PROPPING UP VIRGINIA’S RURAL ECONOMIES WITH PRISONS IS “ASININE” SAYS VIRGINIA LEGISLATOR (2025) By Kevin “Rashid” Johnson

For the first time that I know of, a Virginia government official has publicly admitted that prisons located in the state’s poor rural segregated white communities like Red Onion and Wallens Ridge State Prisons exist solely to prop up these local economies.

On Jan 9, 2025 the Richmond Times Dispatch quoted Va delegate Michael Jones, a member of the state’s legislative Black Caucus, admitting that, Red Onion “remains open because it provides jobs to the rural Wise County.”

He was further quoted stating, “For a locality to have an economic engine and driver being a prison that’s asinine.”

Jones made this statement after visiting Red Onion on Dec 30, 2024, in response to widespread media and public attention brought to the prison in response to numerous Black men setting themselves on fire in desperate efforts to get transferred away from the racist and abusive conditions there. In addition to this statement, Jones issued a press release the day after his tour, in which he identified several conditions at the prison that required immediate attention, including racist abuses of Black prisoners, inadequate food and medical treatment, abuses of attack dogs, lack of treatment programs, and other conditions. No solutions were proposed except to allow the prison officials to investigate and reform their own abusive and racist actions.

Jones also expressed surprise at the huge number of men at the prison who came from his own district of Richmond, Va. In other words, how many were urban Black men for whom he was supposed to be the representative. It is well known that these rural prisons house almost totally Black prisoners but employ almost nothing but rural whites. A racial and cultural clash that administrators know has always generated extreme racism and mistreatment of prisoners.

Jones visited the prison after legislative officials were made to question conditions there because of widespread media and public attention brought the prison, when several men set themselves on fire in desperate efforts to get transferred away from the racist and abusive conditions there.

The major takeaway from Jones’ admission is that these rural prisons exist, not to address legitimate prison security needs nor to make society safer, but rather to prop up poor rural white economies and enrich white corporations, just like all of Amerika’s past racialized systems of genocide, abuse and exploitation of people of color, including the massacres and land theft of the AmerIndians, and slavery and Jim Crow segregation of Blacks.

I emphasize that officials have never before admitted that these rural prisons serve no legitimate security needs, because at all previous times, they have LIED to the public claiming these prisons were needed to house and control Va’s huge numbers of dangerous prisoners WHICH THE STATE NEVER HAD. Lies first exposed by Human Rights Watch in its 1999 investigative report on Red Onion.

In fact, over the years Va prison officials have hatched a series of schemes and manipulated prison security classification policies attempting to justify keeping these unneeded prisons open and operating to continue warehousing Blacks and Browns in them. From changing their classification policies in efforts to make more prisoners meet the high security levels of these remote supermax and maximum security prisons; to housing hundreds of prisoners from other states in these prisons until their home states terminated their contracts to confine their prisoners in Va due to public, media and legal backlash when their prisoners suffered extreme racism and abuses at these prisons; to manufacturing gangs and extremely violent gang wars at Red Onion and Wallens Ridge where no gangs previously existed in the Va prison system, which spread throughout the prison system and to the streets, and is largely the cause of the existing gang epidemic, and increasing presence of racist white gangs, across the state. I wrote about this initially in 2024. The article was first published in the SAN FRANCISCO BAY VIEW newspaper, then included in the 2024 book BEYOND COP CITIES. (1) I also wrote about the recent manufacturing of a racist white gang presence in Va prisons. (2) One thing the MTV series, “The Mayor of Kingstown” got right, on top of revealing the reality of criminal corruption of cops, guards and politicians, was the fact that U.S. street gangs often emerge and/or are organized from within the prisons.

So not only have these prisons NEVER met any public safety needs, but the officials who run them deliberately manufactured what they and the public consider the most serious and wide scale threat to public safety inside these prisons, which have spilled out into society, namely the widespread presence of gangs and gang violence.

So, not only are these prisons used to warehouse Blacks and Browns to sustain rural poor white economies, which as delegate Jones acknowledged is “asinine,” but they have been used to manufacture the most violent and widespread dangers facing society as a deliberate ploy to justify keeping these unneeded and expensive prisons open and operating.

The inhumanity and society-wide danger of Virginia’s remote rural prisons need to be continuously exposed to the public and they must be shut down.

Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!

All Power to the People!
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Endnotes:

1. Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, “How Prison Officials Manufactured Gangs and Gang Wars in Virginia’s Prisons” (2024) http://rashidmod.com/?p=3554; Joy James, ed., BEYOND COP CITIES: DISMANTLING STATE AND CORPORATE-FUNDED ARMIES AND PRISONS (Pluto Books; Las Vegas, NV, 2024), pp. 95-105

2. Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, “From Gang Wars to Race Wars: Officials Continue to Manufacture Group Violence in Virginia Prisons” (2024) http://rashidmod.com/?p=364