Inside Oregon Prisons

Because he resisted the “good cop” strategy and tried to organize interracial groups and activities, Rashid lasted only about six months at OSP and less than another year at Snake River...

Kevin “Rashid” Johnson

(PORTLAND, OR) - Most of us don’t get to learn much about our state’s penal system from the inside. But now, Kevin “Rashid” Johnson educates us in the March 2013 issue of Socialism and Democracy  http://sdonline.org/ where he exposes the penology practiced in the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem. 

In contrast to his previous decades of imprisonment in Virginia, Johnson observes that Oregon is a “state whose Department of Corrections emphasizes more liberal methods, which I believe is the case largely because Oregon’s prison population is largely white.”

Right from his arrival at OSP, his jailers made it clear they considered themselves to be the “good cops” in contrast to the “bad cops” who routinely practice “extreme violence” in Virginia.

The guards were “encouraged to be sociable and dare I say outright “friendly” but if the prisoner did not respond he was seen as a “threat”—arrogant and disrespectful—and then there’s trouble.” Rashid was “compacted” by Virginia to Oregon—falsely-- as a “rabid black separatist”and placed into a social structure in which white separatist groups and culture predominate. He said that boldly parading tattoos of swastikas, double lightening bolts and iron crosses was like “being dropped into a gathering of Klansmen dressed in their robes and hoods.”

He lists over a dozen such groups, ranging from the well known Aryan Brotherhood to the more obscure such as the Insane Peckerwood Society and the Fat Bitch Killer, as operating openly under the ODC. He says that Mexican gangs have “traditional rivalries” with blacks and often “ride’ with the white fascists. Because he resisted the “good cop” strategy and tried to organize interracial groups and activities, Rashid lasted only about six months at OSP and less than another year at Snake River CI, near the Idaho border and its white racist reservations. Since June, he is in a Texas prison. Read the attachment. It opens our eyes to “liberal” Oregon prisons.

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Portland Tribune photo by L.E. Baskow

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Michael Munk tries to glean important but overlooked items from the world media on the issues of the day and posts them on an irregular schedule. Although items can overlap, he also maintains separate lists for activists in Portland, Oregon and the Northwest, and special lists for: Labor, Latin America, Israel, Torture Taxis, Korea, and the Czech Republic.

Michael is a highly praised writer from an important generation whose book, the Portland Red Guide, has received high praise.

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