VA prisons serve oppression

The guards are racist in the extreme, sadistic in their dealings with prisoners and the psychological effect of this treatment is mind-blowing. Wallens Ridge and Red Onion State Prison were built in an economically depressed and alienated region in southwest Virginia. They were built under the guise of a severe gang problem in Virginia, but the actual numbers of violent incidents in Virginia's prisons suggests that the creation of jobs by the state was the real reason.

They didn't have enough violent Virginia prisoners so they had to lease out bed spaces and still do, to other states -- New Mexico, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Michigan, Vermont, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Over 200 million spent in building two super maximum security prisons of the types you find in California and Nevada.

We have all been labeled gang members of some kind or other. For them the means justify the ends. But the building of these two prisons was in keeping with bourgeois opportunism. For this past six years they have been stressing over the overwhelming need to control those "violent prisoners" so they constantly impose their brutality upon us with attack dogs, shotguns, 20 gallon tanks of gas, and the killing of a Connecticut prisoner in Virginia.

Custody has reduced the use of stun-guns, but physical beatings are common practice. Certain prisoners are often targeted for a special brand of oppression -- these prisoners tend to be the ones who seek relief through the administrative process. But this process is made impossible, because the very people prisoners are seeking relief from are the same ones who control this so-called administrative process. If it is not the blatant brutality then it is the subtle tactics which the oppressors use, such as holding mail, destroying personal property, creating tension among prisoners, and using insulting language. My concern is not confrontations with other prisoners, but a violent clash with the oppressors when they (the officers) have created division and little solidarity among prisoners so as to make it easier to suppress and control those few who fight against the brutal oppression.

I think it would be absolutely correct if these two prisons were shut down. There is clearly no need for them in the sense of security and a concern for some flawed idea about "violent Virginia prisoners" needing to be controlled.

A prison built in an economically depressed region that created jobs for out of work coal miners should be exposed for what it actually is -- political maneuvering for the sake of careerism and opportunism.

--A Virginia Prisoner, April 2004