Summary
Incarcerated individuals at Virginia’s Red Onion State Prison have reportedly burned themselves in protest of alleged inhumane conditions, including racial abuse, excessive solitary confinement, and neglect.
The Virginia Department of Corrections confirmed six incidents but denied reports of self-immolation, while others claim 12 men were injured.
Protesters and advocacy groups, including the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus, demand an independent investigation, citing reports of maggot-infested food, physical abuse, and poor medical care.
Incarcerated journalist Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, who exposed the protests, was placed in solitary confinement, allegedly as retaliation.
Red Onion is hell on earth, and they justify its existence and hellishness by saying “these are Virginia’s most violent criminals”
but they justify this based on most of who’s there, their heinous act of violence that got them there was reflexively defending themselves when a guard at a lower security prison started wailing on them. what’s more, is that its location is meant to stimulate fear and terror in its mostly urban general population, whereas the prison is in a rural area with wildlife the inmates have never seen before.
Red Onion isn’t a detention center. it’s a torture facility. i even wonder how long between sustaining these burns and them being treated passed.
The 8th Amendment protects against cruel and unusual punishment but it means nothing if we the people don’t enforce that contract upon the government.
I think it’s terrible that the US system releases convicts and calls them “rehabilitated” basically only if they manage to stay out of prison. Meanwhile the prisons are shitholes that more often than not offer no actual rehabilitation, or it may be limited or have barriers to access. Meanwhile their “convict” status follows them for the rest of their lives, hindering their future prospects and how they are viewed by society at large.
The impression I get from Europeans is that they view their legal system as too soft on crime, letting people escape harsher punishments or seemingly any punishment at all. It’s the same view in the US of our own system, except that I’d view ours to be randomly far harsher on minorities/poverty than white, and almost nonexistent vs the wealthy. In a way I think the EU system is better. Petty crime seems to be more of a thing, partly thanks to tourism and immigrants, but their treatment of the prison system seems far better than the hellholes we “rehabilitate” people in.
Point being, prisons don’t all have to be shitholes that do little to nothing for inmates to prevent them from remaining or returning to prison. The US seems barely above some of the worst prisons we hear about in other poor countries.
European justice are designed to at least try to rehabilitate people, because you know they will come back
The American justice system is all about revenge. Don’t care they will be released again, they’ll screw up again and we will again have our revenge
It’s telling that I haven’t seen a single US-based news source promoting this story.
https://www.wdbj7.com/2024/11/27/concerns-raised-about-red-onion-state-prison/
I can keep going. The only thing it’s telling is about where you personally get your news.
I didn’t say nobody wrote an article about it, I said nobody promoted it, it’s not on anyone’s front page, nor was it included in the physical edition of my local paper over the last week.
As a Virginian living in the area, it’s all over NPR. Dunno what to tell you.
“No, no, you see, when I said “anyone’s”, I meant the physical edition of national papers and also my local one. State’s biggest newspaper and a shitload of local stations published it? Doesn’t count. Needs to be outside the state. Augusta Free Press? Too small. NBC? Not a physical paper. This is totally what I meant when I said ‘any US-based source promoting this story’. Checkmate, libshits!”
.ml is a plague of intellectual dishonesty.
Edit: of fucking course they’re pro-Assad, lmfao. “A dictatorship indiscriminately attacking civilian areas with sarin gas and then trying to cover it up I can handle, but clearly there’s a cover-up (that I don’t approve of) afoot when not more than one massive national news outlet puts a spotlight on bad conditions in this prison.”
Good job destroying that strawman.
Did the Richmond Times-Dispatch recently relocate to Richmond, British Columbia? I’m confused.
A strawman is when you attack arguments nobody made.
I said “the story received no promotion”. I didn’t see it in the national news section of my local paper, and the national online news didn’t cover it for a month and aren’t even putting it on the front page a month later.
That’s borderline a blackout for something that should be a national shame.
🎵 Makin’ shit up 'til it gets called out 🎵
🎵 Got outlets to scold, gotta move all my goalposts 🎵
Repeating exactly what I said is moving the goalposts?
Why would it be in a Russian newspaper?
lmao
You said that you haven’t seen a US outlet covering it. I said that they are covering it, and the fact that you haven’t seen it is only due to your personal media consumption habits.
Yes, because I, like most people don’t dig past the front page of online news, and most people don’t even do that much.
This is still a reflection on the relative lack of promotion such a visceral story should receive.
If a tree falls in the woods and alcoholicorn wasn’t there to witness it and his newspaper never reported it, is it fake news?
He’s kind of right, though. The story originally broke on October 18, and look at the dates of the links from your news articles. It’s all end of November. So it took them over a month to get on it.
It should have been national news on every tv station as it happened, not a small article a month later. Especially since we have a 24-hour news cycle.
In late October the national news was very busy reporting on the major election which was just a few weeks away.
and the interplay of race and our carceral system of torture were absolutely things to be voting on and about. de-emphasizing the importance of these things is a form of conservative propaganda, one that our media outlets engage with constantly. while i think this poster sucks for some other reasons, i do think they’ve found at least part of a truffle here. our media outlets don’t say enough that our prison system is horrible, that our legal system is more effective at hurting black people than it is at helping anyone, and that everything is both political and propaganda. figuring out why is easy. it’s profitable for them
Conditions
More than two-thirds of prisoners at Red Onion are held in solitary confinement, or “segregation”. They are confined to their cells 23 hours per day in 8’ x 10’ cells with 6” x 24” windows for light. Length of confinement ranges from two weeks to fourteen years.[15][16] Food and medicine are served through trays in the cell door.[17]
Opportunities for education and work are more limited than in most prisons due to the higher security level; however, Red Onion offers janitorial work, a GED program, and a literacy program.[16] The prison uses a video education system which allows the playing of prerecorded video files over 5" CCTV screens.[16][17][18]
The facility was designed to minimize contact between corrections officers and prisoners as well as among prisoners.
