PARALLELS BETWEEN SLAVERY AND JIM CROW AND THE OPERATIONS OF VIRGINIA PRISONS TODAY (2025) By Kevin “Rashid” Johnson

Let me paint a picture for you. In this case art doesn’t merely imitate reality, it captures it.

SLAVE LABOR IN VIRGINIA PRISONS

In Va, prisoners are paid pennies per hour to perform labor that keeps its prisons operating which officials would have to pay thousands of people minimum wages to perform if individuals from society were employed to perform these jobs. The Va prison system also operates a large industry and work centers that also exploit the labor of prisoners for pennies that free world workers would demand minimum wages for and worker’s benefits, which prisoners don’t enjoy. This is literal slavery.

Indeed prisons are one Va’s largest and most profitable industries.

RACIALLY TARGETED CONFINEMENT IN VIRGINIA

The Va prisoner population is predominantly male and predominantly Black. Black prisoners are disproportionately confined in the state’s highest security prisons where conditions are the most brutal and privileges are fewest, while white prisoners are disproportionately housed in the state’s lower security prisons where the most privileges and rehabilitation programs are available. Also, those whites who are confined in Va’s high security prisons are usually concentrated in the privileged cellblocks and hold the best and highest paying jobs. At the time of writing this I am housed in such a cellblock at Va’s Keen Mountain prison with “Red Onion Randy,” who has a significant social media presence. We talk often. He recently pointed out that while confined for many years at Red Onion, he’d become accustomed to being the only white guy in cellblocks with 80 or more Blacks. That this sort of housing arrangement CREATED BY PRISON OFFICIALS was the norm – segregation and privileged housing based on race. He ended up housed among large numbers of Blacks because he wouldn’t play into the white supremacist politics that the white Red Onion staff openly encouraged white prisoners to embrace.

POOR WHITES POLICING POOR BLACKS JUST LIKE DURING SLAVERY

The key members of the VaDOC’s HQ administration come from rural Wise county, Va, where the state’s only two supermax prisons are located. These prisons are staffed predominantly by whites who come from the local small, poor, racially segregated communities whose members have little to no contact with Blacks. They therefore come into the prisons with deeply ingrained racial biases against and stereotypes of Blacks, many with an agenda to act out racist fantasies. This blatant demographic contradiction creates a cultural clash that innately generates racist abuse and violence against the Black prisoners by the white staff.This replicates an inherently dangerous environment for the Blacks who are voiceless and powerless while the white staff are armed and have total power to monopolize the narrative of any event and falsely justify violent abuses.

In these prisons officials have free reign to use and they constantly abuse a range of brutal weapon systems, including guns, electric shock devices and attack dogs.

WHITE COMMUNITIES BENEFIT FROM DISPLACED DISENFRANCHISED BLACKS

The numbers of the Blacks in these rural prisons far exceed the numbers of Blacks in the local communities. These disenfranchised prisoners who enjoy no citizenship rights are therefore used to give a false diversity to the local communities in which they are counted for census purposes. These communities consequently reap tax and funding benefits and legislative apportionments that they aren’t otherwise entitled to. This is the exact same scheme applied during slavery to give benefits to slave-owning communities using enslaved Blacks who weren’t deemed citizens but only 3/5 human to add numbers to the local populations, from which those white communities reaped tax and funding benefits and political apportionment.

In fact several interesting things came to light when on Dec 30, 2024 a Va delegate and member of the state’s Legislative Black Caucus, Michael Jones, visited Red Onion State Prison in response to the broad media exposure of several Black prisoners setting themselves on fire in desperate efforts to get transferred out of those racist and abusive conditions.

Jones left Red Onion with numerous critical findings including racist abuses of Black prisoners. He also noted in comments to the media that he was shocked at the numbers of men at the remote prison who came from his own district in urban southside Richmond. In other words Blacks from his own urban district. He said he could have conducted a town hall meeting with those large numbers of Blacks from Richmond. A telling observation – a huge number of Blacks from urban central Va held in remote prisons in the rural segregated white communities of far western corner of Va where they have no representatives. And the political and economic benefits which these displaced Black’s own communities are entitled to are therefore denied and instead given to these white communities that they do not live in.

THE TWO WAVES OF MASS IMPRISONMENT

And this was not accidental. The mid-1990s saw the deliberate construction and opening of the first of these rural prisons with the intentions of targeting Va’s Black communities to fill them. This was not accidental, in fact it was the second wave of mass imprisonment in Va used to reduce Blacks BACK to a state of slave-like subjugation and economic exploitation.

The first wave of Black mass imprisonment occurred after the Civil War when the newly freed Blacks were targeted across the South. Criminal laws were invented, called Black Codes, to justify arresting and enslaving Blacks by the state, whereby Blacks were contracted out to private white companies such as railroads and the old plantations they were just freed from. This conformed to the clause and compromise created in the U.S. Constitution under the 13th Amendment which abolished slavery EXCEPT for those convicted of crimes. This clause in essence allowed the state to assume ownership of slaves instead of private ownership, which made the conditions of slavery far more brutal and deadly than under the old pre-Civil War slave system. With state ownership of slaves, those who contracted with the states for their labor didn’t have to take care of the slaves at all and literally starved and worked many to death, since they could be readily replaced by the state’s prison systems. Since the private companies didn’t own the slaves any more they didn’t care about keeping them fit and healthy.

The second wave of Black mass imprisonment in Va came in the mid-1990s and began the huge numbers of Black prisoners being thrown in the state’s two new rural supermax prisons located in Wise County which opened in 1998 and 1999, namely Red Onion and Wallens Ridge. To generate a mass influx and growth of Va’s prisoner population to fill these unneeded prisons, politicians under the influence of prison profiteers and corporations cut good time credits, abolished parole and created mandatory minimum and three strikes laws in 1995. The lies and fear mongering they fed the public to justify this was the claim of a coming crime wave that never materialized. Like the Black Codes, none of this had anything to do with crime control, but everything to do with corporate profits at the expense of poor Blacks, and by mobilizing poor whites to brutally police the Blacks. Indeed it is why the Va officials repeatedly lied to the public about the need and use of these prisons to house huge numbers of chronically dangerous Va prisoners, which Va never had, as was exposed by the Human Rights Watch investigation and report on Red Onion just a year after it opened amid a flood of abuse and racism complaints against the prison.

RACISM WAS POLITICALLY MANUFACTURED AND STILL IS

Those who uphold whitewashing U.S. history and pretending that racism was some accidental occurrence, evade the fact that racism was MANUFACTURED politically and for specific reasons of economic benefit to those who reaped immense wealth from exploiting the free labor of the racially oppressed while using poor whites as a form of social police to keep the exploited darker peoples subjugated. The arming and political empowerment of whites against powerless disenfranchised Blacks and other people of color was the circumstance that generated the objective basis for the subjective belief that whites were superior to others and had a right to violently repress them. Given this belief and power to enforced it, white violence and impunity against people of color became the status quo and mechanism through which poor whites vented their own social-economic insecurities and frustrations (racial violence and impunty became a social pressure release for poor whites); which is the fuel behind the racist abuses occurring in Va’s remote high security prisons, Red Onion, Wallens Ridge, River North and Keen Mountain being key among them.

WHITE SUPREMACY IN VADOC HEADQUARTERS: BLACK-RUN PRISONS CAN’T BE TRUSTED

It should also be noted that across the state, the cabal of racist whites concentrated in the VaDOC’s central headquarters in Richmond, have been closing down all the predominantly Black-staffed prisons while shifting new high security prison construction and operations to rural white communities like Wise county, where again they are concentrating huge numbers of Blacks. And the VaDOC director Chadwick Dotson, who recently was exposed in the media lying to cover up the men at Red Onion setting fire to themselves and the racist abusive conditions at Red Onion they were reacting in desperation to, has claimed the reason these high security prisons are being concentrated in these rural!white regions is because their white staff can be better entrusted to not bring in contraband and to more professionally enforce security. In other words, as was the position of racist Southern whites who sought to overthrow Black Reconstruction and reestablish white domination after the Civil War, Black people can’t be trusted in government jobs, because the are deemed corrupt and mentally inferior as opposed to whites.

Is it striking that exact parallels can he shown between overt racism and racist government policies from the slavery and Jim Crow eras, and today’s Va prison practices? Of course not. The thing was the Black Liberation and Civil Rights era and the experience of Nazi Germany where racism was targeted at other ‘white’ groups and generated an intolerance of racism and colonialism across the world demanded that Amerika change its open practices of racism, it DID NOT however change the use and economic benefits of racism and exploitation of people of color. It just had to be done under different cover and sneakily. But the same methods were employed, only with different justifications.

Racism is alive and well in Va’s institutions. And with the return of Donald Trumpist politics, the old forms and professions of racist sentiments opersting openly are becoming more normalized.

Our struggle is not just against capitalist imperialism but also white supremacy which grows out of this system that pits the world’s groups of workers and poor against each other; with the most effective method being polarizing them along the manufactured lines of color and race.

Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!
All Power to the People!