The public can’t believe anything Virginia Prison officials tell them. Lies about dog attacks. In an August 1st, 2021, article about two lawsuits filed by Virginia prisoners who had been mauled by prison attack dogs, a spokesman for the Virginia Prison System was cited as saying, “K9 units are used solely for purposes of detecting drugs and other contraband, not for attacking or intimidating prisoners.” This quote came from the article by Keith Sanders titled, “Virginia Prison Guards Dogs Attacked Prisoners with Dogs,” from Prison Legal News, August 1, 2021. An outright lie.
In contradiction of this claim that dogs aren’t used to intimidate, Rick White, past warden of Virginia’s Notorious Red Onion State Prison, was quoted in a 2023 Insider Report on uses of dogs in US prisons, as stating that dogs are, in fact, used frequently in Virginia prisons for “presence,” or, “in other words, the implied violence of their growls and bared teeth is sufficient to frighten people into compliance.” So dogs are definitely used to terrorize Virginia prisoners. They’re also used, no less often, to attack them. In total contradiction of the denied use of dogs to attack Virginia prisoners, the same Insider Report, “…was able to document 271 dog attacks in Virginia State Prisons from 2017 to 2022 through court filings and incident reports.” This is from the Insider Report dated July 23rd, 2023, by Hannah Beckler titled, “Patrol dogs are terrorizing and mauling prisoners inside the United [States].”
Why is indeed would Virginia officials’ lie about using attack dogs? Well, exposing the practice has many implications, including the hidden history of widespread uses of dogs to hunt, terrorize, maul and kill Black people in slavery, including in Virginia. This practice was one of the main outbreaks that motivated the slavery abolitionist movement. The barbarian use of dogs to maul humans was recognized even then, prompting British officials who used dogs in this manner against slaves in Jamaica, to do exactly what Virginia officials are doing now. They lied. As one article noted, “Their public defense insisted that dogs primarily intimidated rather than attacked.” That quote came from the article by Tyler Perry titled, “Slave Hounds and Abolition,” from the publication Past and Present, number 246, February 2020.
Indeed, the practice was criminalized and punished by execution when the same slave hounds were used by the Confederates against White Union soldiers. It’s because this practice is inherently barbaric and was recognized to be so as far back as 200 years ago, during the era of slavery, and has a racist history which continues, that Virginia officials have lied about it, trying to hide it from the public. Which brings me to another campaign of lies projected by them to the public, a lying documentary.
This came with the airing of a December, 2016 HBO documentary titled, “Solitary Inside Red Onion State Prison,” which can be seen on YouTube. This documentary was used to whitewash the abuses within the prison and its image. The program has never been shown to Virginia prisoners, and with good reason. It was a cover up. Through considerable maneuvering, I was able to watch it however, and immediately recognized it as lying propaganda meant to clean up Red Onion’s sordid image.
The film began with two dogs, two guards, one Black, one White, escorting a handcuffed White prisoner to a solitary confinement cell. This was the first lie. I was confined at Red Onion for 14 years, from when it first opened in 1998 until 2012 and several times since then, up to present. The prison, which is located on a mountain in a rural region of the state, has never had more than three Black guards on the entire otherwise White staff, who come from segregated White communities that have no prior contact with urban Blacks. And its prisoner population has always been almost totally Black.
This racial dynamic has always been behind the prison’s notorious history of extreme racist abuses of its prisoners. This is the dynamic of history: These fabricated and opening images were meant to hide and continue throughout the documentary with the interviews of prisoners at Red Onion. Four were White, one was Black. Again, a dishonest representation of the actual demographic makeup of the prison’s population. One of the interviewed White prisoners, Dennis Webb, whom I’ve known for decades and am in the block with as I write this, revealed to me that he and others were given free television by Red Onion’s administrators for doing the interviews.
These commentaries are recorded by Prison Radio.