DOG-GONE! UPROAR LAUNCHES CAMPAIGN TO REMOVE ATTACK DOGS FROM VIRGINIA PRISONS (2026) by Kevin “Rashid” Johnson
UPROAR (Uniting Prisoners’ Relatives Organizing Against Repression) has launched a campaign to remove attack dogs from Virginia’s prisons. These animals (euphemistically called working dogs and patrol dogs by Va prison officials), have been used as weapons of terror and violence by Va prison officials for over two decades. Va’s incarcerated have been mauled and even crippled by dogs at rates unmatched by any other prison system.
During 2023 the INSIDER published a report on the uses of attack dogs in U.S. prisons, where it was found that just between 2017 and 2022 Va prisoners had been attacked with dogs over 271 times, compared to Arizona, which had the next highest number of dog attacks (only 15) during the same period.
The abuse of these animals in Va prisons continues a long and tortured history of uses of attack dogs as weapons of racialized terror in the Amerikas. From the use of specially bred hounds by Spaniards in the extermination of the peaceful Tainos Indians of Hispaniola (modern day Haiti and the Dominican Republic), to the gruesome efforts to put down the revolution that ended slavery in Haiti and Jamaica’s Second Maroon War against slavery, in late 1700s; from the widespread use of attack dogs to terrorize, maul and often kill Black slaves across the U.S. South, to police dog attacks on peaceful Civil Rights demonstrations in the 1960s; from the uses of dogs to terrorize Iraqi detainees by the U.S. military in 2004, to the abuses of dogs by police in Ferguson, Mo in their campaign of terror against Black communities protesting the 2014 police murder of unarmed Black youth Mike Brown.
In each of these historic moments, the uses of attack dogs was widely recognized and denounced as racist, barbaric and inhumane. The priest Bartolome de las Casas protested this abuse against the Tainos. The use of dogs to maul and kill Black slaves was denounced by such figures as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Harriet Tubman, and was a major factor behind wide spread white support to abolish slavery and its horrors. Worldwide condemnation of the racist inhumanity of Jim Crow segregation was bolstered by pictures of police dogs attacking Civil Rights demonstrators in Montgomery, Al in 1963. An international scandal resulting in court marshals of U.S. soldiers followed the release of pictures of them using dogs to terrorize Iraqi detainees, and so on.
Because the use of dogs is occurring behind prison walls, there are no images to show the terror being inflicted on those incarcerated in Va. But we have graphic descriptions. Incidents like Jaeon Chavis’s description in his lawsuit of having dogs at Va’s Red Onion State Prison sicced on him and ripping out chunks on his flesh while guards called him racist names, as he lay defenseless on floor screaming that was being killed; or Walter Kissee who was permanently crippled in a similarly unprovoked attack by guards at Va’s River North prison, where a dog ripped a softball-sized chunk of muscle from his leg as he lay defenseless and blinded from tear gas, in an incident where he had done nothing wrong. There have been hundreds of similar attacks in Va’s prisons, and most of them have been committed against Black and Brown men by guards in rural prisons strategically located in segregated white communities in rural Southwestern Va.
It is no coincidence that Va’s highest security prisons where dogs are present, are all located in such racially hostile regions with Black and a Brown prisoners disproportionately concentrated in these prisons.
UPROAR is calling for all possible public exposure, support and protest to remove attack dogs from Va prisons. Join this fight!
Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!
All Power to the People!
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