WHY HAVEN’T GUARDS AT VIRGINIA’S REMOTE PRISONS BEEN CRIMINALLY CHARGED? (2025) By Kevin “Rashid” Johnson

On Jan 28, 2025 three guards at Virginia’s Greensville Correctional Center were reported as having been criminally charged for violent assaults on prisoners. (1) Greensville is one of Va’s predominantly Black-staffed prisons that houses medium security level prisoners. Thanks to the cabal of good ‘ol boys at VaDOC headquarters, all of the state’s maximum and supermax prisons are now concentrated in rural segregated white communities and have near totally Black prisoner populations, where racist abuse is the norm and is known. (2)

One Black man Demetrius Wallace was beaten by a mob of white guards on Nov 23, 2023 at Va’s notorious remote Red Onion State Prison, while repeatedly called racist names. All the guards were wearing activated body cameras. Surveillance cameras also captured the assault. This was a hate crime. These guards weren’t charged.

In desperate response to this and continued abuse Demetrius set himself on fire during Sept 2024. As was revealed in the media, Red Onion officials were considering having him criminally prosecuted for this. (3)

As reported by his mother, Tomeka Wallace, Demetrius was recently assaulted again by a guard who hit him in the face using handcuffs as brass knuckles. On top of being slammed by several guards face first to a concrete floor while handcuffed behind his back and leg shackled. His mother has appealed to officials throughout the state government to intervene on her son’s behalf, fearing for his life at Red Onion. Nothing has been done. No one has been criminally charged in these assaults.

On April 13, 2024 at Va’s remote River North prison, Walter Kissee was mauled by a prison attack dog while he was lying defenseless on the floor in handcuffs and leg shackles and blinded from mace. The dog was allowed to rip a softball-sized chunk of muscle from his leg, leaving Kissee crippled and still confined to a wheelchair. He had to have multiple surgeries. No one was charged in this barbaric and gruesome assault. The VaDOC has kept this assault under wraps.

There is obviously a double standard at play.

Two Va delegates Holly Siebold and Michael Jones visited Red Onion during 2024 and reported inhumane, abusive and racist conditions at the prisons. For such conditions to be present, there is obviously criminal mistreatment occurring there. But no criminal charges have come out of these remote prisons against these abuses.

In fact Brett Hall, the prosecuting attorney for Wise County, where Red Onion is located, has stated in the media that he and Red Onion staff have a great relationship. (4) And according to local obituaries and other records, the VaDOC director Chadwick Dotson, is a member of the Mullins and Dotson family clan that predominate the staff and nepotistically run the prisons in this remote County. And Dotson was both a judge and prosecutor in Wise County before he became the director of the VaDOC. You don’t criminally prosecute your buddies and relatives.

Is it a mystery that just as these remote prisons are in the international media about abuses and prisoners setting themselves on fire to get out of those conditions, the media is alerted that suddenly guards at a predominantly Black-staffed prison in central Va are criminally charged with abuse? While again, no one at the rural white-staffed prisons has been charged, although the media has been awash for months with reporting on racist abuses in these prisons admitted by state legislators who have visited the prisons and desperate loved ones seeking intervention on behalf of the men suffering in these prisons.

In a recent conversation I had with Tomeka Wallace, she pointed out that the publicized arrests of Greensville guards seems a ploy to divert media attention away from the remote prisons and the KNOWN extreme racism and abuses occurring there to a prison staffed by mostly Blacks. The people are waking up to the TRUE corrupt workings of officials, and the games they play to cover up their dirt and manipulate public trust.

Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!

All Power to the People!
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Endnotes:

1. Laura French, “Virginia Correctional Officers Arrested at Greensville Correctional Center” CBS 6, Jan 28, 2025

2. Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, “Who’s Running the Virginia Prison System?” (2025) http://rashidmod.com/?p=3662

Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, “Racist Politics in Virginia: Virginia Prisons Operate Under an Apartheid System” (2024) http://rashidmod.com/?p=3557

3. Demetrius Wallace, “I Set Myself On Fire! Statement of Demetrius Wallace on Experiences With Racism, Neglect, Retaliation and Abuse at Red Onion State Prison” (2024) http://rashidmod.com/?p=3667

4. Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg, “Prisoners Burned Themselves. So Staff Discussed Making Them Pay Money” Jan 8, 2025 http://theappeal.org/red-onion-virginia-prison-self-immolated/