October 18, 2022

By Bill Berkowitz

“It was a year ago, in early October 2021, that blood tests showed a high likelihood that I had cancer, but Virginia prison officials did nothing for over six months,” Kevin “Rashid” Johnson recently told Prison Radio. “It wasn’t until eight months after these results were known that diagnostic tests were given, which confirmed the cancer and that it had by then spread throughout my prostate and possibly beyond. Yet it’s now a year later and no treatment has been given. Even laymen know that left untreated, cancer can spread and kill in a matter of weeks or months.”

Johnson, 51, is a writer and artist, who was recently transferred to Sussex I State Prison in Virginia, a maximum-security prison where he is now held in solitary confinement. According to Johnson, who was convicted of murder in 1990 and sentenced to life in prison and maintains his innocence, he has spent nearly 20 years in solitary.

On September 23, during a phone conversation with supporters, Johnson, co-founder of the New African Black Panther Party, and Minister of Defense, Revolutionary Intercommunal Black Panther Party, said: “My medical condition over the past several weeks has actually worsened on account of me being systematically denied treatment as well as the deliberate delays and prolonged actions of prison officials in following up on diagnostic care and consultations with radiologists that is not, at this point, even oriented toward giving me treatment.”

He added: “So now I find myself back in solitary in a similar condition of denied care, and who knows what's to come tomorrow.”

Neglecting the health care of prisoners is nothing new for Johnson and most other prisoners in the United States. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, “People in prisons and jails are disproportionately likely to have chronic health problems including diabetes, high blood pressure, and HIV, as well as substance use and mental health problems. Nevertheless, correctional healthcare is low-quality and difficult to access. It's also expensive: Astonishingly, most prisons charge incarcerated people a copay for doctor visits.”

In 2018, in a piece for The Guardian headlined “Prison labor is modern slavery. I've been sent to solitary for speaking out,” Johnson wrote about the nationwide prison strike then taking place, placing it within the context of modern day slavery. Johnson wrote (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/23/prisoner-speak-out-american-slave-labor-strike):

At the end of the civil war in 1865 the 13th amendment of the US constitution was introduced. Under its terms, slavery was not abolished, it was merely reformed.

Anybody convicted of a crime after 1865 could be leased out by the state to private corporations who would extract their labor for little or no pay. In some ways that created worse conditions than under the days of slavery, as private corporations were under no obligation to care for their forced laborers – they provided no healthcare, nutritious food or clothing to the individuals they were exploiting.

“By any measure, Kevin Rashid Johnson is one of the most brilliant artist and writers behind bars in America,” said Noelle Hanrahan, an investigative journalist and the founder and director of Prison Radio. “The most powerful antidote to shackles, prison bars, and brutal isolation: is art. His beautiful artwork (created in solitary confinement) radiates with love and resistance. Each inspired sketch, drawing and article tackles harsh realities head on, bringing hope into existence and making the fabric of resistance stronger.  His writing and reporting from TX, OR and VA prisons has generated a worldwide audience.   An appropriate historical comparison of the breathe and reach of Kevin Rashid Johnson’s impact and writing,  would be to say he is emerging as the intellectual equivalent of a 21st Century George Jackson." 

In July 2019, ‎ Kersplebedeb Publishing published Panther Vision: Essential Party Writings and Art of Kevin “Rashid” Johnson. In the Preface to the book, Professor Jared Ball wrote:

"Rashid represents the fear expressed by COINTELPRO’s fearful question: What happens if this radicalism reaches successive generations and then explicitly calls for the same and more in their time? He both articulates to his contemporaries and those coming behind him the context in which their art exists, the shifts in the landscape that take us from African medallion hip-hop to the bling era. He can also demonstrate with wondrous skill the power artists have in articulating those same ideas, critiques and concepts of revolution. Rashid in this sense becomes the problem he has himself warned is necessary."

View Johnson’s artwork at (https://rashidmod.com/) and contact him at: Kevin Johnson 1007485, Sussex I State Prison, 24414 Musselwhite Dr, Waverly, VA 23891-1111.