On April 2, 2024 at Virginia Sussex 1 State Prison, Ribbon, a prison attack dog, was killed. He was allegedly stabbed to death by a Latino prisoner who the dog had been turned loose on by guards. In the days following the dog’s demise, the local news media frequently bemoaned him and even featured the director of the Virginia prison system, Chadwick Dotson, giving a eulogy to the animal. As I witnessed all of this, I couldn’t help reflecting on slave narratives, where black slaves frequently protested that the dogs that were used to terrorize, brutalize and often kill them were treated better than they were, hence the term “treated worse than a dog.”
The comparison is apt since not even a year before Ribbon’s death, Sussex guards had beaten a prisoner to death but there was no mention of the events in the media, even once. And who can count the number of prisoners unjustifiably mauled by Virginia prison attack dogs just like Ribbon, who received no sympathy from officials. Prisoners such as Curtis Garrett, who put up no resistance, but was mauled by two dogs and beaten by guards at the same Sussex 1 Prison on Christmas Day in 2018, losing the use of an arm and leg as a result. Or Walter Kissy, who is now crippled from having a huge chunk of his leg ripped of by an attack dog at Virginia River North Prison on April 13, 2024.
Only 11 days after Ribbon died, as he lay on the floor in handcuffs and shackles, blinded by mace and not resisting, not a word was heard in the media about Walter’s barbaric treatment and suffering. However, if one sees routine television commercials where donations and sympathetic appeals are made and sold on behalf of neglected and abused animals like those of the ASPCA, what about the neglected and abused humans in Virginia prisons? We’re not even worthy of the consideration of a dog.
The sordid history of the use of animals to carry out the genocidal extermination of the native peoples of this region, like the Tainos, and to terrorize, maim, and kill Black slaves across the American South is all but forgotten. The US public has become so desensitized to state violence against people of color, it’s using carnivorous animals to bite and rip through human muscles, tendons, nerves and bones doesn’t even raise alarms.
Yet, hundreds of years ago, during the slave era, the exact same act was deemed barbaric and prompted writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe to write books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and her later book, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, that more deeply explored the use of hounds to hunt fugitive slaves and the ingenious resistance of the hunted Blacks. In fact, the recognized savagery of using those on enslaved and escaped Blacks was a huge motive that drove white support for abolition. Indeed, such famous slave hymns as Wade In The Water were songs crafted to instruct escaped slaves to use waterways to conceal their scent from the slave hounds sent to track them.
Images of police dogs set on Black protests in the 1960s Montgomery, Alabama elicited international support for the civil rights movement and prompted Malcolm X to remark that the white hood and attack hounds of the Old South had been traded in for blue uniforms and police dogs. This is still true today, especially Virginia’s remote prisons, where rules segregated whites, and guard’s uniforms allow attack dogs to mall prisoners of color for fun.
As Malcolm X counts the victims of such barbarities, “If a dog is fighting a Black man, the Black man should kill the dog, whether the dog is a police dog or any kind of dog. If a dog is sicced on a Black man when that black man is doing nothing but trying to take advantage of what the government says it’s supposed to be his, than that Black man should kill that dog, and any two legged dog who sics the dog on him”.
Perhaps Ribbon’s fate came in response to the Latino man heeding Malcolm’s advice, and his memory of how dogs have been historically used to exterminate brown people of this region, just like himself. But of course, any such idea of fending off attacks by dogs is unspeakable, since people of color have no right to resist or defend themselves, not even against being attacked by carnivorous animals, and we must accept that we are not worthy of being treated any better than dogs.
This is Kevin Rashid Johnson coming to you from within America’s Gulag Archipelago. Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win. All power to the People.
These commentaries are recorded by Prison Radio.