IGNORE, ISOLATE, DISCREDIT, KILL: THE OFFICIAL RESPONSE TO CRITICAL EXPOSURE (2025) By Kevin “Rashid” Johnson

Several things prison officials and my peers know about me is I’m not passive, I don’t frighten and I don’t back down.

I’ve been imprisoned for almost 35 years. Throughout that time I’ve physically warred and litigated against, and publicized the abuses of officials. And they’ve tried for just as long to contain, intimidate, slander and brutalize me into silence and submission. All to no avail.

WHAT MOTIVATES ME

I was recently asked by a journalist what drives me to challenge the abuses of prison officials despite the reprisals I have faced. It is as simple as this: I have a problem with bullies and people who abuse power against the weak and powerless. This and an abiding love for the common people were engendered in me from my youngest years. My developmental years were spent fighting bullies and rebelling against a violently abusive father. I was conditioned from the earliest age, and continued throughout my life, to confront bullies and face down any enemy, not as a victim but a fighter. That’s the will that drives me and which officials have never been able to suppress nor come to terms with.

IGNORE, ISOLATE, DISCREDIT, KILL

George Jackson was a political prisoner who was murdered by the U.S. government in August 1971. He was assassinated, because he critically exposed them to public scrutiny and challenge and they could not discredit nor silence him.

He pointed out that those in power ALWAYS react to those who effectively expose and challenge them. The response he noted depends of the level of effectiveness of the critic and the officials’ chosen method of silencing the critic. First they ignore you, if that fails AND YOU ARE EFFECTIVE they isolate and attack your character to discredit you, and if that fails they kill you.

I’ve been targeted with all of these efforts.

Much of the struggle between me and the Va prison system has gone on behind closed doors, or behind locked doors rather. It is now breaking out into a broad public forum. And I more than welcome it. For decades I publicized abuses in the prisons through written exposés and articles which can be read on my website rashidmod.com. The responses of officials varied giving the public responses that followed. When the public responses were mild I was ignored.

They have always tried to isolate me. In fact I was transferred to various prison systems across the country in efforts to isolate me from 2012-2021. In their applications to have other states accept me, VaDOC officials specifically stated their intent in shipping me out of Va was to undermine my effectiveness at winning public opinion against conditions in Va prisons.

Alongside this I was constantly stigmatized and slandered by officials in efforts to discredit me and discipline me into submission. There were numerous slanderous and fabricated disciplinary infractions which were cited to when people contacted the prisons in response to my exposés. Most of these infractions stigmatized me as having committed criminal acts for which I had never been criminally charged, tried nor convicted or for which I had been acquitted when they did attempt to prosecute me making the allegations slander per se. (1)

Then there was my being profiled by the Va prison system in collaboration with the Va state police in 2009 as a “Domestic terrorist threat,” specifically because they said I proved effective at publicizing abuses in the prisons and thereby turning the public against law enforcement. See the “2009 Virginia Terrorism Threat Assessment Report.” It wasn’t their abuses that caused public disaffection mind you, but instead it was my reporting it. But prison officials love to preach to prisoners that we should accept responsibility for our wrongs. Never mind that I had a Constitutional right to inform the public of what their government was doing behind closed doors and the public likewise has the right to be so informed and to!peacefully protest government excesses. Well at least this is what the people have a right to do in a genuinely democratic society where government is supposed to be elected by and remain accountable to the people.

When my exposure and public responses were relatively strong the official response was attempts on my life. I can’t count the number of times this has occurred. It happened when I was returned to Red Onion State Prison after the 2023-2024 group hunger strike I participated in at the prison, which generated broad publicity to and protest of conditions at Red Onion, including two major rallies at the Va General Assembly building and governor’s mansion and federal litigation.

When I subsequently returned to Red Onion in Sept 2024, Red Onion officials immediately went to work attempting to set me up for violent attached. They spread false rumors among other prisoners that I was pedophile and sexual deviant, although I have NEVER had any sex-related criminal charges, and that I am a snitch although I have never given any information on anyone to nor for any government official. They also tried to put hits on me and had low ranking guards wear body cameras only around me so others felt my presence caused increased scrutiny against other prisoners in my cellblock. Numerous prisoners at Red Onion alerted me and bore witness to my attorneys about these acts.

When I exposed abuses at Nottoway prison I was left for over a year and a half with untreated cancer by VaDOC officials in a blatant attempt to kill me.

Since I exposed that numerous prisoners at Red Onion set themselves on fire during latter 2024 in desperate efforts to be transferred away from racist abuses there and widespread media and public attention followed, the VaDOC returned to its game of attempting to discredit me by slander.

WHO HAS ZERO CREDIBILITY?

According to Kyle Gibson, the VaDOC’s director of communications, I have zero credibility because I allegedly have incurred over 550 disciplinary charges since being in prison, including charges for “sexually aggressive and seriously violent acts.” (2)

Not only do none of these slanderous claims involve dishonesty on my part, which would be the ONLY basis for undermining anyone’s credibility, but the sexual claims are criminal imputations for which I have never been criminally charged, tried nor convicted. In fact I have NEVER committed any acts of sexual aggression. This is the exact game of slanderous rumormongering that Va prison officials love to engage in in efforts to incite hostility and violence against and between disliked prisoners. Worse still, this is the same sort of sexual stigma used to incite thousands of racist mob lynchings against Black males during the old Jim Crow era. As Ida B. Wells-Barnett exposed in her studies of Southern lynchings, the use of false stigma of sexual deviance against Black males was a favorite tactic among Southern whites during Jim Crow to discredit and incite violence against Black males who refused to stay in their place. (3)

Furthermore, the only acts of physical violence I have been involved in with officials have been in defense of myself and others or in response to physical abuses by officials. Interestingly, while at Red Onion I actually WAS criminally indicted a dozen times for violence against guards including three times for attempted capital murder of guards, and in EVERY case I represented myself and was acquitted of every charge.

So, Kyle Gibson is both a slanderer and a liar, projecting racist stigma in an effort to discredit me. Yet EVERYTHING I have reported concerning the prisoner self-burnings and conditions at Red Onion has proven true, contrary to everything that the VaDOC director and Gibson have stated to the media and public. They lied claiming no prisoners set themselves on fire, they lied claiming these prisoners had nothing to protest at Red Onion and conditions there are lawful, and so on. Yet several Va legislators and internal Red Onion emails between ranking staff have proved the burnings did occur and that the conditions at Red Onion are racist towards Blacks and inhumane. But where has any Va prison official shown or even attempted to show me to have lied about ANYTHING?

In fact let’s go back to when Red Onion and its sister supermax Wallens Ridge first opened. It was proven by Human Rights Watch that the then director of the Va prison system, Ronald Angelone, lied to the public claiming need of two 1200-bed supermax prisons to house as many chronically dangerous prisoners who were never going home. As HRW found, the VaDOC had studies conducted of its prisoner population BEFORE the construction of these prisons even began and found that Va never had a large number of chronically violent prisoners and most of those housed at these prisons had upcoming release dates. (4) So, just like today’s director Chadwick Dotson, ranking Va prison officials have been lying about conditions surrounding the operation of these unneeded and expensive remote prisons from their very inception. And age-old racist practices are openly used in the treatment and abuses of their prisoners.

So, who has zero credibility?

Is it an accident that under slavery Blacks were deemed 3/5 human beings so as to be legally disenfranchised while their numbers were used to give numerical benefits to certain political districts to give them favorable legislative apportionment and tax and funding benefits, and the EXACT same practice is occurring with the placement of almost totally Black populations of disenfranchised prisoners in these rural prisons located in segregated white counties who reap undue apportionment, tax benefits and federal funding as a result? Or that hounds were used to terrorize and maul Blacks during slavery and are now used at these rural Va prisons in gross disproportion to any other state? Or that young Blacks are shipped hundreds of miles away from their families to these remote prisons destroying community and familial ties just as was done to Blacks when routinely sold off during slavery? Or that these powerless Blacks are confined and policed by armed poor rural whites who subject them to all manner of barbaric abuse with impunity as during slavery and Jim Crow? Or that the VaDOC’s highest ranking officials have been closing down all of the state’s high predominantly Black-staffed high security prisons and opening and shifting operations of all such prisons to rural white populated regions of the state because, as they’ve stated in the media, the Black-staffed prisons can’t be trusted to provider the needed level of security, hence Blacks aren’t equally trustworthy and competent in government positions. Or that the use of sexually deviant stagma is used in the media, as evidenced in this instance, to malign, slander and attack the character and incite public hostility against a Black male who refuses to be sufficiently deferential to a racist power structure as a red herring.

So we see the continuation of economic, political and violent abuse and exploitation and character attacks in these operation of these remote prisons that mirror EXACTLY the historic racist conditions of the antebellum and Jim Crow South. THIS IS ABSOLUTELY NO ACCIDENT in this old Confederate capital state, that overthrew Black Reconstruction and reinstituted slave like conditions against Blacks after the Civil War with the exact same racist policies.

Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!

All Power to the People!
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Endnotes:

1. In Va it is slander and defamation per se to conclusively impute to anyone an act that constitutes a crime involving moral turpitude or that constitutes a felony. Schnupp v. Smith, 249 Va 353 (1995)

2. Kaitlyn Schmaneman, “Virginia Prisons Considered Charging Inmates Who Burned Themselves in Protest For Intolerable Conditions,” NBC, Jan 8, 2025

3. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, ON LYNCHINGS (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2002

4. Jamie Fellner, “Red Onion State Prison: Super Maximium Security Confinement in Virginia,” Human Rights Watch (NY, 1999)