Unanswered Questions

What do we know about the treatment of individuals in solitary confinement? We assume that those who are held are the worst of the worst. We trust that their treatment is harsh, but fair and necessary. We are assured that their are adequate policies protecting both inmate, guard, and the public, but for security reasons and because ‘we couldn’t possible understand without being there’ we are denied access to those policies.

Below is a statement by artist and political prisoner Kevin Rashid Johnson, recently held in indefinite solitary confinement in Virginia’s Red Onion. This is his account of his treatment and the treatment of his fellow brothers, the following are excerpts from his expose. For further reading, including evidence and occurrences to support his argument, please go here.

1. Physical Abuse:

The more extreme abuses here at ROSP are increasingly taking the form of routine attacks on nonwhite prisoners while they are fully restrained (with hands cuffed behind their backs and wearing leg shackles), each time this occurs, the abusing guards employ a general perfunctory formula to speciously justify such attacks, claiming that the prisoner “pulled away”, from them or “attempted” to carry out some vague and limited assault on the guards thus “compelling” them to “take the inmate to the floor”.

The usual method of such a takedown is accomplished by the guards tripping and body slamming the prisoner face-first to the concrete floor.

Yet, more and more the types of injuries sustained by the prisoners and the complete absence of any injury to the guards (except perhaps hand injuries sustained as a result of beating the prisoner), contradict what guards claim to have done (viz using only the “limited” force of pushing an already manacled prisoner to the floor)…

2. Medical complicity in brutality

ROSP medical staff is in complete complicity with this pattern of attacks. Nursing staff generally go through the formal motions of “checking” a prisoner for injuries after force has been used on him, yet while the prisoner is directing the nurse to the usually obvious location of his injuries, she will acknowledge only “minor” abrasions, scratches, and swelling or remark “he says he’s fine, I don’t see any injuries”, or otherwise claim he “refused” medical attention.

Many ROSP nurses are married to, romantically involved with, and/or have children fathered by guards who routinely abuse prisoners, on account of these factors, in addition to general friendships, community affinity, racial loyalty, and blood or marriage relations to guards. Such nurses have a personal interest in the concealment of the guards conduct, and the injuries they inflict upon prisoners…

3. Torture as behavior modification

A pervasive practice at ROSP is the use of meals and other entitlements as mechanisms to control and modify prisoner’s attitudes and behavior towards staff. These treatments are nearly parallel to methods reportedly used as “brainwashing” on US and UN prisoners of war during the Korean conflict (1950-53). Black prisoners are subjected to summary punishment when they do not show appropriate deference and submission to guards (ie are argumentative, are otherwise verbally disagreeable, do not “cooperate” with guard’s whims or are non conversant with staff), when they do not engage guards in meaningless friendly conversation or when they persist in speaking up on behalf of other prisoners being abused).

These summary punishments which amount to physical and psychological torture, include frequent denials of meals, outside exercise, showers, breaking or trashing prisoner’s property, (especially television sets and personal photographs), frequent harassing cell searches during which property is ransacked and confiscated and “contraband” planted, housing prisoners under stress inducing conditions (eg in cells next to prisoners with mental disorders, or those who are known chronic antagonizers who routinely bang, scream, or argue incessantly with other prisoners)…

Prisoner’s mail is also used as a mechanism of behavior modification. The very same unit guards who perpetrate abuses are the staff who collect and distribute mail. Guards are aware that the mail is our principle lifeline to the outside and thus regularly destroy and “lose” prisoner’s mail or give the incoming mail of one prisoner to another in order to create and exacerbate conflict…

…Prisoners have been denied meals for days or even weeks.

The measures indicated above are employed especially because it is virtually impossible for a prisoner to prove that such has been done to him, since guards will document that the prisoner is receiving his meals and mail, or himself refusing meals, showers, exercise etc. These measures effectively discourage most prisoners from acting as witnesses to the abuse of others, and even if they were willing to act as witnesses, the prison’s complaint and grievance procedures strictly forbid any prisoner from making complaints or inquiries on behalf of any other prisoner, this is intended to atomize prisoners and discourage us from voicing objections or concerns related to the abuse of others.

We can accept this information as the true and horrific experience of an oppressed. Or we could reject his statements as the ramblings of an angry criminal. But what we don’t know if the truth of what happens behind multiple locked doors, behind concrete and barbed wire, a top a remote mountain, in the far southwest corner of this state, all while cloaked in the secrecy of the prison guard culture.

Last year Delegate Bob Hope proposed legislation to study the use of solitary confinement in Virginia. Despite his legislative status, his requests for information about the practice and use of solitary confinement went largely unanswered by prison officials. If Rashid’s first hand account doesn’t speak to you, perhaps this article by the Washington Post will.