UPROAR DEMONSTRATES THE POWER OF THE PEOPLE WHEN UNITED (2026) By Kevin “Rashid” Johnson

UPROAR came onto the scene in early 2025 as a prisoner support group composed primarily of prisoners’ loved ones and ex-prisoners. The group was founded in the wake of and response to broad media exposure of extreme abuses of people imprisoned in Virginia’s remote high security prisons.

This exposure came as the result of numerous prisoners engaging in running hunger strikes and setting themselves on fire in desperate response to abuses in these prisons. The publicity led state legislators to visit these prisons and publicly denounce their conditions as inhumane and racially abusive.

But, as we expected, these legislators’ criticisms would lead to absolutely no official interventions to change these conditions. Distinguishing itself from other self-identified prisoner ‘advocates’, UPROAR came onto the scene with an explicit agenda to generate public attention to abuses and accountability at the highest administrative levels of the prison system.

The group began with public protests and demands to shut down the abusive remote prisons as proven unneeded wastes of taxpayer money and havens of mismanagement, racism and abuse; to fire top administrators of the prison system; and to create independent oversight committees with investigative and enforcement powers.

These demonstrations in public spaces and at the prison system’s headquarters were coupled with members joining meetings with officials where they challenged unresponsive legislators and top administrators. Advocacy groups denounced UPROAR’s methods and demands as too extreme and unachievable. But, contrary to their cautionary postures, we got unprecedented results.

During 2025 UPROAR was called into meetings with the cabinet of then-governor elect Abigail Spanberger. The very ranking administrators we called for being fired were quietly removed from office, including VADOC director and deputy director Chadwick Dotson and Arnold David Robinson, also River North Correctional Center warden Kevin McCoy, who had a decades-long history of presiding over brutal abuses of VA prisoners, including the recent beating of an UPROAR member’s son and the repeated assault with electric weapons of her husband. Numerous other ranking officials and guards were fired following UPROAR’s collecting evidence and protested for their killing several prisoners – deaths that were ruled as homicides by coroners.

Our protests led to the prison system’s revoking such abusive policies as group punishments of entire cellblocks of prisoners for the alleged infractions of any one prisoner, calculated to incite prisoners to violently police each other for officials.

In response to our protests and the proven credibility of our reports, the new VADOC administration has given us direct lines of contact to them and answers on-the-spot to our complaints about cases of prison abuse. We’ve been invited to tour VA prisons and to attend several meetings with the system’s new top administrators, where they’ve openly admitted the corruption and abuses of the prior administration and seek to distinguish themselves from these practices. However, at these meetings, UPROAR persisted in airing prisoners’ ongoing grievances and our intent to continue to hold their office to public account for continuing abuses, including denials of mental health care to and unjustified shootings of prisoners, the continuation of long term solitary confinement and unparalleled abuses of attack dogs, and so on.

The persistence and defiant energy of outraged mothers and fathers, wives and other loved ones of abused and murdered prisoners united in protest and resistance, has proven a force to be reckoned with, and achieved unprecedented results.

UPROAR’s model and method of grassroots mass organization has set a standard of effective resistance of the people, that departs from the placatory approaches of career ‘advocates’ seeking recognition and to ingratiate themselves to and gain standing with high level officials, also those nonprofits who are limited in their powers to engage in political struggles or otherwise chase grant money.

UPROAR’s is explicitly a model of resistance and protest, while our members gain greater education and awareness of the methods of officials to subvert, coopt, and connive against struggles against them for accountability and resolution.

We hope other groups will follow our example and join our fight.

Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!

All Power to the People!