THROUGH COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT VIRGINIA OFFICIALS PROMPT PRISONERS TO
VIOLENTLY POLICE EACH OTHER (2025)
By Kevin "Rashid" Johnson
If anyone needed further confirmation that Virgina's top officials can't be
trusted to safely run the state's prisons, their recently created policy of
collective punishment proves the case. The policy is not just dangerous,
it's downright sinister.
At Va's notorious remote supermax prisons, Red Onion and Wallens Ridge, and
their most updated version River North, entire cellblocks of prisoners -
some 88 men or more - are now formally punished if just one person in the
block breaks a rule. (1) At Red Onion and Wallens Ridge it has been written
into the rulebooks that not only are privileges like visitation, video
calls, canteen, and educational and religious programs taken for one
person's alleged misconduct, but the units must 'earn' their lost
privileges back.
Besides the basic unfairness of punishing innocent people for others'
actions over which they have no control, with this policy officials are
deliberately prompting prisoners to violently police or administrate the
cellblocks FOR THEM. They know that punishing entire units of men if they
don't keep each other in line is creating license and inciting the
'strongest' individuals and groups to terrorize everyone else. Which is the
unspoken purpose of collective punishment in a prison.
What's more telling is it's being done in a prison system plagued by
critical staff shortages, which has been a constant theme in the media for
a year now.
I've written several articles exposing how for decades officials at Red
Onion and Wallens Ridge in particular have not just created prison gangs
and manipulated bloody wars between them that previously didn't exist at
all, as a control mechanism and to create justification for the continued
operations of these unneeded and expensive remote prisons, but also how
they routinely use prisoners to carry out violent hits on those who
officials dislike, can't control or who challenge them and their abuses. (2)
This collective punishment policy formalizes these very practices.
Prison officials are astute at playing prisoners violently against each
other, and THIS is what underlies this new collective punishment policy
coming from the top. Ask yourself: How else might men in the volatile
prison environment control the behaviors of huge groups of other men who
they don't know and who owe them no obedience except by fear and violence?
And the MOST VIOLENT are the ones with the greatest ability to control
whole units. Officials KNOW this. It is a deliberate administrative
maneuver to have prisoners act as auxiliary guards and police the units for
them. The SAME officials who forever spout rhetorical claims of "zero
tolerance" for violent groups, group violence and so on.
If the obvious escapes you, just imagine if the cops did this in your
community - if they incited the most violent groups on the streets to
enforce 'order' for them. But people on the streets can defend themselves.
Prisoners cannot.
Prisoners therefore have the right to be protected from harm. Over 30 years
ago, in the case of Farmer v. Brennan (3), the U.S. Supreme Court
established that prison officials must provide humane conditions of
confinement. That the beating or stabbing of one prisoner by another serves
no "legitimate penological objective."
In this context the court held that having stripped prisoners of the means
of self protection, having confined them with people deemed dangerous, and
having foreclosed their ability to enlist outside support, officials may
not sit by idly and "let the state of nature take its course." Therefore,
it established that the Eighth Amendment imposes a constitutional duty on
prison officials to "protect prisoners from violence at the hands of other
prisoners." What Va officials are doing, however, is the EXACT OPPOSITE.
They are in fact inciting and giving license to prisoners to commit
violence against each other. And the sinister catch-22 that they are
knowingly creating is they are inciting this violence under circumstances
where most victims can't seek their intervention or legal redress, as they
could if they were beaten by guards.
In prison culture, prisoners are forbidden from informing staff when they
become victims of threats or violence from other prisoners. To report this
is the to become a "snitch," which both besmirches their character and puts
them in greater danger. To add insult to injury, those prisoners who
willingly act out violence for officials are in fact acting as agents
(in-house rules enforcers for officials), and are typically already
informants themselves. These are the ones given privileged statuses and
informal license by staff to break rules and receive contraband for
controlling units for them.
These are dynamics of the prison environment that prisoners and officials
know and understand well. Dynamics that I speak to in my newsletter
"InsideOutsideUnity #2," where I discuss the common practice of prisoners
informing by spreading misinformation and rumors for officials against
other prisoners that officials dislike, fear or can't control. (4) And how
this practice acts as a gateway for prisoners becoming full-on agents and
policing other prisoners for them. This new policy of collective punishment
formalizes this practice of using prisoners to violently police each other.
What Va officials are doing is neither new nor unique, and they KNOW IT is
illegal.
In fact the most dangerous and inhumane U.S. prisons historically were
those where officials used prisoner to police each other. Texas proved one
of the most well-publicized cases, as a result of a decades-long class
action lawsuit brought by the legendary prisoner activist, David Ruiz,
titled Ruiz v. Estelle, where officials used inmates as guards under a
"Building Tender" system. (5)
The lawsuit exposed what the presiding judge, William Wayne Justice, found
to be the most evil, corrupt and inhumane system of organized prison abuse
he'd ever encountered. A system he devoted the remainder of his life to
trying to change but in many ways failed due to the entrenched corruption
of Texas prison officials.
In Texas the "Building Tender" system was justified by prison officials as
needed to compensate for extreme staff shortages.
Va officials have now legitimized their long-standing practice of
manipulating prisoner-on-prisoner violence, using the thin disguise of
collective punishment - a tool of both control and continued abuse of men
in its most remote and racially polarized prisons. (1) In this way their
abuses continue by proxy, and in a way that they can claim plausible
deniability for the resultant harm to prisoners, namely the injuries and
deaths inflicted, and as in Texas, inmate informants and agents are being
used as auxiliary guards to supplement for shortages in staffing. Yet
another reason Va's top administrators, director Chadwick Dotson and
operations chief Arnold David Robinson, must be fired and these unneeded,
expensive, remote prisons Red Onion and Wallens Ridge closed down.
Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!
All Power to the People!
_________________
Endnotes:
1. In Va's most remote prisons, which are also its highest security
prisons, such as Red Onion, Wallens Ridge, River North, Keen Mountain and
Augusta, the staff who are drawn from local, rural segregated white
communities of SW Va are nearly 100% white, while the prisoner populations
are near-totally Black and Brown. As a result these prisons have always
been notorious for racist abuses of their prisoners by staff. In fact,
after a surprise tour of Red Onion during latter Dec 2024 in response to
widespread media exposure of several prisoners setting fire to themselves
in desperate response to abuses there, Va legislator Michale Jones issued a
press release the next day identifying racist abuses of Black prisoners as
one of numerous conditions that he stated needed immediate addressing at
the prisons.
2. See for example, Kevin "Rashid" Johnson, "How Officials Manufactured
Gangs and Gang Wars in Virginia's Prisons" (2024)
http://rashidmod.com/?p=3554
3. Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825 (1994)
4. "InsideOutsideUnity #2" http://rashidmod.com/?p=3754
5. Ruiz v. Estelle, 503 F. Supp. 1265 (E.D. Tex. 1980)(pp. 1294-1298 cover
the "Building Tender" system).
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