It’s extreme abuse. It’s, I mean, it’s pretty much blatant racism. It’s really, it’s really hard, I guess, for people on the outside to really understand the context of that environment. The culture that comes into that prison is like 50 years behind time. Guards when they come in, you know, there’s just an air of arrogance, this air of disrespect. There’s a lack of basic humanity, a lack of just respect for the people in there as human beings. They talk down to you, they degrade you. It’s their way or no way. There’s no – you have any sense of correcting them for doing wrong, you know. They do whatever they want to do. If you challenge them, you gon’ typically be subjected to an immediate use of force. Your situation’ll go from zero to 100 in a matter of seconds.
[Unintelligible] are notorious for slamming prisoners on their face while they’re handcuffed and shackled, shooting prisoners, siccing canines on prisoners. You know, prison guards are just… they say they have more instances of prisoners going to the hospital from Red Onion and Wallens Ridge for dog bites than anything else. So there’s no, there’s really no serious injury as a result of violence. There’s lack of any real serious conflicts between prisoners that lead to any type of serious injuries.
They’re [the prison guards] inflicting most all of the serious injuries on the prisoners, so it’s just an environment where the prisoners really don’t know what to expect. It’s a constant sense of foreboding fear, antagonism from the guards, and it’s just, it’s kind of hard to really give a sense to people who don’t live in that type of environment just how insecure and uncertain people who have to live in that environment are. You know, they’re isolated from their families.
Most everyone there is Black or Brown, while the whole staff is White from the rural segregated communities out there in southwestern Virginia in the mountains. So there’s ingrained cultural alienation, there’s a cultural clash between, you know, opposite sides; prisoners versus the guards, there’s just basic stereotypes, cultural animosity. So it’s like a throwback, going back to, like the Jim Crow era, at very least.
These commentaries are recorded by Prison Radio