As a Matter of Routine Policy Virginia’s Prisons Use Attack Dogs on its Mostly Black Inmates (54%) [VA is a Mostly White State (61%)]

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In 2006 Human Rights Watch reported that the United States was the only country on Earth that uses attack dogs in its prisons as a matter of routine policy. In the words of the report, “the U.S. is the only country we know of that authorizes dogs entering a locked cell to bite a noncompliant prisoner as standard policy.” It is a kind of abuse more frequently associated with conflict zones and, when it happens in those, it is often investigated as a war crime—for example, when U.S. soldiers used the threat of a dog attack as a form of torture in Abu Ghraib prison, or claims documented by the United Nations that Israel has set dogs upon Palestinian detainees.

Against this backdrop, little has changed in the two decades since the Human Rights Watch’s explosive report. Twelve states allow the use of attack-trained dogs in prisons, including Virginia. From 2017 to 2022, there have been 295 documented cases of dogs attacking people incarcerated in the United States; 271 of those cases took place in Virginia alone. In other words, Virginia’s taste for canine violence makes the state an outlier even within a global outlier.

These statistics flatten the terror and the enduring harm caused by each and every one of these attacks. The following narrative was shared with Inquest by Jaeon Chavis, an incarcerated victim of one of those many attacks in Virginia. We were connected with Chavis by the Georgetown University Law School Civil Rights Clinic, which is representing him in federal court. Inquest reached out to the Virginia Department of Corrections for comment but received no reply by the time of publication. [MORE]