Red onion prison

officials claimed I was trying to procure weapons to attack guards after they attempted to instigate conflicts between me and other prisoners by trying to put hits on me and spread false rumors that I am a pedophile, rapist and snitch. Numerous prisoners came forward as witnesses to this to my attorneys. No weapons were recovered from me however, so an inmate informant, Dennis Webb, was used to implicate me in all this (in a statement he gave Red Onion investigators that I received copies of in litigation I had against Red Onion officials)

ARLEN Arlen was surprise transferred to Red Onion on Oct 6, 2024 directly from a South Dakota prison. He received no prior notice or hearing to facilitate nor contest the transfer.

He responded that he has seen how quickly things can and do escalate from 0-to-100 with guards at the prison. Arlen said in just the the two months he had been at Red Onion, he’d seen guards repeatedy tear gas prisoners in the cellblock for next to nothing, many others he’d seen slammed face first to the floor or beaten while restrained from behind, others still he’d seen attacked by groups of guards dressed out in body riot armor. He even witnessed an elderly prisoner beaten by a group of guards who just entered his cell and attacked him for no cause.

Which induces a sense of terror, like experiencing an abusive parent

He feels he was sent to Red Onion to instill fear in him; because he is not supposed to have gone there as a new admission to the Va prison system.

They lie as a matter of routine.

When he first got to the prison he was told by counselors that they would contact his family and let them know where he was. They never did.

In contradiction of this claim that dogs aren’t used to intimidate, Rick White, past warden of Virginia’s Notorious Red Onion State Prison, was quoted in a 2023 Insider Report on uses of dogs in US prisons, as stating that dogs are, in fact, used frequently in Virginia prisons for “presence,” or, “in other words, the implied violence of their growls and bared teeth is sufficient to frighten people into compliance

able to document 271 dog attacks in Virginia State Prisons from 2017 to 2022 through court filings and incident reports.” This is from the Insider Report dated July 23rd, 2023, by Hannah Beckler titled, “Patrol dogs are terrorizing and mauling prisoners inside the United [States].”

, exposing the practice has many implications, including the hidden history of widespread uses of dogs to hunt, terrorize, maul and kill Black people in slavery, including in Virginia. This practice was one of the main outbreaks that motivated the slavery abolitionist movement

The film began with two dogs, two guards, one Black, one White, escorting a handcuffed White prisoner to a solitary confinement cell. This was the first lie. I was confined at Red Onion for 14 years, from when it first opened in 1998 until 2012 and several times since then, up to present. The prison, which is located on a mountain in a rural region of the state, has never had more than three Black guards on the entire otherwise White staff, who come from segregated White communities that have no prior contact with urban Blacks. And its prisoner population has always been almost totally Black.

This racial dynamic has always been behind the prison’s notorious history of extreme racist abuses of its prisoners. This is the dynamic of history: These fabricated and opening images were meant to hide and continue throughout the documentary with the interviews of prisoners at Red Onion. Four were White, one was Black. Again, a dishonest representation of the actual demographic makeup of the prison’s population. One of the interviewed White prisoners, Dennis Webb, whom I’ve known for decades and am in the block with as I write this, revealed to me that he and others were given free television by Red Onion’s administrators for doing the interviews.

Speaking with truthout.org in February, Nemeth said the only water her client – Kevin Rashid Johnson, 53, who is also a journalist confined at Red Onion who underwent a two-and-a-half-month hunger strike at the beginning of the year – was allowed to drink was his cell’s own toilet water.

These are not isolated acts. In a span of just two weeks, a dozen Black men at Red Onion took the same desperate measures, setting themselves ablaze. These are not acts of protest. These are human beings driven to extreme lengths, simply hoping for relief from their torment.

The first reported incident concerned Demetrius Wallace, 27, who told The Virginia Defender he set his leg on fire on Aug. 23 because he knew he would have to be transported out of the prison for treatment. Since guards waited three days before taking Wallace to the nearest burn unit seven hours away, he had to have a skin graft and spent 14 days in the hospital.

When he returned, he told The Defender guards harassed him, denied access to his email, and stuck him in "the hole

More than two-thirds of its inmates are held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, ranging from two weeks to 14 years. One inmate spent over 600 days in solitary confinement and was served food covered in maggots, per reporting by Business Insider

television commercials where donations and sympathetic appeals are made and sold on behalf of neglected and abused animals like those of the ASPCA, what about the neglected and abused humans in Virginia prisons? We’re not even worthy of the consideration of a dog.

The sordid history of the use of animals to carry out the genocidal extermination of the native peoples of this region, like the Tainos, and to terrorize, maim, and kill Black slaves across the American South is all but forgotten. The US public has become so desensitized  to state violence against people of color, it’s using carnivorous animals to bite and rip through human muscles, tendons, nerves and bones doesn’t even raise alarms

Harriet Beecher Stowe to write books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and her later book, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal

As Malcolm X counts the victims of such barbarities, “If a dog is fighting a Black man, the Black man should kill the dog, whether the dog is a police dog or any kind of dog. If a dog is sicced on a Black man when that black man is doing nothing but trying to take advantage of what the government says it’s supposed to be his, than that Black man should kill that dog, and any two legged dog who sics the dog on him”.

of course, any such idea of fending off attacks by dogs is unspeakable, since people of color have no right to resist or defend themselves, not even against being attacked by carnivorous animals, and we must accept that we are not worthy of being treated any better than dogs.