The US was condemned around the globe for abusing detainees with dogs at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Two decades later, Hannah Beckler exposed for the first time that multiple state prison systems have also used dogs to attack and terrorize prisoners, resulting in devastating physical and psychological injuries.
The reporting began in 2022, when Beckler came across a news item about a lawsuit, filed by a Virginia prisoner, saying he’d been attacked by a patrol dog in his prison cell. Beckler soon discovered the attack wasn’t an anomaly, identifying a dozen states that authorized the use of dogs against incarcerated people. Through extensive public records requests and review of hundreds of civil suits, she was able to show that 23 prisons in eight states have deployed dogs to attack or terrorize prisoners in recent years.
As it became clear that Virginia deployed the dogs far more often than any other state, Business Insider launched an epic public records battle, in partnership with a University of Virginia law clinic, to obtain incident reports from the Virginia Department of Corrections. Beckler eventually obtained hundreds. Her extensive correspondence with prisoners in maximum security facilities produced a cache of other documents, including grievance reports and medical records. She reached out to corrections officials who had overseen dog programs and to care providers who had witnessed the aftermath. She interviewed dozens of incarcerated men, finding prisoners who’d experienced crush injuries, extensive muscle damage, septic infections, and symptoms of trauma as a result of being attacked. Many said they live with intrusive memories that won’t let them go.
For a stunning accompanying video documentary, Beckler secured exclusive footage and key interviews, including with a former corrections commissioner, a former Virginia dog handler, and former prisoners who spoke vividly about the attacks. “The screaming, the fighting, the blood,” one source said. “It’s just not something you forget.”
In digging into the history of these programs, Beckler pursued other troubling leads. She discovered a 20-year-old report from the Department of Justice, which mentioned that a corrections commissioner who introduced attack dogs to Arizona had served as a civilian advisor at Abu Ghraib — where abuses, including the use of dogs to terrorize inmates, became the subject of military court-martials. She ultimately identified every corrections advisor who served at Abu Ghraib, discovering that every single one had run a US prison dog program.
Beckler also looked into the history of the use of attack dogs against Black people, which dates back to the use of dogs to hunt down enslaved people who escaped. She found shocking echoes of this history in the documents. In Virginia, where the majority of the state prison population is Black, a former prisoner told her an officer had shouted racial slurs at him during a dog attack. Beckler combed through court filings and other documents to establish a pattern of racial abuse during dog attacks. She uncovered a particularly troubling cluster of dog attacks that occurred while the men were shackled.
