On November 17, 2025, Corrections Officer Jeremy Lewis Hall, 40, was killed at River North Correctional Center (RNCC). Within hours, Virginia’s political and media apparatus settled on a familiar story: a “vicious, unprovoked attack,” a fallen hero, an unforeseeable tragedy. But what people inside RNCC, and across western Virginia prisons, had been reporting for months tells a different story. Hall did not die in a vacuum. He died in a system built around collective punishment, manufactured crisis, and tight control over information—the same conditions that have already killed incarcerated people and will keep killing unless they’re dismantled.

River North Was Already Under Extreme Pressure

RNCC didn’t suddenly become volatile on November 17. On September 8, 2025, men in C-2 reportedly set themselves and their mattresses on fire twice—around 10:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. The next morning there was another attempt; alarms went off and movement was curtailed. Instead of bringing in outside review or addressing mental-health conditions, RNCC leadership: ordered a 60-day lockdown of the pod, and shut off phones and kiosks so “nobody could report it.” People inside described this not as crisis management, but as a deliberate blackout. UPROAR documented those events and the blackout in this public briefing:

👉 Investigate the Sept 8 River North prison fires

At the same time, RNCC and other western prisons were rolling out a new “privileges and incentives” regime that punishes entire pods if one person is charged—seizing tablets, cutting visits and commissary, and locking people down for weeks. This directly violates Operating Procedure 861.1, which requires discipline to be individual, post-adjudication, and time-limited. Instead of relieving tension, these group punishments pressurized whole units, pushing already desperate people toward hunger strikes, fires, and self-harm.

“They Knew This Was Going to Happen”

Shortly after Hall’s death, TikTok creator @second_chancer shared what an RNCC staff source said happened. According to that source:

The night before the killing, someone went to security with a credible threat that an officer would be attacked. The prison locked down, but no shakedowns or weapon searches were conducted. “They did nothing more than open the doors” the next morning. Hall came on shift, did count, and was told to run pill call and chow call at the same time—a clear safety violation, because an officer can’t safely supervise two high-movement posts at once. While juggling both, he was attacked from behind and stabbed; an officer in training and a K-9 officer were also stabbed.

The source says staff were in “a state of rebellion” because management “could have and should have protected that officer,” and that Hall’s wife first learned of his death on Facebook. The warden and assistant warden were reportedly placed on administrative leave.

This is not random chaos. It’s credible warnings ignored, policies violated, and movement increased inside a unit already under extreme pressure, in a facility that had just used a fire-and-blackout response to suppress information. As incarcerated journalist Kevin “Rashid” Johnson has written for years at https://www.rashidmod.com, violence thrives when communication is blocked and leadership is never held to account.

People Inside—and the Public—Warned Virginia Officials

The policy that helped create this pressure cooker did not come out of nowhere, and it did not go unchallenged. On September 1, 2025, VADOC rolled out its collective punishment regime across Red Onion, Wallens Ridge, River North, and Keen Mountain. In response, families and supporters launched coordinated ActionNetwork campaigns:

End Collective Punishment / Enforce OP 861.1

By late November, this tool alone had sent over 3,800 letters from more than a hundred Virginians to DOC leadership, oversight, the Governor, AG, and legislators. It documented RNCC’s Sept 8–9 fires and blackout, a 30-day Keen Mountain lockdown after an isolated mental-health incident, and a hunger strike in Red Onion A-6, warning that collective punishment was “increasing internal pressure and producing desperate, life-threatening behavior.”

Urgent: End Torture, Retaliation, and Medical Neglect in Virginia Prisons

This letter laid out a “documented state of emergency” at Red Onion, Wallens Ridge, Keen Mountain, and River North: beatings of restrained prisoners, “ghost trays,” at least six self-immolations, live-round “red line” threats, and retaliatory transfers of whistleblowers like Kevin “Rashid” Johnson and Ekong Eshiet.

C-1 Kiosk Outage at Red Onion: Contract Violation & Communication Blackout

This campaign exposed a months-long outage of the only charging kiosk in Red Onion’s C-1 pod—where many “safety agreement” refusers and whistleblowers are housed—despite Contract DOC-14-074’s 72-hour repair requirement.

On October 4, Rashid published “THROUGH COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT VIRGINIA OFFICIALS PROMPT PRISONERS TO VIOLENTLY POLICE EACH OTHER.” On October 24, supporters read that article aloud outside VADOC headquarters, demanding that Commissioner Chadwick Dotson and Chief of Operations A. David Robinson be fired and that Red Onion and Wallens Ridge be closed.

Families have echoed those demands in petitions, including:

Petitions to fire Commissioner Chadwick Dotson

By the time Hall was killed, Virginia officials had been repeatedly and specifically warned—by prisoners, by families, by thousands of letters—that collective punishment, blackouts, and retaliation were pushing these prisons toward exactly this kind of lethal incident. They knew. They chose not to act.

Whose Lives Count?

In the week after Hall’s death, Virginia saw wall-to-wall coverage: front-page stories, repeated TV segments, official statements, flags at half-staff.

Meanwhile, families of people who died inside struggled to get even basic answers:

At Greensville, 38-year-old Michael Dove’s mother, Rhonda, says he attempted suicide in February, had deteriorating mental and physical health, and repeatedly sought help. After his April death, VADOC told her they couldn’t release details because he was “no longer in their custody”—a rationale journalists couldn’t find in any Virginia statute.

Months later, also at Greensville, 40-year-old Christopher Armentrout died. His stepmother was told DOC had 256 pages of records but would withhold all of them “at its discretion.”

At Wallens Ridge, 27-year-old Aubrey McKay was found dead with blunt force trauma, injuries consistent with shackling, and a fractured larynx. His family is still fighting for a full investigation. No flags lowered. No extended news cycle. No coordinated mourning.

The Civilian Deaths in Custody 2024 report (RD402) confirmed that:

VADOC—not the state—controls all prison death data, and the working group tasked with recommending reforms was barred from reviewing individual prison death cases. In other words: the same agency responsible for these deaths decides what, if anything, the public and even oversight bodies get to see. That information chokehold is the real engine of impunity.

This Is a Political System—And It Has Political Protectors

The conditions that killed Hall, Dove, Armentrout, McKay, and at least 97 incarcerated people in VADOC in 2024 are not accidents. They are the outcome of decisions made and defended by:

the Governor
the Secretary of Public Safety and Homeland Security
the Attorney General
the General Assembly’s Public Safety and Appropriations Committees
Commissioner Chadwick Dotson
Chief of Operations A. David Robinson

These officials have been put on notice—via documented fires, hunger strikes, self-immolations, lawsuits, protests, and thousands of letters—and have chosen to maintain a system of collective punishment and information control anyway. Hall did not die in a vacuum. His blood, and the blood of those who died before him, is on the hands of everyone who ignored these warnings.

What Has to Change—and Who Has to Lead It

Breaking this cycle will require both legal change and organized power outside the prisons. On the legal side, Virginia needs at minimum:

A real death-in-custody law that puts investigations in independent hands and guarantees timely disclosure to families.
A ban on collective punishment, with teeth to enforce OP 861.1.
A Right to Contact law protecting phone, kiosk, and mail access from retaliatory blackouts.
Transparent reporting on lockdowns, staffing, use of force, and deaths by facility.

But laws don’t pass or get enforced on their own. That’s why Kevin “Rashid” Johnson has called for PAPA—People Against Prison Abuse, a union of prisoners’ loved ones capable of acting as an organized pressure group:

➡️ A Call to Organize a Prisoner Support Network Composed of Prisoners’ Loved Ones – PAPA (People Against Prison Abuse)

His point is simple: almost everyone in Black, Brown, and poor white communities “has loved ones or know someone in prison.” Isolated, families are easy to ignore. Organized, they can become one of the most powerful forces in public life—a bloc that can’t be bought off, grant-managed, or easily divided.

UPROAR (Uniting Prisoners’ Relatives Organizing Against Repression)—https://bit.ly/join-uproar—is one attempt to build that union in Virginia: a formation of loved ones, directly impacted people, and inside correspondents coordinating documentation, campaigns, and political education across facilities.

The path forward is clear:

Document every fire, beating, death, hunger strike, blackout.
Expose them publicly—through letters, media, hearings, and campaigns.
Organize families, friends, and communities into lasting structures, not just crisis responses.
Demand concrete legal changes that cut into VADOC’s monopoly over information and punishment.

Until the information regime is dismantled, the violence will continue.

If Virginia wants safety—for the people who live in these prisons and for the people who work in them—it has to start by breaking the blackout.

FROM EXPOSING PATTERNS TO ORGANIZED POWER

The pattern in this article is the same one we map in our UPROAR Background & Principles, in Kevin “Rashid” Johnson’s A Call to Organize a Prisoner Support Network – PAPA, and in his Creating an UPROAR Steering Committee pamphlet: families and loved ones are the first to know the truth, and we have the potential to become a disciplined, statewide force that can challenge both VADOC’s violence and its story about that violence.

December is one step in that direction. We’re creating spaces that match the three pillars in those documents: clarity, study, and collective action.

• Clarity & narrative struggle – Dec 6 film screening
  Join us in Richmond to watch and critically analyze HBO’s Solitary: Inside Red Onion State Prison — connecting what the state shows on screen with what loved ones and whistleblowers like Rashid and Ekong have exposed for years.
  👉 Details & flyer on Instagram
• Study & principled criticism – Dec 1 & 8 Constructive Criticism study
  Two online sessions on Vicki Legion’s Speaking & Listening More Effectively in Personal Relations, Groups & Political Activities, to practice the habits of criticism/self-criticism and listening that Rashid calls for in building an UPROAR Steering Committee.
  👉 RSVP for the Constructive Criticism study
• Collective action – Dec 18 rally against human rights abuses inside Virgini’as prisons
  We’ll bring the patterns named in this article — fires, blackouts, retaliation, deaths — directly to VADOC and state officials, with families and supporters standing together instead of isolated.
  👉 Info & RSVP for the Dec 18 rally

If you have someone inside—or if you’re trying to make sense of what you’re seeing from the outside—these spaces are for you. They are how we move from scattered emergencies to the kind of organized UPROAR that PAPA calls for.