Spotlight on Virginia prisons: Why Virginia’s remote prisons need to be publicly exposed and closed

Red Onion State Prison, shown here, and Wallens Ridge State Prison were “sold” to  the people of Appalachia as a replacement for lost coal-mining jobs, and the prisons were built on the sites of “mountaintop removal” open-pit mining. Those sites are extremely toxic, so prisoners face the danger of deadly toxins along with deadly racism from the all-white staff. by Kevin ‘Rashid’ Johnson Cultivating secrecy in Virginia prisons Virginia officials have always tried to hide what happens inside their prisons from the public – especially the abuse. Fifty years ago in a lawsuit against inhumane conditions at the Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond, Va., a Virginia federal court observed and critiqued this practice.& The court noted that Virginia prisons officials demonstrated “a lack of recognition that a prison administration is not a fief unto itself. Coupled with this antiquated notion that a prison unit is not even peripherally a part of the community is the practice over the years that has been shown to the court in this and other prisons cases to envelop the system with a massive veil of secrecy. More concern seems to have been given to the image of the prison’s administration than to granting to...