RURAL VIRGINIA GUARDS ELECTROCUTE PRISONER FOR FUN (2024) By Kevin “Rashid” Johnson

On December 15, 2024, Dwight Jackson, a Black man confined at Keen Mountain, yet another remote Virginia prison, was electrocuted by guards with a 50,000 volt electric shock belt for fun.

The shocking assault happened while Dwight was being transported for a court appearance. He’d been held overnight at Buckingham Correctional Center, and was being taken out for his court appearance, when a Keen Mountain transportation guard Colley activated the electric belt Dwight was made to wear. Dwight recalls that Colley asked him if he wanted to see how the belt worked, and pushed a remote button that set off a warning signal. Then the guard said, “That’s a warning now this is the real thing,” and hit a second button that activated the weapon.

Dwight was severely electrocuted for no reason other than these guards’ entertainment. Keen Mountain is another near-totally white staffed rural prison located just an hour’s drive from the state’s notorious Red Onion State Prison, which has received widespread media attention for several months now concerning racist abuses and prisoners setting themselves on fire in desperate efforts to be removed from those conditions.

These remote Virginia prisons have a long history of abuses of electric weapons. One such incident that resulted in the electrocution death and racist mutilation of the corpse of a Connecticut prisoner, Larry Frazier, was graphically featured in the documentary film, “Up the Ridge,” which can be viewed on You Tube. For a time most electric weapons were removed from the Virginia prison system because of just such abuse, but are now being brought back.

Dwight Jackson has been seeking action in response to this assault, with nothing done by officials. In fact guards here at Keen Mountain have been making a mockery of his torture with the weapon, many of whom, when they see him, imitate the sounds of the electric belt being activated or mock his movements when he was electrocuted.

Keen Mountain is part of a circle of Virginia prisons located in remote segregated white communities in the rural Western region of Virginia, where racist abuses are frequent and the demographic contrast of the prisoner population (totally Black and Brown) versus the staff (totally white) creates inherent conditions for racist abuses and cultural conflict. Yet Virginia officials continue to close down predominantly Black-staffed prisons and emphasize shifting resources to and opening new prisons in these remote racially segregated regions then pretend not to know the conditions they have created and continue to sweep resultant abuses under the rug.

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