by Kevin ‘Rashid’ Johnson
The Virginia Legislature created an ombudsman’s office in July 2024, charged with overseeing and investigating the Virginia prison system. Andrea Sapone was appointed as ombudsman that September. The creation of this office was backed by advocacy groups who believed the VADOC could be trusted to investigate and correct itself in the wake of protests of prison abuses and a prisoner hunger strike at its supermax Red Onion State Prison that gained widespread public and media attention and protest.
I was one of the hunger strikers at Red Onion, enduring 71 days without food in protest of conditions and abuses there. I also recognized that the creation of an ombudsman within the VADOC was an empty token gesture and diversion that would only allow the prison system to continue with its abuses as usual business. I expressed this in an article a year ago. (1)
Shortly after the ombudsman’s office was created, I helped draw further attention to abuses at Red Onion by publicizing that numerous men had set themselves on fire there in desperate efforts to be transferred away from the inhumane conditions in the prison.
Initially, VADOC director Chadwick Dotson and Red Onion warden David Anderson lied to the media and public denying the prisoner self-immolations. Their lies were exposed by legislators who only days later confirmed the burnings in the press and questioned why they were happening. Media outlets using the Freedom of Information Act also obtained internal email exchanges between Red Onion administrators discussing the prisoner self-burnings and how to stop them. In turn legislators visited Red Onion and confirmed conditions to be inhumane, needing to be addressed immediately. The ombudsman’s office promised to give special focus on Red Onion and its sister supermax, Wallens Ridge.
Recognizing the futility of creating an ombudsman’s office and the ineffectiveness of so-called advocacy groups and not-for-profits who trusted and worked in league with our our abusers or had their own agendas and economic motives for pretending to stand with prisoners against abuse, I put out a call to create a prisoner support group composed of people who genuinely cared about our treatment, namely prisoners’ loved ones and ex-prisoners. From this call UPROAR (Uniting Prisoners’ Relatives Organizing Against Repression) was born.
It took 10 months for the ombudsman’s office to get up and running. In the meantime, conditions at the supermaxes only got worse, while the prisoners who resisted and publicized the conditions like myself were retaliated against. I for one was transferred to South Carolina and kept incommunicado for publicizing and protesting abuses in the VADOC.
Andrea Sapone then held several underpublicized public meetings where her plan was to pretend for the media that her office was busy serving its purpose of visiting and investigating conditions and complaints in the VADOC. She didn’t anticipate that UPROAR along with angry loved ones would show up and put the lie to her faking public accountability. Few knew about the first ombudsman meeting. But UPROAR members, including Evi, showed up and pointed out that Sapone’s office had done absolutely nothing to address the many prisoners’ and their loved ones’ complaints of abuses in the remote supermaxes.
The next meeting, held on Oct. 2, 2025, got a larger attendance and more spirited protest from loved ones and UPROAR.
Mothers and fathers of men imprisoned in the VADOC who’ve been abused and members of UPROAR took the mic. Each was forced to limit their statements to 5 minutes. One mother and UPROAR member Melinda Evans described abuses of her son and other prisoners who’ve been beaten, tortured and even killed in the supermaxes. One attendee, Dawn of CCCAN, who spoke about official coverups and abuse in Virginia’s prisons and the murder of Aubrey McKay in June 2025 at Wallens Ridge, protested, “I deserve more than five minutes. They’re killing people!”
Her son has been physically abused and had contraband planted in his cell by guards. He’s also been touched on his genitals by male guards in these remote prisons. Another mother and UPROAR member, April Wright, also spoke. Her son, who’s been confined in the VADOC for eight years, has been beaten, had his nose broken, been picked up by metal restraints on his wrists and ankles, and strapped down to a steel bunk and left naked to urinate and defecate on himself by guards as other prisoners looked on.
Evi of UPROAR and a senior staff member of the Virginia ACLU also spoke about inhumane conditions and the terrorizing of prisoners in the supermaxes. Other parents and UPROAR members confronted Sapone, like Dawn, Pertell Gilmore and Tyrecia Williams-El. Pertell’s son was shot in the face with rubber buckshot at Wallens Ridge for no justifiable reason. He spoke not only as the parent of an abused son, but also as a victim himself of abuses within the VADOC, where he did time himself.
He gave voice to the frustrations of the multitudes of prisoners and loved ones who’d made complaints to the ombudsman that went unanswered – a situation that I foresaw and spoke to a year ago. He said: “All the hurdles and stuff that I’ve been jumping over already – and all us parents in here – this is just a drop in the pond.
“And nothing has been done as of yet. I know this is a procedure, so it can look good for people to say, ‘Well we did this; we listen[ed] to them. But it’s going in one ear and out the other.'”
But the frustrated attendees’ complaints didn’t go in and out of Sapone’s ears, they fell on completely deaf ears as Sapone’s colleagues called in capitol police to quietly escort her from the meeting while the frustrated attendees were speaking. She used as a pretext for walking out without answering their questions or concerns, that the righteously frustrated Pertell had raised his voice during his statements and went over the arbitrary five-minute time limit.
She was jeered by attendees for showing distrust and lack of identity with the very communities she was supposed to report to by calling in police and leaving in this manner.
The ombudsman’s next meeting was held on Oct. 9, 2025. Unlike many of the so-called prisoner advocates, UPROAR showed up once again, along with members of Bending Bars and IDEA (Incarceration Doesn’t End Achievements).
This time Sapone was accompanied by a large contingent of officials and her attitude was one of smug arrogance and indifference. The attendees left feeling thoroughly disrespected – further confirmation that nothing can be expected from these token officials whose positions have been created to divert public attention and protests into empty channels. The abuses continue unabated in Virginia’s prisons as the people are told to look to this office of indifference for redress.
This reminds me of events that led the original Black Panther Party (BPP) to begin its community survival or Serve the People programs back in the late ’60s. There was an intersection in an urban neighborhood where kids who had nowhere else to play were repeatedly run over by cars, because officials refused to put up a stop sign. The distraught community members went before the city council repeatedly begging for a stop sign. They were “allowed” to voice their grievances, but each time were put off with official promises to look into the situation. Nothing was done. Children kept dying in the intersection.
In turn, BPP leaders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale went to the intersection themselves with a shovel, hammer, stop sign and armed. They set up a sign themselves as community members watched. No more kids were run over. From that example other communities with the same problem put up their own stop signs and no more children were run over.
The lesson? The people can solve their own problems by taking power into their own hands instead of relying on indifferent officials who only string them along with empty promises, and, like Pertell told the ombudsman, engaging in staged public meetings where they just allow people to voice their grievances which only go in one ear and out the other.
We must unite the people to put the feet of those responsible for these abuses and the indifference of hirelings like Sapone to the fire of public exposure and cost them their public images and political careers. They being the ELECTED officials in the state legislature, the governor’s office, and so on whose very careers are dependent on winning and wooing public opinion, and who therefore make a habit of lying to the public for the purpose of winning undeserved public trust. This is how you force political accountability of these opportunistic politicians while developing our own independent political power by, of and for the people.
This is what UPROAR is about. Join us!
Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!
All Power to the People!
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Endnote:
1. See, Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, “A New Ombudsman for the Virginia Prison System Is Business as Usual” (2024), http://rashidmod.com/?p=3660
Send our brother some love and light: Kevin ‘Rashid’ Johnson, 397279, Perry CI, 430 Oaklawn Rd, Pelzer SC 29669.
