VIRGINIA OFFICIALS PATHOLOGIZE DESPERATE RESISTANCE TO RACIST PRISON ABUSE (2025) by Kevin “Rashid” Johnson

Chadwick Dotson has been the director of Virginia’s prison system since September 2023.

Before this appointment, he was a chief judge in the Circuit Court for Wise County, Va. He was also a past prosecuting attorney and dean of students at the Appalachian School of law.

With a resume of numerous high level positions of public trust that affected the lives and liberty of many many people, the public would expect this man to have a high level of integrity, credibility and honesty. In fact, his job as a judge and prosecutor had him penalizing people, throwing them in prison and taking their property, for dishonesty. And now as head of a state prison system, he’s holding people in prison for the same acts.

Yet Dotson proved to be an extreme and unrepentant liar in the media, and interestingly, no one in the state’s government took issue with it.

Not one!

That’s because Dotson isn’t the problem, he’s the symptom of a corrupt system.

During October 2023 I brought public attention to several men at Va’s notoriously abusive and racist Red Onion State Prison setting themselves on fire in desperate efforts to be transferred out of those inhumane conditions. My reports were aired on Prison Riot Radio, Prison Radio and picked up by the Virginia Defenders newspaper, Interfaith Action for Human Rights and others.

In response numerous media outlets covered the story. The Richmond Times Dispatch was one. In a Nov 27, 2024 article in that paper Dotson went on record stating that my report was a lie. He was quoted as saying, “To be clear, these inmates did not set themselves on fire or self immolate.” He was further quoted from that time in a Jan 9, 2025 Richmond Times Dispatch article as saying the prisoners at Red Onion “did not set themselves on fire or self-immolate, as some reports ludicrously suggested.” This same article quotes Dotson as denying any such “self-immolating as a result of conditions at Red Onion.” All of his denials came in November 2024.

But contrast these statements with those of Virginia legislators who right on the heels of Dotson’s denials, confirmed the self-burnings in the New York Times on December 4, 2024. But worse still, were revelations in a Jan 8, 2025 article in The Appeal quoting internal email exchanges between the Red Onion assistant warden, major and investigator from September 2024 which state, “in the past three weeks” three prisoners “set Fire to themselves.” The emails also discussed criminally prosecuting these prisoners for “setting fires in their cells,” and admitted that five prisoners had been institutionally charged with “setting a fire damaging or injury to persons or property,” and “self mutilation.”

These emails alone reveal Dotson to be a blatant liar and made in statements to the public concerning the treatment and conditions of people under his care inside Virginia prisons.

But going further, on December 30, 2024 a Virginia delegate Michael Jones visited Red Onion in an unannounced visit and spoke to several prisoners and staff, including two of the men who set themselves on fire. Jones not only found numerous abusive conditions at Red Onion including racism towards Black prisoners, but he stated, that guys shouldn’t be suffer such desperation that they set themselves on fire as the only way they believe they might gain resolution of mistreatment.

Instead of admitting that prisoners were setting themselves on fire and addressing why, Dotson lied and then deflected the cause of the desperate acts onto the victims and, as the Red Onion emails revealed, proposed punishing the victims for seeking through desperate means to escape their suffering.

After he and all other officials magically glossed over the very fact that Dotson lied about the self-immolations and conditions at Red Onion, he claimed the self-burnings were indicative of the prisoners suffering mental illness because there was no reason for them to be upset about conditions at the prison. Once again, we have racist precedent surfacing.

In 1851 Dr. Samuel Cartwright published an article in the NEW ORLEANS MEDICAL AND SURGICAL JOURNAL, which pathologized resistance to slavery through the invented disorder of draptomania which he said, “manifests itself in an irrestrainable propensity to run away,” and dysoethesia oethiopeca which he said was characterized by the enslaved person breaking tools and evading slave work. In essence, seeking to escape and resisting racist enslavement and abuse was symptomatic of mental disorders.

Those who wish to rationalize and whitewash abuse and racism always villainize, penalize and pathologize their victims. How many accounts of slavery portray it as kind, gentle and beneficial to Blacks? Thus any resistance is insane and must be punished. This is the idea Dotson and the entire Va government who have been silent in the face of his exposed lies are projecting against the men at Red Onion, who resorted to the desperate extreme of setting themselves on fire in efforts to escape the racist abuses at the prison. Indeed, like multitudes of Blacks expressed in slave narratives, these men expressed willingness to die or burn their entire bodies to escape the dehumanization, racism and abuses at Red Onion. But they, like Cartwright said of the protesting slaves of antebellum times, are insane according to Dotson and company.

How dare these ungrateful dark creatures take issue with the kindness and favor showed them under Va’s modern system of slavery and racist abuses in its remote prisons.

The apologists of the slavery era lied, villainized, punished and pathologized those who protested the now-recognized racist inhumanity of that old system of slavery; just as Dotson and others are doing now in relation to their inhumane and racist prisons.

Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!

All Power to the People!