{"id":3851,"date":"2025-10-04T21:26:19","date_gmt":"2025-10-04T21:26:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/?p=3851"},"modified":"2025-10-04T21:26:37","modified_gmt":"2025-10-04T21:26:37","slug":"through-collective-punishment-virginia-officials-prompt-prisoners-toviolently-police-each-other-2025-by-kevin-rashid-johnson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/?p=3851","title":{"rendered":"THROUGH COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT VIRGINIA OFFICIALS PROMPT PRISONERS TO VIOLENTLY POLICE EACH OTHER (2025) By Kevin “Rashid” Johnson"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
THROUGH COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT VIRGINIA OFFICIALS PROMPT PRISONERS TO\nVIOLENTLY POLICE EACH OTHER (2025)\n\nBy Kevin \"Rashid\" Johnson\n\nIf anyone needed further confirmation that Virgina's top officials can't be\ntrusted to safely run the state's prisons, their recently created policy of\ncollective punishment proves the case. The policy is not just dangerous,\nit's downright sinister.\n\nAt Va's notorious remote supermax prisons, Red Onion and Wallens Ridge, and\ntheir most updated version River North, entire cellblocks of prisoners -\nsome 88 men or more - are now formally punished if just one person in the\nblock breaks a rule. (1) At Red Onion and Wallens Ridge it has been written\ninto the rulebooks that not only are privileges like visitation, video\ncalls, canteen, and educational and religious programs taken for one\nperson's alleged misconduct, but the units must 'earn' their lost\nprivileges back.\n\nBesides the basic unfairness of punishing innocent people for others'\nactions over which they have no control, with this policy officials are\ndeliberately prompting prisoners to violently police or administrate the\ncellblocks FOR THEM. They know that punishing entire units of men if they\ndon't keep each other in line is creating license and inciting the\n'strongest' individuals and groups to terrorize everyone else. Which is the\nunspoken purpose of collective punishment in a prison.\n\nWhat's more telling is it's being done in a prison system plagued by\ncritical staff shortages, which has been a constant theme in the media for\na year now.\nI've written several articles exposing how for decades officials at Red\nOnion and Wallens Ridge in particular have not just created prison gangs\nand manipulated bloody wars between them that previously didn't exist at\nall, as a control mechanism and to create justification for the continued\noperations of these unneeded and expensive remote prisons, but also how\nthey routinely use prisoners to carry out violent hits on those who\nofficials dislike, can't control or who challenge them and their abuses. (2)\nThis collective punishment policy formalizes these very practices.\n\nPrison officials are astute at playing prisoners violently against each\nother, and THIS is what underlies this new collective punishment policy\ncoming from the top. Ask yourself: How else might men in the volatile\nprison environment control the behaviors of huge groups of other men who\nthey don't know and who owe them no obedience except by fear and violence?\nAnd the MOST VIOLENT are the ones with the greatest ability to control\nwhole units. Officials KNOW this. It is a deliberate administrative\nmaneuver to have prisoners act as auxiliary guards and police the units for\nthem. The SAME officials who forever spout rhetorical claims of \"zero\ntolerance\" for violent groups, group violence and so on.\n\nIf the obvious escapes you, just imagine if the cops did this in your\ncommunity - if they incited the most violent groups on the streets to\nenforce 'order' for them. But people on the streets can defend themselves.\nPrisoners cannot.\nPrisoners therefore have the right to be protected from harm. Over 30 years\nago, in the case of Farmer v. Brennan (3), the U.S. Supreme Court\nestablished that prison officials must provide humane conditions of\nconfinement. That the beating or stabbing of one prisoner by another serves\nno \"legitimate penological objective.\"\n\nIn this context the court held that having stripped prisoners of the means\nof self protection, having confined them with people deemed dangerous, and\nhaving foreclosed their ability to enlist outside support, officials may\nnot sit by idly and \"let the state of nature take its course.\" Therefore,\nit established that the Eighth Amendment imposes a constitutional duty on\nprison officials to \"protect prisoners from violence at the hands of other\nprisoners.\" What Va officials are doing, however, is the EXACT OPPOSITE.\nThey are in fact inciting and giving license to prisoners to commit\nviolence against each other. And the sinister catch-22 that they are\nknowingly creating is they are inciting this violence under circumstances\nwhere most victims can't seek their intervention or legal redress, as they\ncould if they were beaten by guards.\n\nIn prison culture, prisoners are forbidden from informing staff when they\nbecome victims of threats or violence from other prisoners. To report this\nis the to become a \"snitch,\" which both besmirches their character and puts\nthem in greater danger. To add insult to injury, those prisoners who\nwillingly act out violence for officials are in fact acting as agents\n(in-house rules enforcers for officials), and are typically already\ninformants themselves. These are the ones given privileged statuses and\ninformal license by staff to break rules and receive contraband for\ncontrolling units for them.\n\nThese are dynamics of the prison environment that prisoners and officials\nknow and understand well. Dynamics that I speak to in my newsletter\n\"InsideOutsideUnity #2,\" where I discuss the common practice of prisoners\ninforming by spreading misinformation and rumors for officials against\nother prisoners that officials dislike, fear or can't control. (4) And how\nthis practice acts as a gateway for prisoners becoming full-on agents and\npolicing other prisoners for them. This new policy of collective punishment\nformalizes this practice of using prisoners to violently police each other.\n\nWhat Va officials are doing is neither new nor unique, and they KNOW IT is\nillegal.\n\nIn fact the most dangerous and inhumane U.S. prisons historically were\nthose where officials used prisoner to police each other. Texas proved one\nof the most well-publicized cases, as a result of a decades-long class\naction lawsuit brought by the legendary prisoner activist, David Ruiz,\ntitled Ruiz v. Estelle, where officials used inmates as guards under a\n\"Building Tender\" system. (5)\n\nThe lawsuit exposed what the presiding judge, William Wayne Justice, found\nto be the most evil, corrupt and inhumane system of organized prison abuse\nhe'd ever encountered. A system he devoted the remainder of his life to\ntrying to change but in many ways failed due to the entrenched corruption\nof Texas prison officials.\n\nIn Texas the \"Building Tender\" system was justified by prison officials as\nneeded to compensate for extreme staff shortages.\n\nVa officials have now legitimized their long-standing practice of\nmanipulating prisoner-on-prisoner violence, using the thin disguise of\ncollective punishment - a tool of both control and continued abuse of men\nin its most remote and racially polarized prisons. (1) In this way their\nabuses continue by proxy, and in a way that they can claim plausible\ndeniability for the resultant harm to prisoners, namely the injuries and\ndeaths inflicted, and as in Texas, inmate informants and agents are being\nused as auxiliary guards to supplement for shortages in staffing. Yet\nanother reason Va's top administrators, director Chadwick Dotson and\noperations chief Arnold David Robinson, must be fired and these unneeded,\nexpensive, remote prisons Red Onion and Wallens Ridge closed down.\n\nDare to Struggle Dare to Win!\nAll Power to the People!\n_________________\nEndnotes:\n\n1. In Va's most remote prisons, which are also its highest security\nprisons, such as Red Onion, Wallens Ridge, River North, Keen Mountain and\nAugusta, the staff who are drawn from local, rural segregated white\ncommunities of SW Va are nearly 100% white, while the prisoner populations\nare near-totally Black and Brown. As a result these prisons have always\nbeen notorious for racist abuses of their prisoners by staff. In fact,\nafter a surprise tour of Red Onion during latter Dec 2024 in response to\nwidespread media exposure of several prisoners setting fire to themselves\nin desperate response to abuses there, Va legislator Michale Jones issued a\npress release the next day identifying racist abuses of Black prisoners as\none of numerous conditions that he stated needed immediate addressing at\nthe prisons.\n2. See for example, Kevin \"Rashid\" Johnson, \"How Officials Manufactured\nGangs and Gang Wars in Virginia's Prisons\" (2024)\nhttp:\/\/rashidmod.com\/?p=3554<\/a>\n3. Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825 (1994)\n4. \"InsideOutsideUnity #2\" http:\/\/rashidmod.com\/?p=3754<\/a>\n5. Ruiz v. Estelle, 503 F. Supp. 1265 (E.D. Tex. 1980)(pp. 1294-1298 cover\nthe \"Building Tender\" system).\n<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[6,24],"class_list":["post-3851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-party-articles","tag-virginia-prison-conditions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3851"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3851\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3853,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3851\/revisions\/3853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}