RACIAL DOUBLE STANDARD IN TREATMENT OF VIRGINIA GUARDS WHO ASSAULT PRISONERS (2025) by Kevin “Rashid” Johnson

In a recent article I pointed out the racial double standard applied where officials publicized that several Black guards had been criminally charged with assault on prisoners that occurred in Virginia’s Black-staffed prisons, while no charges have been issued against guards in the predominantly white-staffed prisons in the state’s rural western region where frequent racist abuses have been acknowledged by state lawmakers. (1)

The issue arose after it was announced in the media that three guards had been criminally charged with assaults on prisoners at Greensville, a medium security prison in the state’s central region. (2) These publicized arrests came in the wake of broad media and public exposure and protests of abuses in the state’s remote white-staffed supermax prisons like the notorious Red Onion State Prison where numerous Black men had set themselves on fire in desperate efforts to get transferred away from the racist and abusive mistreatments there.

Both I and relatives of victims of abuses at Red Onion saw these publicized arrests as a move by Virginia officials to divert public attention and publicity away from conditions in the state’s remote prisons. Clearly, there has been a different standard applied to the staff in the state’s predominantly Black-staffed prisons and those in the white-staffed prisons concentrated in rural segregated white communities in remote regions of the state.

As I’ve pointed out, and no official has attempted to refute, Va officials have been closing down all the state’s high security predominantly Black-staffed prisons, while concentrating all the new high security prison construction projects and resources to the state’s segregated rural white communities. (3) And as I’ve also pointed out, state delegate Michael Jones recently admitted in the Richmond Times Dispatch on Jan 9, 2025 that these rural prisons exist not to meet public safety nor prison security needs, but rather to prop up poor white rural economies, a practice that he called “asinine.” But it is not just asinine, it is an age old blatantly racist practice of using Black people – the prisoners concentrated in these rural prisons are predominantly Black – to the economic and political benefit of whites.

The racial double standard has been further evidenced by the recently publicized conviction of one of the Black guards charged at Greensville (4), while a white guard, Dwayne Turner, who the Richmond Times Dispatch received a video of assaulting a prisoner in the state’s remote Keen Mountain prison, was not only never criminally charged but he has been promoted to the present position of assistant warden of Red Onion. (5)

In fact, the man who leaked the video to the papers of Turner assaulting the prisoner was a high ranking Va prison investigator. This man, Brian Mitchell, exposed to journalist Sandy Hausman, the hostile responses and threatened violence he faced in response to daring to investigate staff improprieties and abuses in the state’s remote prisons. He ultimately left employment in these prisons as a result of this corruption and retaliation. (6)

Having spent 14 years (from 1998 through 2012) confined in Va’s remote Red Onion and Wallens Ridge prisons, and having returned to Red Onion again in 2023 and 2024, I’ve witnessed the systemic protection and promotion of abusers like Turner up through the ranks of the Va prison system. In fact it is evident in the official silence that has attended the exposure of the Va prison system’s director, Chadwick Dotson’s, repeatedly lying in the media about conditions and prisoners setting themselves on fire at Red Onion.

I’ve known Turner since 1998, when he was a sergeant at Red Onion. I’ve both witnessed and been a victim of physical assaults by him and/or under his supervision. I even prosecuted a two-day federal jury trial in a lawsuit I brought against him for such an assault. Not only this, but he attempted several times to instigate deadly violence between me and other prisoners, including Robert Gleason, who was executed in 2013 after Turner and others facilitated his murder of another Black prisoner on a Red Onion solitary confinement exercise yard in 2010. Gleason was widely known in the media as one of Amerika’s most notorious killers. Just before that killing, they put Gleason in a cell next to me attempting to incite and set me up to be the one that Gleason killed. The ploy failed when I began helping Gleason in his efdorts to publicize how Wallens Ridge and Red Onion officials were using him to take out hits on disliked prisoners for them. (7) When their plot failed they moved Gleason from next to me and he killed that other prisoner just weeks later. As I’ve written about, it is in these prisons that a violent prison gang culture and wars that now plague our communities were and continue to be manufactured. (8)

Indeed, it is those who prison officials who engage in such abuses and prove loyal to this system of racist abuse and protectionism that rapidly move up in the ranks and enjoy preferential administrative appointments. It is no accident nor coincidence that those concentrated in the prison system’s Richmond headquarters came from and were groomed in these remote prisons. (9)

This is the corruption and racist, murderous abuse and violence that lies behind the double standard applied to officials at Va’s remote prisons. This is why these unneeded and expensive prisons are protected, the conditions in them which have persisted for decades are covered up and nothing has been nor will be done to stop these abuses.

There is no reforming these centers of racism and abuse that present the greatest threat to public safety.

Virginia’s remote prisons must be shut down and the prison system’s top administrators need to be fired.

Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!

All Power to the People!
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Endnotes:

1. Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, “Why Haven’t Guards at Virginia’s Remote Prisons Been Criminally Charged?” (2025) http://rashidmod.com/?p=3722

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

3. Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, “Racist Politics in Virginia: Virginia’s Prisons Operate Under an Apartheid System” (2023) http://rashidmod.com/?p=3557

4. Laura French, “Former Virginia Correctional Officer Found Guilty of Assaulting Inmate” CBS 6, Feb 26, 2025

5. Luca Powell, “Red Onion Official Suggested Making Inmates Pay For Burn Treatment,” RICHMOND TIMES DISPATCH, Jan 9, 2025

6. Sandy Hausman, “A Former Prison Guard Shares His Thoughts On Virginia’s most Expensive Agency,” RADIO IQ, Dec 5, 2023, 6:30AM http://www.wvtf.org

Sandy Hausman, “Virginia Prison Guards Reflect on Problems Behind Bars,” RADIO IQ, Dec 6, 2023, 5:23AM http://www.wvtf.com

7. Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, “From Bad to Worse” (2012) http://rashidmod.com/?p=334

8. Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, “How Officials Manufactured Gangs and Gang Wars in Virginia Prisons” (2024) http://rashidmod.com/?p=3554

Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, “From Gang Wars to Race Wars: Officials Continue to Manufacture Group Violence in Virginia Prisons” (2025) http://rashidmod.com/?p=3642

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