by Michael Thompson

The River North Center had been on lockdown for three months as of February 2026 due to the murder of a guard. Following the murder, John Holomon Russell was charged with aggravated murder, as well as the attempted murder of two other prison guards, and transferred to Red Onion Prison in another county.

The lockdown was one of the longest in the state since the pandemic. It left the unit’s prisoners unable to access phones or showers more than once per week. For some, the choice of a 20-minute call or a shower had them sacrificing hygiene for contact with their families during a time when there were no religious services, mental health appointments, or family visits.

Dawn Hall is the widow of the murdered guard and has filed a lawsuit blaming the Virginia Department of Corrections (DOC) and River North’s warden in federal court. The lawsuit alleges her husband’s death was a “civil rights violation due to unsafe working conditions caused by chronic understaffing,” her attorney told The Virginian-Pilot. Nevertheless, the DOC had declined to discuss staffing levels at the prison with The Virginian-Pilot due to security concerns.

For its western region, where River North is located, the DOC reports just a 10% vacancy rate as of January with 1,878 guards. However, over the preceding decade, the DOC as a whole averaged just 84% of its desired staffing level. Against that average, a 2024 report by CGL Management Group, compiled at DOC’s request, found that the state’s prisons were “critically and, in many cases, dangerously short-staffed.” As a result, it noted “facilities that are unsafe and inefficient.” They posit the problem, however, was not necessarily funding, but the “lack of the ability to hire, train and retain enough staff to fill positions.”

The report offered a few ways to speed the process from hiring the guards to placing them into duty posts, as well as ways to reduce redundancies and shift some security positions such as laundry services to non-security employees or third-party vendors. But they also noted that many of Virginia’s staffing challenges come from the combination of salary competition and work environment differences, both with other agencies, such as county and federal systems, and jobs available outside of corrections, a factor that must currently be on the minds of potential new-hires and existing staff in light of the murder.

With the prisoner alleged to have committed the crime shipped off to another unit, it is difficult to understand the lengthy lockdown that exacerbates the prisoners’ traumas. Juanita Shanks is former Governor Glenn Youngkin’s appointee to the Corrections Oversight Committee. She notes that, as the prisoners languished in cells the size of a parking space without access to loved-ones, educational coursework, and recreation, “trauma will take over you and then you begin to act out and expand your sentence.”  

Source: The Virginian-Pilot