Reviving Slave Hounds and Canine Crimes in Virginia Prisons — Kevin Rashid Johnson

Fyodor Dostoyevsky was right. Anyone who wants to determine a society’s level of progress only needs to look inside its prisons. This is because prisons are a condensed version of the society that produces them.

Indeed, as the U.S. Supreme Court has stated, the U.S. Constitution’s 8th Amendment, which forbids cruel and unusual punishment, is supposed to reflect “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” (1)

So, how far has Amerika evolved?

AMERIKA IS STILL A BACKWARD RACIST SOCIETY

Though it is forgotten in history, slave hounds or “negro packs of dogs,” were THE primary weapon of terror and brute violence used to repress Black slaves and compel their submission to a life of permanent humiliation, dehumanization and servitude. The use of these animals to maul and often kill slaves and hunt down those who fled captivity, was deemed barbaric and outmoded over 200 years ago and was deemed so outrageous that it led multitudes of people to unite in the struggle and ultimately a war that abolished slavery. (2)

A look inside Amerika’s prisons, in Virginia in particular, reveals that Amerika is still a very backward and racist society. Where the practice continues of use of attack dogs to maul prisoners, particularly prisoners of color and often for the entertainment of guards.

During July 2023, the Insider published a report on the use and abuse of attack dogs inside U.S. prisons. (3) The Virginia prison system was the main focus of the report, based upon the disproportionate use of attack dogs in its prisons, and the fact that no other prison system in the world uses dogs to attack prisoners inside cells. The report found that just between the years 2017 and 2022, Va prisoners had been attacked with dogs no less than 217 times, compared to only 15 times within the same period in the next highest recorded state of Arizona. The 217 identified dog attacks in Va prisons was NOT a complete listing, but simply what the Insider discovered from reviewing court and medical files. There were MANY more.

In fact when I was confined at Va’s notoriously abusive and racist Red Onion State Prison in 2023, I heard guards and medical staff frequently admit, that for years prisoners in Red Onion and its nearby sister supermax, Wallens Ridge State Prison, were taken to local hospitals for emergency treatment for dog bites more than all other medical conditions and injuries combined.

In Va, the violence that prisoners live in danger of suffering serious often crippling injury from is dogs not other prisoners.

ABUSES OF ATTACK DOGS IN DEFIANCE OF STATE LAWS

For decades, the abuses of these animals in Va prisons was kept secret from the public. I recall, back in 2006, questioning how the constant uses of these animals in Va was overlooked by Human Rights Watch (HRW) in its critical report issued that year on the use of canines in U.S. prisons. (4) That report came on the heels of the 2004 international scandal that erupted when photographs were leaked to the media of Amerikan soldiers torturing and using military dogs to terrorize detainees in Iraq.

The HRW report looked at several U.S. prison systems that used canines to intimidate prisoners. But it didn’t once mention Va’s prisons, where dogs were frequently used even then to ACTUALLY ATTACK prisoners.

It took decades of abuses of these animals in Va for the public to become aware and for the state to enact laws intended to limit the uses of attack dogs in its prisons.

The Insider report, came over 15 years after the HRW report, and was the first broad coverage of the abuse of dogs in Va prisons.

Ironically, the push for laws to limit the uses of these dogs didn’t come in response to the frequent maulings of prisoners. Instead, it happened after one of these animals was allegedly killed by a Va prisoner fending off an attack in Apr 2024. I wrote about this incident and the sympathetic media response to the animal’s death, compared to the total indifference to the frequent mutilations of prisoners by these dogs, demonstrating that prisoners in Va, like the slaves of the old South, are literally “treated worse than dogs.” (5)

In any case, during 2024 this law was enacted limiting the “use” of prison attack dogs in Va to incidents where officials believe they are immediately needed to protect someone against threat of serious bodily injury or death, or where approved by a ranking official to intervene in an altercation involving three or more prisoners. (6) Never mind that these animals themselves present the danger of serious injury and death.

At no point has this law been obeyed.

Not only are these animals used to physically attack prisoners in situations where no such dangers exist, but they are “used” to violently threaten prisoners on a continuous basis, which constitutes assault.

I have been housed at numerous Va prisons where these animals are present and used, both before and since this new law was enacted, including Greensville, Sussex 1, Red Onion and, now, Keen Mountain prisons.

At Keen Mountain, where I’m presently confined, multiple attack dogs are used to threaten and intimidate prisoners all day every day, particularly as we go about our daily activities, such as going to and from meals, outside recreation, work and so on.

No matter where we go, these animals are used to menace us. Their handlers incite (giving the animals commands) and cause them to rabidly bark, snap, and rear up on their hind legs and lunge at us with such force they often drag and jerk the trainers along behind them, often coming within a foot or less of our bodies. As Va prison officials have conceded in the media, the act of having these dogs intimidate prisoners by ‘presence’ constitutes their “use.” Prisoners who dare to protest or complain of this abuse are taunted by officials as timid or subject to retaliation in efforts to silence our protests.

One such prisoner was Antwan Whitten. Antwan was one of the victims of a malicious dog attack detailed in the July 2023 Insider report. On Oct 31, 2015 after an altercation with another prisoner, he followed guards’ orders to lay facedown on his cell floor.

After he laid down, an attack dog was brought into the cell and made to brutally maul him. His wounds made evident that he had been attacked while lying prone.

The dog bit and tore the flesh from the back of his head and shoulder and his back. To cover up the fact that the animal was brought to his cell and deployed on him after the altercation was over and the other prisoner had been taken away from the scene of the altercation, officials erased surveillance camera footage of the cell area that showed these activities and conformed reports lying about what transpired. Understandably, Whitten was traumatized and suffers PTSD and other psychological effects from the malicious assault and lying cover-up.

Here at Keen Mountain Whitten complained about the dogs being allowed to menace him and all of us wherever he went in the prison.

A week after he filed a complaint he was targeted with an infraction and thrown in solitary confinement, where he found much of his personal property had been stolen or destroyed. He was then transferred to River North where attack dogs are abused even more.

DAILY ASSAULTS WITH CANINES

At Keen Mountain these animals and their handlers sit inside the entryway to our housing units. We must pass them whenever we enter or exit the unit, at which times we are subjected to having them attempt to attack us, barking and lunging at us as described above.

They can be heard inside our cellblocks barking loudly, especially when the front door to the block is opened to allow prisoners or staff to enter or exit. The barking is often so loud we cannot hear our conversations on the telephones inside the block, and prisoners who must sleep during daylight hours such as kitchen workers are kept awake. Also, those workers who frequently come in and out of the unit such as Keith Fitzgerald and Tiqua Ubuntu, who push carts of food, laundry and other items through the prison, suffer having these animals lunging at and attempting to attack them throughout the day.

At River North, Askari Lumumba suffered and filed suit against the constant use of dogs to menace prisoners in the same way, but often with greater malice. At River North, prisoners moving throughout the prison are made to walk gauntlets with dogs on either side of walkways that they must walk down. The animals are made to lunge and attempt to attack the prisoners, coming within inches of biting them.

Lumumba complained of suffering panic attacks, fear for his safety, and often refused to leave his cell. He suffered taunts and repression by River North officials in response to complaints of these uses of dogs to terrorize him and others.

But, as in Antwan Whitten’s case, the physical abuses of these animals on prisoners, predominantly Blacks and Browns, is downright evil.

DOGS USED TO MAUL THE MENTALLY ILL

“On July 15, 2024 I had a psychotic episode. Other inmates tried to help but correctional officers thought it was a fight and I was OC’ed [tear gassed] and then the K-9 was deployed when I clearly posed no threat to myself, no officer, nor the orderly operation of the facility. This was just a racist attack and wantonly sadistic ploy to use old Jim Crow, proud boy tactics on me and cause me irreparable harm and violate my rights.” – Keen Mountain complaint #KMCC-24-WRI-01508

This statement is from the summary of a complaint filed on July 16, 2024 by Tremain Williams, a Black man imprisoned here at Keen Mountain.

As it states, on July 15th Tremain had a mental breakdown. His worst offense was to crawl beneath a table in his cellblock and, in a display of obvious paranoid fear, cling to the leg of the table. In response, a mob of white guards repeatedly tear gassed and openly beat him. He was handcuffed and taken out of the block, after which the guards sicced an attack dog on him. The dog mauled his leg including ripping his Achilles tendon.

The entire attack on Tremain was recorded on surveillance and guard body cameras, which he requested be preserved for litigation.

Tremain had to be rushed to the hospital where he received emergency treatment and now suffers a permanent crippling injury, for which he was prescribed rehabilitative care, which Va prison officials refuse to provide.

Tremain’s experience is common in Va’s prisons. The malicious use of attack dogs to maul Black prisoners. The infliction of severe, often crippling injury. And the denial of needed medical treatment for those injuries. These incidents occur with especial frequency in Va’s remote high security prisons, like Red Onion, Wallens Ridge, River North and Keen Mountain, that are located in rural segregated white communities where the staff are almost totally white, while the prisoners are near totally Black and Brown. In any case, inherent in the very presence of the dogs is the fact that they will be and are abused, and on an extreme level.

DOGS USED TO MALICIOUSLY MAUL PRISONERS

On Dec 31, 2023, at Wallens Ridge, Ekong Eshiet, a Black man, was involved in a minor fist fight with a white prisoner. Both prisoners followed guards’ directions to stop fighting and lie face down on the floor.

Moments after both were lying down as ordered and restrained, a dog was brought into the unit and the handler pulled the animal on top of Ekong and had it tear into his leg.

On July 23, 2023, at Red Onion, Jaeon Chavis, another Black man, was also mauled by an attack dog while he was lying restrained on the floor.

The attack on Jaeon came in response to his having a heated personal telephone conversation in his block. Guards entered the unit and ordered him to place his hands against a wall. He raised his hands. Instead of restraining him, a guard rushed up and punched him. Others swarmed, tackled and piled on top of him. Despite that Jaeon never resisted, a dog was brought in and thrown on top of his exposed legs and caused to rip out the back of his calf. He suffered numerous puncture wounds and nerve damage.

As also commonly occurs in dog attack cases, Jaeon didn’t receive necessary medical treatment for his bite wounds. An open hole was left in his leg that should have been sutured closed. The hole became septic and led to nerve damage.

Worse still was the case of Walter Kissee, yet another Black man, who was attacked and permanently crippled by a dog at River North on Apr 13, 2024.

Walter was attacked, tear gassed and beaten by guards. After he was left lying blind and handcuffed and leg shackled, a dog was brought into the cellblock and caused to rip a softball-sized chunk of muscle out of his right calf. The bite force he suffered nearly shattered his leg bone which was left exposed.

In an effort to hide him and the assault he suffered, Va officials had him transferred to remote Red Onion, where he was denied hospital ordered treatment which caused his wound to become infected, and his leg to almost require amputation. He underwent several surgeries, one to clean the wound of the infection. Walter has since the assault been confined to a wheelchair, being permanently crippled, and held at Red Onion, which is not a wheelchair accessible prison. Despite skin grafts and multiple surgeries, Walter has a huge scar on his leg measuring 3″ × 4″.

To add insult to injury, while at Red Onion he was again beaten by guards on Oct 16, 2024, because he couldn’t kneel due to his injuries, when he was taken to solitary confinement because of protesting a cell move. He actually had a medically issued “no-kneel” pass because of his injuries.

Then there was Jamaal Shivers. On Feb 1, 2025 at Keen Mountain, he was involved in an altercation with another prisoner. By guards’ own admissions, he was the target of an attack caused by their leaving the area where the altercation took place unattended and several security gates unlocked. He was struck several times with a heavy object, yet the dog was used on him.

Jamaal nearly suffered castration as the handler allowed the dog to bite him between the legs. He still endured serious injuries from the dog bites.

In another case, a dog was maliciously trained on a prisoner’s groin, who wasn’t even involved in a fight. This prisoner, Carl Hughes, was targeted in this manner at Sussex 1 prison because of being transgender.

Carl had been punched by another prisoner and never fought back. Two dogs were sicced on Carl by two guards, McCray and Gonzalez. McCray taunted Carl as he directed the dog to attack Carl’s groin, stating that Carl didn’t need male genitals anyway since they were transgendered.

Carl was bitten seven times suffering numerous deep tear and puncture wounds requiring dozens of sutures, including to their penis, ear, forearm, bicep, wrist, calf and inner thigh.

Then there was Curtis Garrett, a Black man who also had two dogs sicced on him. On Christmas day in 2018 he was involved in a minor fight with another prisoner. After which he retreated into his cell where guards secured him locking the door.

Two canine handlers brought their dogs to his cell, and, instead of cuffing him when he turned his back to the door to allow them to do so, they had the cell door opened and sicced their dogs on him as they beat him. At times Curtis had the two animals hanging on his upper body by their teeth tearing into his flesh as the guards assaulted him.

As a result he suffered severe nerve damage and deep wounds causing paralysis in his leg and hand.

As was done to Walter Kissee, Curtis was transferred to remote Wallens Ridge where he was denied hospital ordered treatment causing greater suffering and injury and his wounds to become infected. He was only taken to a hospital to receive care including for the infected wounds because he laid down and played dead in his cell.

Not long after his dog attack Curtis was released from prison. He ended up being committed to a mental health facility because of suffering a mental breakdown from the abuse he suffered.

LEGAL PROTECTION OF ABUSE OF DOGS

Attacks like those described above are the daily norm in Va’s high security prisons, where these animals are used. As I’ve pointed out in several articles, Va’s high security prisons are concentrated in rural segregated white communities and staffed almost totally by whites, while the vast majority of prisoners confined in them are Black and Brown. This alone creates a culturally and racially hostile environment that has always fostered violent and racist abuse. (7)

This culture of abuse is further encouraged by the general indifference of federal courts to the dog attacks despite that the constitution is supposed to embody and enforce principles of an evolving and maturing society; making clear that racist abuse is still the norm in Amerika, hundreds of years after canine attacks on people were widely deemed inhumane and barbaric.

Numerous Va prisoners have tried to sue officials for these abusive attacks, but have been told by Va federal judges that these dog attacks are not against the 8th Amendment.

Yet the use of canines was criminalized during the Civil War, when Confederates used their slave hounds on Union Army soldiers. This standard came into being only when the dogs were used on whites.

Confederate leaders like Henry Wirz were even sentenced to execution for the practice. (8) But, this standard came into being only when the dogs were used on whites. Hence, today mauling Black and Brown prisoners in Virginia is accepted practice.

ABUSING THE DOGS

As the Insider report revealed, these dogs are not only abused against prisoners, the animals are often the victims of abuse by their handlers. This is often the case because many of the animals resist being taught to attack people or become rabid and unstable in response to this training. In one case reported by the Insider, a Va prison dog handler choked his dog to death at a veterinarian’s office when he could not control the animal.

Here at Keen Mountain, I and other prisoners witness handlers manually choke and literally hang their dogs (snatching them off the ground and suspending them in the air by their leashes for extended periods) on a near daily basis, in response to the dogs resisting them.

On Mar 16, 2015 Keen Mountain prisoner workers Tiqua Ubuntu and Keith Fitzgerald witnessed one of the dogs turn on and bite his handler in response to such abuse. The handler in turn slammed the dog to the ground and manually choked him while screaming into the animal’s face.

But the abuses of Va attack dogs have also been the victims of sexual abuses by handlers.

In 2009 a media scandal erupted when five canine guards at several Va prisons were arrested for animal cruelty for sexually abusing their attack dogs. (9)

NO GOOD USE OF ATTACK DOGS

In no context or situation is the presence of dogs in prisons justifiable nor humane. As demonstrated in sampling just the few cases given here, officials will always abuse and create pretexts to falsely justify the misuse of these animals. And they will often abuse the animals as well.

The use of these carnivores in Va prisons is explicitly racially targeted. They are deployed only in the state’s high security prisons, which are strategically located in remote white segregated communities and peopled almost exclusively by Black and Brown prisoners. This racial and cultural contradiction of arming rural whites to police absolutely voiceless and powerless people of color creates the basis for racist abuse and impunity. Officials know what they have created. It is a dynamic that replicates the racial and power disparity of the slavery and Jim Crow eras that fueled and now fuels racist abuse. Adding attack dogs to the equation only ensures that the abuse take on the most barbaric forms.

As was recognised over 200 years ago, only animals consider it an acceptable practice to have carnivorous animals rip and crush the flesh and bones of humans.

These animals must be removed from these prisons – those that walk on four legs and two.

Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!

All Power to the People!

_____________________
Endnotes:

1. Rhodes v. Chapman, 452 U.S. 337, 346 (1981)

2. T.D. Parry, “Slave Hounds and Abolition in the Americas,” PAST AND PRESENT, number 246 (2020) http://academic.oup.com/past/article/246/1/69/57722095

3. Hannah Beckler, “Patrol Dogs are Terrorizing and Mauling Prisoners Inside the United States,” THE INSIDER, Jul 23, 2023

4. Jamie Fellner, “Cruel and Degrading: The Use of Dogs for Cell Extractions in U.S. Prisons,” HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH, Oct 2006. https://www.hrw.org

5. Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, “Prisoners Treated Worse Than Dogs” (2024) http://rashidmod.com/?p=3644

6. See, Code of Virginia section 53.1-39.3 (Use of canines in state correctional facilities; prohibited acts; policies and regulations made public; incidents of use of canines reported; exception.)

7. Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, “Parallels Between Slavery and Jim Crow and the Operations of Virginia’s Prisons Today” (2025) http://rashidmod.com/?p=3676

8. Larry H. Spruill, “Slave Patrols, ‘Packs off Negro Dogs’ and Policing Black Communities” PHYLON, Vol 53, No. 1, pp. 42-66 (Summer 2016) http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/phylon1960.53.1.42

9. Matthew Stabley, “Corrections Officers Take ‘K-9 Handling’ Too Far: Five Face Animal Cruelty Charges After One Was Filmed Masturbating a Dog,” Oct 29, 2009 https://www.nbcwashington.com

David Reutter, “Virginia DOC K-9 ‘Training’ Results in Animal Cruelty Charges,” PRISON LEGAL NEWS, Apr 15, 2010

source: Kevin Rashid Johnson

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=17631

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