Virginia’s Prisons Have a Dog Problem

Editor’s Note

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.

In the summer of 2023, my daughter turned nineteen. On the day of her birthday, I planned to use my daily scheduled phone call to talk with her. From prison, I had helped to plan a surprise party for her and then arranged for my son to take her to the movies and to dinner.

When the day came around, though, the phone to which I’d been assigned for my call was not working.

I wanted so badly to wish my daughter a happy birthday, so I went to ask for help from the corrections officer sitting in the booth. The officer told me that if the phone was not working, I should just go back into my cell. I tried to plead with the shift supervisor to call somebody to fix the phone. I explained it was my daughter’s birthday. Once again, I tried the phone; I was frustrated and desperate. My kids mean everything to me; I always look forward to calling them regularly and pushing them to be great.

There were other phones. You might think that it would be a simple matter of using one of those. But with prison bureaucracy, there are no simple matters. The other phones had been assigned to other people; I was only permitted to use the phone to which I’d been assigned.

When I tried again to plead my case to the officer, he began yelling at me and then I could hear him calling for backup. Soon, three officers entered the pod and approached me. They told me to follow them into a place called the “boulevard.”

I knew what happened to inmates who followed officers into the boulevard and I was afraid. The area is a blind spot where no cameras capture what happens. During my years in the prison, correctional officers have beaten people there several times. I have heard of inmates being so badly injured that they had to be removed in a wheelchair; others have had their fingers broken, their teeth knocked out.

All this ran through my head as I was commanded to follow. I just wanted to call my daughter to wish her happy birthday.

My fear was misconstrued as resistance. Soon a canine officer and his dog approached. I pleaded with the officers, “Please don’t let the dog bite me.” My instinct in that moment was just to surrender. I put my hands up to indicate that I wasn’t trying to resist. One of the officers then approached me from behind and began to put me in handcuffs.

The dogs are brought in every time a fight happens, and almost always for incidents that don’t involve any threat of violence, like when inmates are not following orders. I have seen how the dogs are directed to bite people, and how long the attacks are allowed to go on—and the scars they leave. I have heard of dogs biting people all over the body, including even the head or neck. My biggest fear since being here had been being attacked by one of those dogs.

Yet here I was. I could hear the officers commanding the pod to lock down and the loud, echoing barking of the dogs. I was scared and praying to just be allowed to go back to my cell. My internal prayers were interrupted when I heard the officers yell “STOP RESISTING.” I was confused and turned to look at the officer so he could hear me over his own shouting and the barking as I said, “I am not resisting.” I was partially handcuffed at that point and even raised my other hand in the air to make it clear that I was trying to comply.

In a blur, my legs were swept from beneath me and my body was slammed into the ground. I was maced in the face by one of the officers. The officer who swept my legs climbed on top of me and placed me in a chokehold, squeezing my neck and windpipe. The two other officers held my restrained arm behind my back as they climbed on me, while my other arm was trapped under by body. All I could hear was the dog barking and the officers shouting “stop resisting.” It was instinctual to struggle; I couldn’t breathe and was trying to find a way to stop myself from suffocating.I started picturing the birthday plans I had for my daughter. I couldn’t die. I had to make sure I was there for my kids.

When the dog finally bit me, I did not feel it immediately. It was thrashing my leg like a toy but I was in shock, and so terrified that this might be where I die. It felt like forever before the officer told the dog to let go. When it finally did, it took some of my flesh with it.

The officers then pulled me up, placed me in a wheelchair, and only then did I see for the first time what was left of my lower leg. That was when the shock slipped away enough for the pain to rush in; I started screaming in agony. My leg looked like taco meat. My skin was completely ripped from my flesh and there were holes where I could see down to the bone.

Later I would piece together that from there I was taken to the medical bay. At the time, I stopped being able to make much sense of what was happening. I believe I passed out two or three times. My own memories of that time immediately after the attack are both blurry and too bright. I remember hearing the officers begin to spin the story they would tell: that surely I must’ve been on drugs. I was not, but they were casting about for any excuse to justify what they had done.

I was eventually taken to a hospital by ambulance. The first three or four days in the hospital are fuzzy; I remember not understanding why I couldn’t sit down. The severity of what had happened to me couldn’t penetrate my consciousness, which in hindsight was probably my mind trying to protect itself. The doctor eventually informed me that the bite had missed an artery by only a few inches. It is a miracle I am even here.

I was left with a nine-centimeter laceration on the front of my leg. Multiple six-centimeter lacerations on the left and right side of the leg. The lacerations were so deep that a nurse remarked that she could fit her entire pinky in my leg. When later I would request my medical records, they were shockingly incomplete, missing description of lacerations that anyone can see clear evidence of in the long, deep scars on my leg.

When I returned to the prison, I realized that my punishment was not over. I—the victim of an unprovoked assault—had been given a fake disciplinary charge for supposedly biting the officer who held me in a chokehold. During the disciplinary hearing, the hearing officer even claimed that she reviewed the video footage and the photos and saw no evidence that I had bitten that officer. Nevertheless, she upheld the disciplinary charge against me because, in her own words, she had to take the officer’s word as truth since “officers are trained not to lie.” These sham proceedings are part of the system of canine violence in prison. Officers know they can attack inmates without cause and then silence them with false charges.

As part of my long process of recovering from the attack, it became important to me to do what I can to stop this from ever happening to anyone else. Shortly after I came out of medical, I began the grievance process. As expected, the prison dismissed my grievances without consideration. Nevertheless, I was determined not to quit, and so I filed a lawsuit in federal court. Some lawyers from the Georgetown University Law School Civil Rights Clinic heard about my case and reached out to see if I needed representation. I felt seen by the lawyers and students at the clinic. They had already done a lot of research on Virginia prisons and were horrified by everything they had been learning about the use of the canines. We agreed that my lawsuit had a bigger purpose. Even though the Prison Litigation Reform Act limits the ability for any one inmate’s lawsuit to make wider changes, winning my case could make it easier for people after me to challenge the canine attacks they suffer. Eventually, Virginia may have to start paying attention.

Being a part of this process has pushed me to be brave in the face of what I see as the state’s attempts to silence me with retaliation tactics. I have now been given false disciplinary charges on multiple occasions. I have been moved between prisons multiple times since the attack, and for a time I was moved back to Red Onion, where many of the officers who assaulted me still work. But no matter what these prisons do, I want to remain strong in my cause. I know I am the master of my fate; the captain of my soul. I want to do this for my family. My kids have been my focus since the beginning and they have given me the courage and the hope to believe that I will survive this, that I will get to go home and have a better life with them. I want to show them that good things can come from bad places. The same way I have been inspired by them, I want to be able to be an inspiration for them.

_{Image source: A man with a spear and a pack of dogs attack a wild boar emerging from the reeds in the swamps. Wellcome Collection (Public Domain).}

Contributors

Jaeon Chavis Jaeon Chavis is a loving father of three, a singer-songwriter, and an entrepreneur from Petersburg, Virginia. He is currently incarcerated at Wallens Ridge State Prison. He cares deeply about using his experiences and pain to educate and inspire others to build a better world.

Topics

• Institutions & Practices

Tags

• civil rights litigation
• conditions of confinement
• incarcerated and formerly incarcerated authors
• violence
• virginia