Guards Deliberately Starve Prisoners in Virginia

I was in building B2 and saw officers Lawson and Gibson starve a prisoner for 3 days straight because the prisoner wrote them up for messing with him.

We were in the hole in B2, in segregation. When we get fed we have a box on our door. The officer puts the food in and then slides this piece of metal to the side so we can reach in to get the tray and put it back. All trays have tops on, and this is how they get away with it on camera. The tray is empty when they get to the cell, but with the top on the camera just shows them placing the tray in the box. If someone writes them up the officer will claim he delivered the food, but the whole time there was never anything on the tray.

To punish prisoners who expose them, the officers do things like plant knives in their cells to do a staged cell search, or put the person in segregation to have better control over them.

The main two people who call all the hits here at Red Onion Prison are Walter Sweeney, the Unit Manager for B building, and Yonce, Unit Manager for A building. They both use the word “nigger” here frequently with prisoners. The warden does nothing; he lets the unit managers run this place however they want.

MIM(Prisons) adds: There is no justification for torture of prisoners, yet it happens all the time in the Amerikan prison system. This description of deliberate starvation in Virginia in retaliation for prisoners exercising their legal rights fits in with the overall goal of the criminal injustice system as a tool of social control. There is nothing rehabilitative or corrective about these actions. This is why we call for a complete dismantling of the system. We are not just writing about a few bad apples perpetrating evil deeds, while the rest of the system is otherwise working well. Prisons help control oppressed populations within the United $tates for the imperialists. We won’t be able to end this through the legal system that is part of the overall criminal injustice system. That doesn’t stop us from taking on legal battles when they are winnable, but at the same time we must build a movement that can take down the entire system.