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 dangerous, it’s downright sinister.
At Va’s notorious remote supermax prisons, Red Onion and Wallens Ridge, and their most updated version River North, entire cellblocks of prisoners – some 88 men or more – are now formally punished if just one person in the block breaks a rule. (1) At Red Onion and Wallens Ridge it has been written into the rulebooks that not only are privileges like visitation, video calls, canteen, and educational and religious programs taken for one person’s alleged misconduct, but the units must ‘earn’ their lost privileges back.
Besides the basic unfairness of punishing innocent people for others’ actions over which they have no control, with this policy officials are deliberately prompting prisoners to violently police or administrate the cellblocks FOR THEM. They know that punishing entire units of men if they don’t keep each other in line is creating license and inciting the ‘strongest’ individuals and groups to terrorize everyone else. Which is the unspoken purpose of collective punishment in a prison.
What’s more telling is it’s being done in a prison system plagued by critical staff shortages, which has been a constant theme in the media for a year now.
I’ve written several articles exposing how for decades officials at Red Onion and Wallens Ridge in particular have not just created prison gangs and manipulated bloody wars between them that previously didn’t exist at all, as a control mechanism and to create justification for the continued operations of these unneeded and expensive remote prisons, but also how they routinely use prisoners to carry out violent hits on those who officials dislike, can’t control or who challenge them and their abuses. (2)
This collective punishment policy formalizes these very practices.
Prison officials are astute at playing prisoners violently against each other, and THIS is what underlies this new collective punishment policy coming from the top. Ask yourself: How else might men in the volatile prison environment control the behaviors of huge groups of other men who they don’t know and who owe them no obedience except by fear and violence? And the MOST VIOLENT are the ones with the greatest ability to control whole units. Officials KNOW this. It is a deliberate administrative maneuver to have prisoners act as auxiliary guards and police the units for them. The SAME officials who forever spout rhetorical claims of “zero tolerance” for violent groups, group violence and so on.
If the obvious escapes you, just imagine if the cops did this in your community – if they incited the most violent groups on the streets to enforce ‘order’ for them. But people on the streets can defend themselves. Prisoners cannot.
Prisoners therefore have the right to be protected from harm. Over 30 years ago, in the case of Farmer v. Brennan (3), the U.S. Supreme Court established that prison officials must provide humane conditions of confinement. That the beating or stabbing of one prisoner by another serves no “legitimate penological objective.”
In this context the court held that having stripped prisoners of the means of self protection, having confined them with people deemed dangerous, and having foreclosed their ability to enlist outside support, officials may not sit by idly and “let the state of nature take its course.” Therefore, it established that the Eighth Amendment imposes a constitutional duty on prison officials to “protect prisoners from violence at the hands of other prisoners.” What Va officials are doing, however, is the EXACT OPPOSITE. They are in fact inciting and giving license to prisoners to commit violence against each other. And the sinister catch-22 that they are knowingly creating is they are inciting this violence under circumstances where most victims can’t seek their intervention or legal redress, as they could if they were beaten by guards.
In prison culture, prisoners are forbidden from informing staff when they become victims of threats or violence from other prisoners. To report this is the to become a “snitch,” which both besmirches their character and puts them in greater danger. To add insult to injury, those prisoners who willingly act out violence for officials are in fact acting as agents (in-house rules enforcers for officials), and are typically already informants themselves. These are the ones given privileged statuses and informal license by staff to break rules and receive contraband for controlling units for them.
These are dynamics of the prison environment that prisoners and officials know and understand well. Dynamics that I speak to in my newsletter “InsideOutsideUnity #2,” where I discuss the common practice of prisoners informing by spreading misinformation and rumors for officials against other prisoners that officials dislike, fear or can’t control. (4) And how this practice acts as a gateway for prisoners becoming full-on agents and policing other prisoners for them. This new policy of collective punishment formalizes this practice of using prisoners to violently police each other.
What Va officials are doing is neither new nor unique, and they KNOW IT is illegal.
In fact the most dangerous and inhumane U.S. prisons historically were those where officials used prisoner to police each other. Texas proved one of the most well-publicized cases, as a result of a decades-long class action lawsuit brought by the legendary prisoner activist, David Ruiz, titled Ruiz v. Estelle, where officials used inmates as guards under a “Building Tender” system. (5)
The lawsuit exposed what the presiding judge, William Wayne Justice, found to be the most evil, corrupt and inhumane system of organized prison abuse he’d ever encountered. A system he devoted the remainder of his life to trying to change but in many ways failed due to the entrenched corruption of Texas prison officials.
In Texas the “Building Tender” system was justified by prison officials as needed to compensate for extreme staff shortages.
Va officials have now legitimized their long-standing practice of manipulating prisoner-on-prisoner violence, using the thin disguise of collective punishment – a tool of both control and continued abuse of men in its most remote and racially polarized prisons. (1) In this way their abuses continue by proxy, and in a way that they can claim plausible deniability for the resultant harm to prisoners, namely the injuries and deaths inflicted, and as in Texas, inmate informants and agents are being used as auxiliary guards to supplement for shortages in staffing. Yet another reason Va’s top administrators, director Chadwick Dotson and operations chief Arnold David Robinson, must be fired and these unneeded, expensive, remote prisons Red Onion and Wallens Ridge closed down.
Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!
All Power to the People!
