Kevin "Rashid" Johnson is experiencing yet another round of deliberately
denied medical/dental treatment at the hands of prison officials, this time
for an abscessed tooth, while held against his will under interstate
compact in a prison system outside of Virginia, his home state. Rashid was
transferred to SC on May 1, 2025, and immediately thrown in solitary
confinement, although he was housed in general population in Virginia's
Keen Mountain prison just before his transfer. In SC he has been stripped
of all property and his communication lines have been cut. He is not
allowed to possess or use the prison tablets allowed all other SC prisoners
and is banned from telephone use. This occurred in specific response to him
writing an article about his transfer to and treatment in SC which he sent
out on May 14, 2025. After outside people and the media complained to SC
prison officials about his treatment, he was threatened to have all his
communication lines cut by a special agent with the SC prison system's
Office of the Inspector General, Jamie Fergeli, if he didn't tell outside
people and media to stop contacting the prison system. Two days after these
threats were made, Rashid was moved to a special non-communication solitary
wing where he was banned from tablet and phone use. He has been banned ever
since. He is being forced to seek and pay himself for dental treatment,
which has only been allowed because of outside support and complaints.
His outside dental appointments are pending. His incoming and outgoing
mail, general and legal, has been repeatedly intercepted and denied
delivery by SC prison officials, in particular by a mailroom clerk, Tamara
Conwell, acting in collaboration with the prison system's central
headquarters administration. He has had efforts to communicate with
attorneys by mail and phone repeatedly frustrated. SC officials in
collaboration with Va officials have been acting to hold him incommunicado,
in blatant retaliation for and to prevent his continued efforts to
publicize abuses of himself and others in U.S. prisons. Rashid has been
unable since leaving Va to write and publish any but a tiny number of
articles, which is the very purpose and intent of his confinement and
treatment in SC, after his involvement in gaining widespread media and
public attention to abuses in Va's remote supermax prisons, Red Onion and
Wallens Ridge State prison, leading up to and prompting his transfer to SC.
These treatments, however, have not and will not deter him.
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