Shine White Launches Hunger Strike Against Prison Conditions

After being transferred to Scotland Correctional Prison, inmate Shine White began a hunger strike on February 24, 2026, to protest inhumane living conditions. Last November, he had already undertaken a similar action (see our article). He is particularly concerned about his unsanitary cell, whose ceiling is covered in black mold (causing untreated health problems), as well as the confiscation of his tablet, an essential tool for accessing his mail and legal aid. A long-time activist who has been a victim of violence in the past for denouncing the prison system, he is calling on his supporters to contact prison authorities to demand an end to these reprisals and the restoration of his fundamental rights.

New Boss, Same Plantation: Joseph Walters and the Grievance Machine

When Governor Abigail Spanberger moved to replace Chadwick Dotson at the Virginia Department of Corrections, the public hoped for change: a break from the violence, retaliation, and secrecy that have defined Virginia’s Western Region prisons. The man elevated to run the system, Deputy Director Joseph W. Walters, was presented as a steady technocrat.

Look at the record, and a different picture emerges. Walters is not an outsider brought in to clean house. He is the longtime administrator of the plantation economy inside VADOC: the official who sits over money, labor, “compliance,” HR, and the very grievance maze that keeps people out of court.

Across at least 29 federal civil cases naming him as a defendant, Walters appears not as a reformer but as a constant: the signature at the top of a regime that survives by controlling both the bodies and the paperwork.

The man over the maze

The org chart makes Walters’ role plain. As Deputy Director for Administration, his name sits at the top of a column that runs through Information Technology, Financial Management, Health Services, Human Resources, Administrative Compliance, Virginia Correctional Enterprises, Corrections Administration, Infrastructure and Environmental Services, Agribusiness, Policy and Agency Initiatives, General Services, and Training. These are the offices whose outputs—policies, trainings, compliance certifications, medical practices, hiring and discipline decisions, procurement and facility records, and grievance metrics—are later treated by courts and auditors as neutral evidence of constitutional adequacy.

This is not a side wing of the agency. It is the core of how the regime reproduces itself on paper: who gets hired and promoted, what happens when staff are accused of abuse, how medical neglect is documented or blurred into “non-compliance,” how force reports and grievances are coded, how prison labor and contracts are justified, how auditors are walked through “compliance” checklists. Wardens and line staff may deliver the blows, but Walters’ division designs and maintains the administrative environment that makes those blows disappear into procedure.

Administrative Compliance, which sits under his supervision, is also where grievance rules and many of the operating procedures live. That is the level at which VADOC decides what counts as a “proper” informal, how many hoops a person must jump through, what deadlines apply, what counts as a disqualifying technical error, and how facilities are scored for “compliance” with those rules. Walters may not be the one rejecting individual forms, but the rulebook, the training, and the internal audits that courts later rely on all run through his side of the house.

A colonial economy in bureaucratic dress

Virginia has built an internal colony in its own southwest corner. People from Black and poor communities in Richmond, Tidewater, and Northern Virginia are pulled hundreds of miles into a prison belt in Wise, Buchanan, and Russell counties, stripped of any real political voice, and folded into an economy built around cages. It is a new layer on an old pattern: a state that once ran on enslaved labor and, later, on chain gangs and company coal towns now staffs rural prisons to keep that coercive labor structure alive under another name. In county after county, the same surnames that show up in nineteenth-century slave schedules and land records show up again in the rosters of sheriffs, judges, and corrections officers; families whose names appeared as slaveholders now occupy offices that control confinement.

Inside that belt, prisons function as anchor employers. Entire counties are effectively put on a payroll to guard and break people from the rest of the state: corrections jobs, medical contracts, food and construction vendors, agribusiness, Virginia Correctional Enterprises shops. Walters’ side of the house—financial management, VCE, agribusiness, HR, administrative compliance—sits where all of that is coordinated: the budgets and contracts, the staffing pipelines, the policies that decide who is shipped out of Richmond or Norfolk and who is put to work on which line. His division does not just manage a bureaucracy; it manages the extraction circuit.

That is what makes the Western Region an internal colony rather than just a “poor region” or “periphery.” Wealth and political advantage flow outward, while risk and trauma are concentrated there. Local white-majority workforces are paid to police overwhelmingly Black and brown prisoners from the cities; state funding and federal dollars follow the headcount; and the same offices that profit from the labor also control the paperwork that defines what that labor “is.” Walters sits where the labor system, its staffing, and its paper shield meet, making the plantation economy read as ordinary administration.

Twenty-nine cases and a pattern of impunity

Against that backdrop, Walters’ litigation footprint comes into focus. There are 29 federal cases in Virginia where he appears as a defendant. In most of these cases, Walters is named not for direct acts, but as the senior policy official responsible for the administrative systems being challenged.

Eastern District cases like Webb, Meyers, Perkins, Tyler, and Monzon raise conditions, medical neglect, retaliation, and grievance obstruction tied to policies that flow through Richmond. Western District cases like Mangus, Watson, Barksdale, Reid, Lumumba, Deans, and Chenevert are rooted in the brutal daily reality of Red Onion, Wallens Ridge, and their satellite camps. Routon and related medical-provider suits recur with Walters in the leadership tier that contracted, oversaw, and then defended third-party “correctional health” vendors as abuse and neglect accumulated.

In case after case, Walters is not the counselor or the guard. He is the policy-level defendant, the man whose name stands in for “the people who built this system and refuse to change it.” And in case after case, the claims fail at the threshold—dismissed before factual development, often on exhaustion or immunity grounds. The underlying pattern of labor exploitation, retaliation, and medical neglect remains intact.

Those 29 Walters cases are not happening in a vacuum. During the same 2021–2024 period, Virginia quietly paid out more than $5 million in publicly documented § 1983 settlements and verdicts tied to its prisons: a $1.875 million payment in Boley after a jury found wrongful death from an untreated aneurysm, $1.6 million in Puryear for over-detention, $700,000 in Pfaller for a hepatitis C death, and additional six-figure settlements in Reyes, Lee, NFB-VA, and the Duynes estate. Walters is not named on every caption, but every one of these losses comes out of the same administrative and medical systems he helped oversee. When plaintiffs manage to break through the grievance maze and the PLRA’s procedural traps, the pattern is blunt: the state pays. What changes is not the system, but the titles of the people who keep it running.

Walters’ institutional leverage: the PLRA and the grievance contradiction

This is where the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) meets Walters’ portfolio. As Deputy Director for Administration, Walters sits over the units that write, “audit,” and defend VADOC’s internal rules—Administrative Compliance, HR, Corrections Administration, Training. Under federal law, people in Virginia’s prisons don’t have any constitutional right to a fair or even functioning grievance system. But under the PLRA, they are barred from federal court unless they navigate every step of whatever grievance maze VADOC chooses to design. That contradiction is a key source of Walters’ institutional leverage.

This system does not require overt conspiracy to function—only the routine maintenance of procedures that courts are trained to defer to. His shop builds the maze, trains staff to run it, declares it “in compliance,” and then watches courts treat that paper system as proof that remedies were “available” when prisoners’ cases get thrown out on exhaustion.

UPROAR has received and shared reports from the Western Region that make “availability” a dark joke. In some pods, the grievance box itself sits behind a painted red line. UPROAR has documented accounts alleging that access to grievance boxes is enforced through threats of force, including reports of less-lethal munitions used to deter approach. On paper, the grievance process remains pristine and “available.” On the ground, it is guarded by threat of physical punishment.

The 29-case docket against Walters lives inside this contradiction. Plaintiffs allege beatings, retaliation, denial of medical care, sexual harassment, grotesque conditions. The cases are met not with real accountability, but with threshold defenses: “failure to exhaust,” “no personal involvement,” “no clearly established right,” “official immunity.” The same system that makes people risk rubber bullets to reach a grievance box is then treated as if it worked flawlessly when courts decide whether they had “available remedies.”

Walters’ role over Administrative Compliance makes him the custodian of this legal fiction. If the grievance maze were redesigned to be simple, safe, and accountable, that would threaten the very mechanism that currently keeps most suits from ever reaching a jury.

Oversight over its own overseers

The OSIG Red Onion report shows how this plays out at scale. After years of reports about beatings, starvation, racist retaliation, and desperate acts of self-harm at Red Onion, the Virginia Office of the State Inspector General issued an investigation report on “conditions of confinement.” VADOC leadership immediately began citing the report as vindication—proof, they claimed, that allegations were “unsubstantiated.”

UPROAR’s public analysis of that report walks through the reality: OSIG relied heavily on VADOC’s own records, accepted the department’s grievance and incident tracking at face value, and treated a long trail of brutality and self-immolation as administratively invisible whenever the paperwork didn’t line up. Where people were too scared to grieve, or where grievances were blocked, delayed, or destroyed, OSIG simply found “no evidence.” That procedural absence was then used as a political shield.

That shield is forged in Walters’ world. Administrative Compliance decides how use-of-force, medical neglect, and retaliation are supposed to be recorded. HR and leadership decide who gets disciplined, who gets promoted, and who keeps running a housing unit after repeated allegations. When outside investigators or courts come knocking, the only “facts” they see first are the ones produced by that system. The reliability of those records traces directly back to the administrative offices Walters oversaw for years.

The result is oversight over its own overseers: the same regime that abuses, starves, and buries people in segregation also supplies the “evidence” that supposedly clears itself. Walters’ career sits right at that junction.

Spanberger’s choice: continuity, not rupture

Chadwick Dotson’s tenure as VADOC Director brought the Western Region’s brutality into sharper public view, but he did not invent it. The abuses documented by prisoners, families, and advocates long predate him. They are the product of a structural arrangement: a carceral plantation economy run through an internal colony in Southwest Virginia, insulated by a grievance and oversight apparatus designed to fail the people it claims to protect.

By elevating Joseph Walters—the overseer of that apparatus—to the top job, Governor Spanberger did not break with that regime. She promoted it. The man whose division manages prison labor and agribusiness now presides over the entire system that profits from that coerced work, and the official whose chain of command runs through Administrative Compliance and HR now has the final word on how VADOC responds to OSIG findings, FOIA pressure, and civil-rights litigation. The defendant in at least 29 federal cases alleging harms under his watch is now the public face of “reform.”

“New boss, same as the old boss” is not a slogan here. It is a description of institutional continuity. Walters’ rise shows that the thing the regime values most is not safety, not accountability, not the lives of the people trapped inside its walls, but the continued smooth operation of a system in which grievances are dangerous or pointless, oversight depends on DOC’s own paperwork, and those who help maintain that impunity are rewarded with promotion.

Virginians who are serious about ending the plantation economy inside their prisons cannot treat Walters’ appointment, or Governor Spanberger’s role in promoting him, as a misunderstanding to be politely corrected. They have to understand it for what it is: a deliberate consolidation of the apparatus that now governs Virginia’s prison crisis. That apparatus takes an internationally reported pattern of racist abuse—punctuated by self-immolations, unexplained deaths in custody, and increasing attacks on guards—and turns it into a “mostly unsubstantiated” administrative mystery.

To confront that system, Virginians must treat Walters and the administration that elevated him not as partners in reform, but as managers of an entrenched regime that chooses impunity over human life. The task then is to learn more, fight harder, and organize on a different scale: to build real inside–outside unity between imprisoned people, their families, and supporters on the street, and to knit together unions, grassroots groups, faith communities, and abolitionist formations into a common front. That kind of unity—across the walls and across movements—is what it will take to break the information monopoly that keeps abuse “unsubstantiated,” to force an end to the most dangerous practices, and to make it politically impossible to keep calling consolidation “reform.”

source: Kevin Rashid Johnson

Memorializing a Neo-Nazi: The Commemoration of Charlie Kirk

For weeks now, the mainstream U.S. media has been awash with coverage and accolades about Charlie Kirk, a racist ultra-right young fascist who was shot to death on Sept 10, 2025. In this era of MAGA glorification and promotion of traditional Nazi ideals, and shaming those who dare oppose them, Kirk is being hailed as a martyred young hero of the mainstream Right, euphemistically called a “conservative activist” instead of the Neo-Nazi that he was. There have been calls from modern conservatives for violent retaliation and repression of their political critics and opponents, whom they blame for creating the social climate that incited Kirk’s killer.

Top U.S. officials attended and spoke at his memorial service, including president Donald Trump. He’s being lionized as a hero of the Republicans, which reveals the true racist character of these U.S. power holders that they have hidden for decades behind a thin veil of ‘tolerance.’ Republican Virginia governor Glenn Younkin attended a gathering in memory of Kirk on Sept 25th where he expressed that Kirk left a “blueprint” for young conservatives to follow, and pledged $100K to Kirk’s Neo-Nazi Turning Point USA organization to set up chapters in Va.

Kirk was the sanitized political version of Dylann Roof, the young white loner who shot nine Black parishioners to death in 2015 during a Bible study class in Charleston, SC’s Mother Emanuel Church. In Kirk was, and is now in death, FAR more dangerous than Roof, because his agenda was and is being used to revitalized a culture from not so long ago where the MAJORITY of white Amerika were people just like Dylann Roof. Where Amerika was a society where Blacks weren’t just murdered in their churches and homes, but entire white communities routinely gathered to carry out festive gruesome murders (lynchings) of Blacks and distributed their body parts – with especial emphasis on genitalia – as mementos, and white mobs invaded and burned entire Black communities to the ground while gang raping Black girls and women and randomly killing Blacks.

This is the history that MAGA proponents and the Charlie Kirks are driving a movement to erase and remove from schools and libraries, in furtherance of their agendas to revive this history. Indeed ,THIS is the very meaning of MAGA (“Make Amerika Great Again”). Meaning, bring back that old openly racist, sexist, white male supremacist Amerika, where no one except the dominant white male class had a voice and power, and openly repressed and murdered those who even breathed a whisper of defiance. This is the “great” Amerika they want to see “again.”

The whole anti-DEI movement is blatant white male supremacy writ large. This is only a new euphemism (in times past they called it “Manifest Destiny” and “Mission Civilastrace”), that allows it to be promoted openly and to attack its critics as racists – the typical dysfunctional defense mechanism of ‘deflection’ is now a conservative political strategy. In this moment of heroizing the slain Neo-Nazi Kirk, not a word of criticism is being allowed to be uttered about him. Those who have simply posted or pointed to his own racist and sexist utterings and views have been fired from jobs, ridiculed in the press and social media, faced pressure from top power holders in the government, and have been used as heads on spikes dotting the landscape to warn others to keep quiet lest they suffer the same attacks for expressing free and honest speech.

Yet these conservatives claim that Kirk embodied the ideals of free and open political debate and expression and holding his views up against those of his opponents, so he should be emulated. His death is also being denounced by them as an evil act of political violence which they claim to oppose. Yet, they are openly repressing his critics. Wow! One wonders then, why I am now sitting and suffering abuses in the SC prison system, including being held incommunicado, in the IMMEDIATE wake of and response to publishing articles exposing abuses in Va prisons and its high level administrators lying to the public to conceal those conditions?

Not only was my transfer to SC in retaliation for those articles and what is supposed to be protected free expression, but SC prison officials have retaliated each time I’ve written anything critical about them, and they’ve been trying to murder me by medical/dental neglect, refusing and delaying me treatment for an abscessed tooth for several months now, and lying to cover up their actions. I’ve been a recognized political activist for decades, and was profiled as a domestic terrorist by federal and Va agencies in 2009, BECAUSE of their own statement that my written views and articles have often proven persuasive in educating the public and leading them to criticize the U.S. law enforcement and prison system, and “promoting a brotherhood of the oppressed philosophy.”

So, a Neo-Nazi is a hero for espousing his views and challenging opponents, but I am designated a terrorist and face continued retaliation and censorship, including being targeted by the state with violence (political violence), for espousing my views, and simply reporting the truth about the abuses suffered by America’s imprisoned and holding my UNIFYING political views up against the existing standards of the status quo, which has a tiny group of predatory rich exploiting everyone else.

Clearly a racial and political double standard. How many of our independent Black leaders have suffered political persecution and violence, and were murdered BY THE AMERIKAN GOVERNMENT for using their tongues? – Fred Hampton, George Jackson, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr, and the list goes on. NONE of them were memorialized as with Kirk, because they weren’t white Nazis. In fact they were opponents of Nazism, and were murdered for challenging America’s white racist capitalist status quo. Indeed, the formal commemoration of their memories many years after their deaths, which the MAGA movement is trying to erase today, were the results of Black folks fighting for decades to have them remembered.

In this period of the resurgence of open and unapologetic white supremacy and the Nazification of America, they must invent heroes like Kirk, shielding and hiding his deviant views, and pretending he was an innocent victim of some sinister killer.

Kirk and his Turning Point USA group embodied, propagated and united to revive everything everything hateful that Amerika was built upon and has stood for (genocide, white male supremacy, sexism, lynching, slavery, racial mass imprisonment, capitalism and every form of divisiveness and discrimination devisable to target and playing them against each other), while trying to hide behind lies, red herrings and mudslinging. This is the history of hate that the MAGA movement wants to erase while promoting a new generation of Neo-Nazis like Kirk and Turning Point USA. We must expose them for what they are, fearlessly counter them, and stop their grabs for power.

Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!
All Power to the People!
Kevin Rashid Johnson

source: Kevin Rashid Johnson

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=22555

#blackLiberation #charlieKirk #kevinRashidJohnson #newAfrikanPantherParty #northAmerica #politicizedPrisoner #us

Solitary Confinement in South Carolina Leads to Suicide and Psychosis

I recently wrote about the barbaric conditions in South Carolina’s solitary confinement units (euphemistically called “Restrictive Housing Units”). [1] I want now to give examples of the effects of these conditions on its victims. I write this as I remain confined in one such unit in SC’s Perry Correctional (sic!) Institution.

In the cell next to me is Rakeem Scott #373388. Throughout the day he giggles and talks to himself. Not so loudly –– well not initially –– that it draws alarm, but adrift in his own world, in what is obviously a desperate attempt by his mind to compensate for, cope with and escape the total isolation he suffers inside an empty concrete box with no access to the outside and next to no human contact. As the weeks have passed his giggling and talking to himself have become louder, more erratic.

On May 29, 2025 the chaplain here, a man named Peatre, came to Rakeem’s cell asking if he were okay.
“Your mother’s been calling the prison,” said the chaplain. “She’s worried. She hasn’t heard from you.”
My neighbor mumbled something inaudible in dismissal of the chaplain. Nothing much else was said. The chaplain left telling Rakeem he’d let his mother know he was okay. He’s not okay.

A few days later a nurse peered into his cell while issuing his mental health medications.
“Where are your sheets?” she asked. “You don’t have sheets?”
“No,” he answered. He’d been sleeping on a bare plastic-covered mattress in a cold cell for months.
She asked the guard why he had no sheets. The guard blew her off as if to say, “Why do you even care?” This is how we’re treated.

A few days later still, Rakeem reported to a mental health worker Marie Cox that his mental health medications don’t help anymore, that he’s feeling worse. Prisoners with mental illnesses aren’t supposed to be held in solitary. It is well known to exacerbate their conditions and cause further mental injury. Almost everyone in my cellblock takes antipsychotic meds.

And it’s not just that Rakeem hasn’t contacted his mother. He couldn’t if he wanted to. We’re housed on a non-communication wing, where everyone in this block is barred from using the phone or to send and receive emails on the prison tablets. We haven’t broken any rules that warrant or authorize any of this. In fact the SC Department of Corrections’ (sic!) own disciplinary policy states that phone restriction may only be imposed as a disciplinary penalty for findings of guilt on an infraction for misusing the phone. Not one of us has been charged or found guilty of misusing the phone. We’re just targeted, by abuse of power.

I was put in this block to be held incommunicado in stated retaliation for an article I wrote about my transfer to and treatment here in the SCDC and people calling headquarters about my treatment. I was thrown in solitary on a completely fabricated disciplinary report (that was doctored up and served on me weeks after I was thrown in solitary), and confronted by an irate special agent from the state’s Inspector General’s office named Fergeli (phonetic spelling), only minutes after I was locked up from general population. He told me if I didn’t tell people and the media to stop calling HQ about me we’d cut off all my lines of communication, have me criminally charged, that I’d remain in solitary and I’d “get hurt.” He said this message came from HQ and he’d driven an hour to deliver it. I responded that I would tell people no such thing and that he should tell the media himself. Two days later I was moved to the non-communication wing and all my communication lines were cut off. Each cell on the wing had a sign on the door stating that the occupant was banned from phone and tablet use.

Most of the others in this non-communication block have pending criminal charges initiated by special agents with Fergeli’s office. These agents conspire with SCDC administrators to illegally use this non-communication block as a form of enhanced torture (over and above solitary confinement) to coerce them to plead guilty to their pending charges in exchange for being moved from this wing and returned to general population where most of them were previously housed. They’re literally told as much. Just like a tortured confession.

Being housed in Perry’s inhumane solitary confinement unit with the added abuse of being held incommunicado has driven my neighbor into deeper mental crisis. I am witness to it.

In another nearby cell is Wayne Hollinshead #300696. He’s hung himself twice and tried to kill himself by starvation and dehydration. First on April 9, 2025 after he’d protested months of being cut off from being able to contact his family. He recently lost a close relative who’d raised him like her own son. He threatened self harm. A Captain Brent Blakeley told him he didn’t care what he did and walked off. Minutes later another guard discovered him hanging in the cell, sprayed him with tear gas, and pulled him down.

He was brought out of the cell to speak with a mental health worker Randall Vickery, who told him he just needed to learn how to ‘cope’ and told guards to return him to his cell. Wayne protested he needed mental health crisis intervention. He was ignored. The next day he hung himself again with the same result.

Then beginning on June 2, 2025 he went nine days without eating; most of that time without drinking as well. The warden, Curtis Earley, came to his cell the following day and told Wayne they’d discuss moving him off the non-communication wing once he resumed eating. Eight days later he ended the strike. The warden hasn’t uttered another word to him.

The mental torture and physical abuse in Perry’s solitary unit is deliberate. The harmful effects are well known. The 4th Circuit federal appeals court that presides over SCDC has made this clear. [2]

Wayne has written a huge volume of requests and grievances to administrators, mental health and many other officials, especially Warden Earley, complaining of the enforced isolation, lack of sensory stimulation and overall torture of confinement in solitary and being cut off from communicating with his loved ones. He has complained about the effects it has had on his mental health.

He has explicitly told them it has made him suicidal and he fears for his life –– at his own hands. They know about his repeated suicide attempts. He’s been ignored and blown off. As pointed out, almost every prisoner around me is prescribed meds to treat mental illness. They have no business in solitary. And how is isolating them from contact with loved ones on top of that justified?

It is torture that is driving people to insanity and suicide. As the courts have pointed out and based on the volume of complaints from prisoners like Wayne Hollinshead, SC officials know what they’re doing.

It must be stopped!

Dare to Struggle  Dare to Win!
All Power to the People!
Kevin Rashid Johnson

—

Endnotes:

1. See, Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, “The Barbarity of Solitary Confinement in South Carolina” (2025) http://rashidmod.com/?p=3806

2. See, Porter v. Clarke, 923 F.3d 348 (4th Cir. 2019); Thorpe v. Clarke, 37 F.4th 926 (4th Cir. 2022).
In the Porter case the federal appeals court emphasized that prison officials can no longer pretend not to know the mental injuries that prolonged solitary confinement causes, based upon the extensive psychological studies and reports on the subject in recent years. In concluding this observation the court stated,

“Notwithstanding that scholars have conducted dozens of studies on the psychological and emotional effects of solitary and segregated confinement, the leading survey of the literature regarding such confinement found that ‘there is not a single published study of solitar y and solitary-like confinement in which nonvoluntary confinement lasted for longer than 10 days, where participants were unable to terminate their isolation at will, that failed to result in negative psychological effects.’”

See, Porter at p. 356 (emphasis in original).

source: Kevin Rashid Johnson

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=20788

#300696 #373388 #blackLiberation #kevinRashidJohnson #newBlackPantherParty #northAmerica #politicizedPrisoner #us

Strikng Back Against Prison Slavery – Reflections on the Sept 2016 Prison Strike

The following is an interview conducted with Kevin “Rashid” Johnson by James K. Anderson a member of the IWW Freelance Journalist Union.

JAMES ANDERSON: When did you first learn about the plan for the Sept 9, 2016 prison strike?

RASHID: I knew about it from its inception. I helped to organize and publicize it.

The strike was against prison slave labor. Sept 9th was chosen to commemorate the Sept 9, 1971 peaceful uprising at Attica State Prison, where prisoners of all races united in protest of the murder of George Jackson by guards in San Quentin the month before, and the inhumane conditions in Attica. Officials suppressed the Attica protest by murdering 29 prisoners and 10 civilians, then torturing hundreds more, sparking international outrage and exposure of the inhumane conditions in Amerikan prisons.

JAMES ANDERSON: What did you think then and what do you think now about the focus on prison labor/slavery and the emphasis on a prison work stoppage?

RASHID: Focusing on prison slave labor is a key part of the struggle against this global capitalist imperialist system that the U.S. empire presides over. Amerika was built by slave labor which continues. In fact the world’s industrial system was built on it. The Industrial Revolution was fueled by the cotton production based on Amerindian land theft and Black slave labor.

Slave labor continues inside U.S. prisons, which grew out of the old chattel slave system. When chattel slavery was abolished after the U.S. Civil War (1865), the prisons became the new plantations and the new site of racialized slavery. It was then that the U.S. saw its first wave of mass imprisonment and criminalization of Blackness.

The 13th Amendment was enacted at the war’s end which abolished slavery except for those convicted of crimes. The 13th Amendment was actually a compromise with the old slaveowners of the South, allowing slavery to continue but with the state taking ownership of the slaves instead of private individuals. This was done through criminalizing the newly freed Blacks.

Criminal laws were passed across the South to put Blacks back in servitude. Those laws, called the Black Codes, criminalized vagrancy, lack of employment, and such other conditions that the newly emancipated Blacks found themselves in, having been turned out from the plantations illiterate, poor, without land and resources, and created special racially separate courts. While at the same time white supremacists and vigilante groups, like the Ku Klux Klan and White Knights of Camellia, who desired to reclaim white dominance across the South sabotaged Black political and economic achievements and lynched and murdered Blacks seen to be ‘successful,’ and who persisted in trying to exercise any level of actual freedom.

Almost overnight the prisons were overflowing with Blacks, who were then contracted out by the state prison systems as free labor to private corporations and back to the old plantations. These work forces and chain gangs were seen across the South building and rebuilding everything.

The conditions of this new bondage were often much worse than when the slaves were privately owned, because with the Blacks no longer being private property and easily replaced from the endless pool of Blacks being imprisoned, those who exploited their labor didn’t care about their upkeep. So, they weren’t cared for, they were often not fed, many were literally worked to death. A condition that literally continues to exist in today’s prisons, in Texas prisons in particular.

In the Texas prison system today, ALL prisoners are forced to work without any pay at all. Many work in private and state-owned industries. They also produce most all the food eaten by Texas prisoners and staff. There are huge prison plantations of crops of various types of vegetables they grow, also cotton which they also use to make the guards’ and prisoners’ uniforms. There’s an egg plant. Also hog, cow and chicken farms where the prisoners raise these animals for food.

In this agricultural work they are given no modern tools or machinery. But are made to plant, tend and harvest the crops using nothing but handheld hoes. These work groups are derisively called, “Hoe squads.”

This reflects conditions that exist to a lesser or greater degree in prisons across the U.S., where prisoners are made to work for no pay at all or for only pennies, performing labor that sustains the prisons and enriches various corporations. This is labor that officials would otherwise have to employ people from society at minimum wage to do. So, the U.S. prison system is largely sustained and prison corporations reap trillions in profits from exploiting prison slave labor. This is what is known as the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC).

In this regard, prisoners are a large sector of the U.S. workforce, but enjoy none of the benefits and wages that workers in society receive, as inadequate as they are for even those workers. This is why they play an important role in the struggle against this capitalist imperialist system that exists upon the exploitation of workers in general.

JAMES ANDERSON: When did you start organizing/mobilizing for the 2016 strike, and what did that work look like?

RASHID: My involvement in organizing around the Sept 9th strike began after members of my Party, then the New Afrikan Black Panther Party (now the Revolutionary Intercommunal Black Panther Party), led a prison work strike in April 2016 at seven Texas prisons. This took place after an uprising in Alabama’s Holman prison, where the warden, Carter Davenport, who was notorious for physically abusing prisoners, ended up on the receding end of violence.

These two protest actions in early 2016 inspired the call across the U.S. for a countrywide prisoner strike beginning on Sept 9th. With the April 2016 strike in the Texas prisons, I became involved in agitating and uniting with the Alabama prisoners or the Free Alabama Movement (FAM) through IWOC, to stage the countrywide strike later that year.

I wrote articles and through media contacts and correspondences got other prisoners, my entire Party, and other allied groups involved. I was closely involved with IWOC Comrades in this effort, the late Karen Smith with the Florida IWOC and Fight Toxic Prisons (FTP) chapters in particular.

JAMES ANDERSON: Did you get involved with the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC) prior to the buildup to the 2016 strike?

RASHID: Yes, I did. I had actually joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) several years before, then, during mid-2015, led and formally announced an alliance between the NABPP and the IWW/IWOC. I wrote about it in my article, “Black Cats Bond: The Industrial Workers of the World and the New Afrikan Black Panther Party-Prison Chapter,” posted at http://rashidmod.com/?p=1251.

JAMES ANDERSON: Can you describe your work with/in IWOC prior to the buildup to the 2016 strike?

RASHID: I was involved in developing a strategy for the NABPP’s involvement in the IWW/IWOC and other worker’s groups and organizing worker’s strikes, and developing links between imprisoned workers and those in society.

I wrote position papers and corresponded with various people and Comrades on the inside and outside and media folks to help build awareness around, and support for and unity of prisoners and outside people and groups in, the strike.

JAMES ANDERSON: Where were you incarcerated in 2016?

RASHID: I was right there in Texas, confined at the Clements Unit in Amarillo.

JAMES ANDERSON: What sort of buildup and organizing took place inside the prison where you were incarcerated leading up to Sept 9, 2016?

RASHID: We communicated throughout the prison across the races and tribes to stage a work stoppage and to boycott the commissary.

JAMES ANDERSON: What happened on Sept 9th inside the prison where you were held, and what did you do specifically? What did other prisoners do? How many withheld labor or participated in other ways? What other forms of protest or disruption took place? Any details you can recall would be helpful.

RASHID: We actually didn’t do anything besides boycott the commissary, because officials locked the entire prison down on Labor Day, Sept 6, 2016, the day before the strike was to begin. I wrote about it in my article, “Texas Locks Down Prison on Labor Day to Avert Work Stoppage.” Which can be read at, http://rashidmod.com/?p=2219.

JAMES ANDERSON: Did guards/administrators at the prison where you were incarcerated know about the plans for the strike/disruption (and if so what did it entail)?

RASHID: Yes, they did. That’s why and how they were able to head off the work stoppage by locking everyone down starting the day before the strike was set to begin.

JAMES ANDERSON: How did guards and administrators inside the prison where you were held respond to the actions on Sept 9, 2016? Can you recount any details regarding retaliation?

RASHID: As said they locked the prison down, which meant they didn’t use prisoners in any work positions at all. Everyone was confined to their cells, and guards distributed the meals which consisted primarily of a disgusting PBJ and oil mixture on cornbread and prunes.

JAMES ANDERSON: What worked well in terms of preparing for and trying nationally to coordinate the strike in 2016?

RASHID: Having a wide unification of different outside groups and political tendencies support and help spread word throughout the prisons about the strike. Karen Smith proved in my opinion to be one of the most effective outside supporters and collaborators. She almost organically was able to accept prisoners in leading positions of the strike, she built large media support and involvement, she worked with every political tendency out there despite most having different views from her own Anarchist persuasion.

She was always humble and open to facilitate and follow prisoners’ ideas in a democratic manner, and was never inclined to the tendency I observed with many white leftists over the years of their trying to control the struggles and organizations of people of color and prisoners.

JAMES ANDERSON: What did not work well?

RASHID: The involvement of certain white leftists who DID act to coopt and divert the strike into what they wanted it to be. Namely, instead of a movement aimed to contest the 13th Amendment’s pro-slavery clause and prison slave labor, they converted its slogan and purpose into one of abolishing prisons. This was the trend that became the “Abolition Movement,” which was/is something different from the prisoner-led movement to abolish prison slave labor and the 13th Amendment.

The newly injected slogan of “Abolish prisons” came from the general Anarchist idea of “Abolish the state.” It was outside Anarchists who inserted this slogan into the movement in place of our slogan to “Abolish prison slavery,” that actually began in the early 2000s among prisoners on Texas’s death row. The NABPP took up this call shortly after we were founded in 2005. In fact it was introduced into our party by our first recruit, Hasan Shakur, a Texas death row prisoner, who we recruited that year, and was executed in August 2006. I wrote an article (and drew art) promoting this theme of abolishing prison slavery back in 2006, “A Modest Proposal for Abolishing Prison Slavery in Amerika in the 21st Century.” Which can be read at http://rashidmod.com/?p=478.

The idea and slogan of abolishing prison slavery became widely adopted by prisoners across the U.S. largely through our Party’s newsletters, RIGHT ON!, SERVE THE PEOPLE, and others, which were widely popular across U.S. prisons, where we continually promoted the idea and slogan for years leading up to 2016.

JAMES ANDERSON: What did you and others who participated learn from the Sept 9, 2016 efforts and the response?

RASHID: We learned that we had immense power in unity and the ability to unite in huge numbers around commonly shared oppressed conditions. Also that such struggles broke down the false stigma that officials projected against us that we are less than human and unworthy of equal consideration to those in society. That through principled struggle we can win broad public support and unity with our struggles against inhumane conditions and treatments.

JAMES ANDERSON: What did you make of the coverage of the Sept 9, 2016 strike – both corporate media, local/regular media and alternative media outlets?

RASHID: It was huge and extraordinary.

JAMES ANDERSON: What did you make of the social movement/radical media (and use of social media) in relation to the strike?

RASHID:That it was also huge and extraordinary. But it was also used by some outside white leftists to coopt our prisoner-led movement to abolish prisoner slave labor and to amend the 13th Amendment and convert it into a vague and amorphous “Abolitionist” movement.

JAMES ANDERSON: What did you make of the broader public response?

RASHID: It verified my prior belief that prisoners can build the huge public support against our oppression and exploitation by engaging in principled struggles.

JAMES ANDERSON: What did you think was the biggest impact of the Sept 9, 2016 strike?

RASHID: It humanized us and showed that we are people with whom outside workers must unite to advance their own struggle against wage slavery and economic exploitation by the capitalist bosses.

It also set a precedent for greater struggles that continued after 2016, which I and our Party were able to help organize and participate in, including the 2017 Florida statewide prison strike called Operation PUSH and the 2018 countrywide prison strike.

source: Kevin Rashid Johnson

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=17627

#blackPanther #kevinRashidJohnson #northAmerica #politicizedPrisoner #prisonResistance

Virginia Officials Pathologize Desperate Resistance To Racist Prison Abuse: Kevin Rashid Johnson

Chadwick Dotson has been the director of Virginia’s prison system since September 2023.

Before this appointment, he was a chief judge in the Circuit Court for Wise County, Va. He was also a past prosecuting attorney and dean of students at the Appalachian School of law.

With a resume of numerous high level positions of public trust that affected the lives and liberty of many many people, the public would expect this man to have a high level of integrity, credibility and honesty. In fact, his job as a judge and prosecutor had him penalizing people, throwing them in prison and taking their property, for dishonesty. And now as head of a state prison system, he’s holding people in prison for the same acts.

Yet Dotson proved to be an extreme and unrepentant liar in the media, and interestingly, no one in the state’s government took issue with it.

Not one!

That’s because Dotson isn’t the problem, he’s the symptom of a corrupt system.

During October 2023 I brought public attention to several men at Va’s notoriously abusive and racist Red Onion State Prison setting themselves on fire in desperate efforts to be transferred out of those inhumane conditions. My reports were aired on Prison Riot Radio, Prison Radio and picked up by the Virginia Defenders newspaper, Interfaith Action for Human Rights and others.

In response numerous media outlets covered the story. The Richmond Times Dispatch was one. In a Nov 27, 2024 article in that paper Dotson went on record stating that my report was a lie. He was quoted as saying, “To be clear, these inmates did not set themselves on fire or self immolate.” He was further quoted from that time in a Jan 9, 2025 Richmond Times Dispatch article as saying the prisoners at Red Onion “did not set themselves on fire or self-immolate, as some reports ludicrously suggested.” This same article quotes Dotson as denying any such “self-immolating as a result of conditions at Red Onion.” All of his denials came in November 2024.

But contrast these statements with those of Virginia legislators who right on the heels of Dotson’s denials, confirmed the self-burnings in the New York Times on December 4, 2024. But worse still, were revelations in a Jan 8, 2025 article in The Appeal quoting internal email exchanges between the Red Onion assistant warden, major and investigator from September 2024 which state, “in the past three weeks” three prisoners “set Fire to themselves.” The emails also discussed criminally prosecuting these prisoners for “setting fires in their cells,” and admitted that five prisoners had been institutionally charged with “setting a fire damaging or injury to persons or property,” and “self mutilation.”

These emails alone reveal Dotson to be a blatant liar and made in statements to the public concerning the treatment and conditions of people under his care inside Virginia prisons.

But going further, on December 30, 2024 a Virginia delegate Michael Jones visited Red Onion in an unannounced visit and spoke to several prisoners and staff, including two of the men who set themselves on fire. Jones not only found numerous abusive conditions at Red Onion including racism towards Black prisoners, but he stated, that guys shouldn’t be suffer such desperation that they set themselves on fire as the only way they believe they might gain resolution of mistreatment.

Instead of admitting that prisoners were setting themselves on fire and addressing why, Dotson lied and then deflected the cause of the desperate acts onto the victims and, as the Red Onion emails revealed, proposed punishing the victims for seeking through desperate means to escape their suffering.

After he and all other officials magically glossed over the very fact that Dotson lied about the self-immolations and conditions at Red Onion, he claimed the self-burnings were indicative of the prisoners suffering mental illness because there was no reason for them to be upset about conditions at the prison. Once again, we have racist precedent surfacing.

In 1851 Dr. Samuel Cartwright published an article in the NEW ORLEANS MEDICAL AND SURGICAL JOURNAL, which pathologized resistance to slavery through the invented disorder of draptomania which he said, “manifests itself in an irrestrainable propensity to run away,” and dysoethesia oethiopeca which he said was characterized by the enslaved person breaking tools and evading slave work. In essence, seeking to escape and resisting racist enslavement and abuse was symptomatic of mental disorders.

Those who wish to rationalize and whitewash abuse and racism always villainize, penalize and pathologize their victims. How many accounts of slavery portray it as kind, gentle and beneficial to Blacks? Thus any resistance is insane and must be punished. This is the idea Dotson and the entire Va government who have been silent in the face of his exposed lies are projecting against the men at Red Onion, who resorted to the desperate extreme of setting themselves on fire in efforts to escape the racist abuses at the prison. Indeed, like multitudes of Blacks expressed in slave narratives, these men expressed willingness to die or burn their entire bodies to escape the dehumanization, racism and abuses at Red Onion. But they, like Cartwright said of the protesting slaves of antebellum times, are insane according to Dotson and company.

How dare these ungrateful dark creatures take issue with the kindness and favor showed them under Va’s modern system of slavery and racist abuses in its remote prisons.

The apologists of the slavery era lied, villainized, punished and pathologized those who protested the now-recognized racist inhumanity of that old system of slavery; just as Dotson and others are doing now in relation to their inhumane and racist prisons.

Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!

All Power to the People!

source: Kevin Rashid Johnson

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=16823

#blackLiberation #kevinRashidJohnson #newAfrikanPantherParty #northAmerica #politicalPrisoner #politicizedPrisoner #us

The international liberation struggles of colonized people in nations like Haiti, Palestine, as well as Indigenous nations on land stolen by the U.S., are inextricably linked to the struggle for the liberation of New Afrikan people.

Amerika has never dealt with its original sin of Colonial Genocide and Structural Settler Racism. Instead, it has moved to placate, pacify and co-opt New Afrikan/Black folks into its own structural system of oppression and neo-colonialism.

New Afrikan people represent an oppressed nation, an exploited nation where the means of production and ability to produce and sustain itself, the ability to meet the needs of its people and community has been seized by a foreign entity. This genocidal seizure was to be in the interest of creating the amerikan settler state, that later, on the surface, has created this false impression of a multicultural democracy.

You don’t get to impose a constitution upon a conquered people, you do not get to amend a people into a constitution that you once deemed as 3/5th human. You do not get to impose a second-class citizenship upon a people and call it Freedom, as if all has been forgiven.

Freedom for New Afrikan people represents Independence, Land, Autonomy and the ability to be self-determining in creating its own destiny and national identity. It means being able to dictate and sustain the quality of life for our people. It means being able to not only govern Ourselves, but create institutions that meet the needs of Our people, Our children and have a direct impact upon Our material world/existence and the quality of Our lives.

It means being able to reverse some of the negative social ills impacting Our community in the areas of healthcare, economic empowerment and economic independence. It means that we are no longer being forced to contribute billions of our dollars to an economy that is controlled by a government that has proven again and again not to function in Our collective best interest, a government that refuses to reinvest our own tax dollars back into Our community or Our people, especially Our children or youth.

It means being able to put a stop to a lot of the reactionary and homicidal violence that exists in Our community. It means being able to stop and reverse the chemical and biological warfare being visited upon Our communities. It means ending and reversing the mass incarceration and current practice of harvesting and ethnic cleansing of black and brown bodies out of Our communities and processing them into the Prison Industrial Complex.

We are not separatists. We are revolutionary nationalists which is very different from being reactionary nationalists. As an enslaved people once deemed chattel slaves by the u.s. government, as a conquered and neo-colonized people, based on international law, We were never allowed to declare Ourselves free and independent. We have never been allowed through a legal entity or democratic process to declare our Nationality and National Identity and have it recognized and binding by this government. Nor have we been afforded reparations to make up and atone for the 400+ years of bondage, servitude, exploitation, and genocide perpetrated against New Afrikan people by this neo-fascist and neo-colonial government. Therefore We continue to wage the struggle of war and resistance for Land, Independence and Socialism first begun by Our ancestors when the first settlers stepped off the boats and arrived on the shores of Afrika. We salute, champion and continue that tradition from one generation to the next.

As I tune into corporate-controlled media and I see all of these young people and others who have suddenly discovered that genocide not only exists but is being perpetrated against the Palestinian people by Israel, I can’t help but ask do you not see the Genocide that has been and is being carried out against New Afrikan/Black folks in modern day Babylon?! Genocide that is being carried out on the shores of the North American continent?

We are Pro-Palestine liberation, just as We are Pro-Haitian, Pro-Darfur and Pro-Sudanese liberation, but We are also Pro-New Afrikan Liberation. You do not have to look outside of the u.s. borders to denounce genocide. You have wars and struggles of National Liberation right here on this north amerikkkan continent. The thousands upon thousands of native and Indigenous people being wiped off of this earth, the womyn being disappeared and slaughtered from their communities that no one wants to acknowledge or talk about for example. The tens of thousands of black and brown bodies being fed into the prison industrial complex prevent Our ability to reproduce or serve Our people and/or communities.

Revolution Starts At Home!!!
We Challenge You To Broaden The Struggle!!!
FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS!!!
FREE THE LAND!!!

May 17th, 2024

Shaka Shakur
Shaka Shakur.org
Shaka Shakur is a New Afrikan political prisoner. For more information on Shaka’s case and how you can donate to his legal fund and sign the petition demanding his release, go to www.shakashakur.org  .

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/post/2024/06/07/revolutionary-notes-from-the-western-front/

#blackLiberation #blackPower #blackStruggle #northAmerica #politicizedPrisoner #PrisonAbolition #us

New poem by Kevin Rashid Johnson

race is an invention
a social prison
of artificial division
the oppressed separated
into ranks that race
for first place
in a caste system
based
on the color of one’s face
created
by those in power under
capitalism
so that our
focus might be diverted
from them to us
when they are the common foe
but we don’t know
because through their systems of control
and influence
they show
an inverted reality
a confluence of images
that portray them as heroes
of elevated validity
but the workers and poor
as mats on the floor
to be trampled across the globe
sapped of our roles
as the producers of all
that make societies flow
so where do we go
what must we do
to take control
we must unite as a whole
to overthrow
capitalism
the source of division
and polarization
upon all bases
such as nation
and racism
gender and
sexual orientation
whatever serves to divide
workers and those who must ride
allied
on the basis of class oppression
on the worker’s side
a divide
often difficult to grasp
by the victims
of this system
so the struggle
must be led
with precision
by a party of comrades
united and driven
by a working class vision
of liberation
to dismantle
all divisions
then we can all
enjoy the highest quality of living

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/post/2024/05/19/racism-dies-with-capitalism/

#blackLiberation #kevinRashidJohnson #northAmerica #politicizedPrisoner #repression