The Virginia legislature enacted a set of laws governing the state’s prison system. Under those laws, it designated a director as the system’s head of operations. Chadwick Dotson was appointed under the administration of present Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin as the prison system’s new Director. Dotson came into this position with no prior experience in running a prison system. In fact, he was previously a prosecutor and a judge based in remote Wise County, Virginia, where the state’s two notoriously racist and abusive supermax prisons, Red Onion and Wallens Ridge, are located. It must be noted that Wise is a remote county in the mountains of rural southwestern Virginia that is populated by communities of segregated whites.
As prosecutor and judge, Dotson acted as an enforcer of abuses at Red Onion and Wallens Ridge, upholding selective prosecutions of prisoners by officials at these prisons and protecting the same officials from prisoner litigations and requests for criminal charges against abuses by them. It is no wonder that he went from Wise County Judge to Virginia Department of Corrections Director, reflecting his blatant sympathies with the prison system. Actually, a peculiar trend is evident if we look at the composition of Virginia prison system’s central headquarters.
Alongside Dotson is A. David Robinson, Arnold David Robinson, the Virginia Department of Corrections Chief of Corrections Operations. Unlike Dotson, Robinson has been a fixture in the Virginia prison system for decades and was the Warden of Wallens Ridge during periods of extreme abuses there. In fact, Robinson is the defacto Director of the Virginia Prison ystem, running things from behind the scenes, with Dotson operating largely as a figurehead and its public face. With this power, Robinson has implemented a system of cronyism and nepotism by inventing new positions at headquarters and placing a good old boy circle of racist, dirty officials hailing from Wise County, in those positions. Among them is Randall Mathena, who is now at VADOC headquarters as the Director of Security and Correctional Enforcement, a completely invented position.
Mathena was Assistant Warden of Red Onion when it first opened in 1998 under Chief Warden George Deeds.
Red Onion came under fire almost from the moment it opened for operations for extreme racism and abuses against its predominantly Black prisoner population by its near totally white staff. This resulted from a 1999 report by Human Rights Watch and investigation titled: “Red Onion State Prison Super-Maximum Security Confinement in Virginia.” This exposure prompted a change of the administrative personnel at the prison, as window dressing, where Mathena and Deeds were removed. But after a cooling off period, Mathena returned to Red Onion in October 2011 as the Chief Warden, restoring much of the prison’s old culture, racism and prison mistreatment. Mathena is now at VADOC headquarters, instituting such practices statewide.
Then there is Fletcher, who rose from the position of a petty guard at Wallens Ridge in the early 2000s to now presiding over Virginia Department of Corrections special security group called the “Strike Force,” or Special Response Team –SRT. The SRT patterns itself after police SWAT units and fancies itself a military style Special Operations Unit, even calling its activities “Ops.” The group exists, ostensibly to respond to riots, hostage situations and such incidents that require specialized tactical intervention. The SRT, however, operates as a prison guard gang that has no oversight in its conduct when mobilized in prisons. Under Robinson, Fletcher’s been expanding the role of SRT. Headquarter officials sent SRT units all over the state at-will to carry out targeted hits on disliked prisoners, like myself. They operate without identification tags and routinely beat prisoners and destroy prisoners property with zero accountability. Once mobilized by the headquarters, they have overriding authority over, even the wardens of prisons they are activated inside of.
Across the Virginia Department of Corrections, Robinson and company have been systematically closing down the predominantly Black-staffed prisons and shifting resources to, and replacing them with prisons located in rural, segregated white communities like Wise County. And almost without exception, the prisoners disproportionately targeted for assignment to these prisons are Black and Brown. In response to recent reports of Black prisoners at Red Onion setting themselves on fire in desperate efforts to be transferred away from racist mistreatment there, Dotson ignored the long-standing complaints and notoriety of racist abuses at Red Onion, claiming the prisoners had “nothing to complain about”; racist abuse is nothing, and basically took the position that these white staff dominated prisons are more secure and less inclined to introduction of contraband, than largely Black staffed ones. This in itself, is a thinly disguised position reflecting racist predispositions of Virginia Department of Corrections headquarter officials. Indeed, it is the same position held by racist southern whites during the era of Jim Crow segregation, from 1865 to 1965, that kept Blacks out of government office, including as prison guards and police.
This circle of officials at Virginia Department of Corrections headquarters is turning back the clock to that period. They’re concentrating Virginia’s highest security prisons, where predominantly Black prisoners are held, because [they are] portrayed as the “most dangerous” in rural white communities, where they suffer the harshest treatment and abuse. The Virginia Department of Corrections headquarters staff is composed of a closed, corrupt nepotistic circle of officials who operate above the law and free of public accountability; a cabal that needs to be broken up and the invented titles given to them, eliminated. 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