Prison Radio
Kevin “Rashid” Johnson

By Kevin “Rashid” Johnson

It’s really common sense that those in power, who abuse power, will resist and attempt to suppress those who expose their abuses.

The head of the Virginia prison system, director Chadwick Dotson, has been exposed as lying to hide racist abuses in his remote supermax prisons, Red Onion State Prison in particular, and the desperate responses of numerous terrorized prisoners who set themselves on fire trying to get transferred out of those conditions. 

I was the source of the news of those burnings initially reaching the public, through recorded and written reports published in October 2024 by Prison Riot Radio, the Virginia Defender, Prison Radio, and others. 

The initial response of ranking Va prison officials was to lie and deny the self-burnings. 

When The Defender’s editor Phil Wilayto called Red Onion investigating the issue he was told by the warden David Anderson that no self burnings had occurred. Then on November 27, 2024 Dotson went in the Richmond Times Dispatch specifically denying my reports that prisoners set themselves on fire and self-immolated, calling them “ludicrous.” He and his so-called Communications Director Kyle Gibson went further in subsequent media reports and public meetings saying the reports were cheap shots at the prison system by Abolitionists and radicals, that the prisoners at Red Onion had nothing to protest, and they invited members of the Va legislature, including the Black Caucus, to visit Red Onion. This is when the public lies coming out of this Propaganda Ministry became apparent.

Almost immediately the state legislature, who has access to the state prisons’ internal records, condfirmed in the press that at least six prisoners had in fact self-immolated. Then two Va legislators, Holly Siebold and Michael Jones, who did in fact visit Red Onion both reported illegal, abusive and “inhumane” conditions there. Jones went further stating that racist abuses of Black prisoners was occurring in Red Onion and that he spoke to two of the burned prisoners. But according to the Propaganda Ministry my reports were false, the prisoners had nothing to protest, and it was all the inventions of people trying to besmirch the image of Va’s prison system.

With the cat out of the bag, Dotson and Gibson pretended that they had never blatantly lied to the public about the prisoner self-immolations and the racist abuses in Va’s remote prisons, and suddenly claimed the burnings were prisoners being manipulative, they were acts symptomatic of mental illness, and the prisoners were just trying to get transferred to prisons closer to family and friends which they could accomplish by simply behaving themselves. 

This also proved to be lying propaganda, and by legislative officials yet again.

Both delegates Siebold and Jones wrote letters refuting Dotson and revealed that prisoner assignments to and lengths of stay at Red Onion were arbitrary, that there was the arbitrary abuse of the torture of long term solitary confinement at the prison, and again abuses were extreme.

The axe truly fell exposing the lies of ranking Va prison officials when on Jan 8, 2025 The Appeal quoted email exchanges from Sept 2024 between Red Onion’s assistant warden, major, and investigator where they discussed not only several prisoners setting themselves on fire, but were exploring how to get prisoners to stop, including by having them criminally prosecuted for setting fires in their cells, and fined thousands of dollars for their medical transportation and treatment for their burns. They also admitted that five prisoners had received disciplinary infractions for setting fires or self mutilation.

So, everything I had reported was proven true and the public and historical record shows a prison administration subjecting prisoners to racist and inhumane abuses and lying to the public about the desperation their victims were driven to seeking to escape those conditions. Then they went further to punish and pathologize those acts of desperation. 

This scenario sounds like something ripped from German Nazi archives. But it’s not the end of the story.

As public protests of Dotson’s lies and calls to shut down his remote prisons mobilized, and the very media outlets who gave him platforms to feed the public the now-discredited lies began reaching out to me for comment, his Ministry of Propaganda diverted fire at me. 

Kyle Gibson, who under VaDOC policy 022.2 (which governs Va prisoners’ access to the media) is supposed to facilitate media interviews with Va prisoners, went in the media defaming me and blocked the same media from interviewing me in response. In a Jan 8, 2025 NBC report he went on record lying and slandering me as being a habitually violent sexual deviant, which had nothing to do with my credibility or the truth of my reports. Furthermore, while I have been targeted with numerous fabricated infractions during my confinement in response to my resisting abuses, I have never been convicted of any sex crimes. The same report stated I had failed to respond to NBC’s requests for comment. Not only had I never received any requests from NBC for comment, but instead of facilitating those communications between me and the media, Gibson maligned me in the media then blocked my communication with them. Not just this, but I observed that several journalists, including Luca Powell of the Richmond Times Dispatch, Kaitlyn Schwanemann of NBC, Allison Williams of Richmond channel 8, and others had registered to communicate with me on the prison’s secure Jpay email system, but I never received messages from them. Their communications were blocked.

When has a corrupt fascist system ever portrayed itself as being anything but just and working to serve the people?

When has evidence of such a corrupt racist system been more blatantly exposed to the public in real time than right now