On September 15, 2024, a young African man, Ekong Eshiet and his cellmate Trayvon Brown, set themselves on fire at Virginia’s remote supermax Red Onion State Prison. Ekong suffered third degree burns along his legs and was hospitalized until September 24th for inpatient PharmaCare, including skin grafts. His cell mate’s injuries were even worse.
I met Ekong the day after he returned to Red Onion from the hospital. He had been placed in the cell next to me in the prison’s medical department, where I overheard him talking with others about a series of prisoners, including himself, setting fire to themselves. I could not help but ask him what was going on. He told me simply that the racism and abuses, the hard and inhumane conditions at Red Onion, was so intolerable that he and others were setting themselves on fire in desperate attempts to be transferred away from the prison. These were not protests, he made clear, but acts of desperation, hoping to get out of an insufferable situation.
For me, the tragedy of what Ekong expressed was compounded by the fact that I understood his situation all too well. In fact, I had just, six months before all of this, underwent a 71-day, that is two and a half months long, hunger strike in protest of conditions at this very same prison. Actually, after just over a month on the hunger strike, people on the outside were questioning whether my going so long without food was a sign of insanity, or were conditions so bad at the prison that I’d been driven to such extreme measures of protest.
Ekong and his cellmate’s own extreme action answered the question. But the three of us are not alone. Over an approximate two-week span, during the same period that Ekong burned himself, a dozen other prisoners at Red Onion also set themselves ablaze, all suffering serious injuries. All were Black. Not ironically, among those who set themselves on fire were prisoners whose mistreatment at Red Onion I had featured in prior articles in 2023, one being Demetrius Wallace, who set himself on fire twice.
I’ve written about him in an article, “Beating Time: Racist Abuse Continues at Red Onion State Prison.” He was being held in an empty isolation cell in the medical department after he was tear gassed, beaten, and repeatedly called nigger by a group of White ranking guards while he was handcuffed from behind; all of whom were wearing activated body camera during the assault, so little did they care about any investigation or oversight.
Another prisoner who set himself on fire was Charles Coleman, who I wrote about in my article, “Another Virginia Prisoner Suffering Life-Threatening Medical Neglect.” He had, in response to desperate attempts to receive needed care for multiple chronic life-threatening heart diseases, suffered repeated physical, verbal and psychological abuse and denied treatment by Red Onion guards and medical staff. He is now being held in long term solitary confinement at Red Onion.
Although nothing has been even whispered about these terrors and the string of prisoners’ desperate responses in the media or other public platform, Virginia prison officials and government officials at the highest levels are aware of everything. In fact, a Virginia Senator, Russell Carey, recently visited Red Onion in response to these complaints of widespread abuses at the prison, which led to these prisoner burning but not to resolve the underlying causes. Instead, as I heard several guards tell Ekong, they were simply not going to take prisoners to the hospital anymore who burned themselves so that there were no more public exposure and protests and potential scandals concerning conditions so insufferable that they were driving people confined at the prison to set themselves on fire.
Red Onion and its twin supermax Wallens Ridge State Prison are both located in the remote mountainous regions of far southwestern corner of Virginia, in rural segregated White communities, while the prisoner populations are near totally Black and Brown. Since opening in 1998 and 1999 respectively, both prisons have operated with impunity and total lack of oversight in regions where the local populations are culturally conditioned to secrecy and hostility to outside scrutiny, which makes for prisons shielded by an iron curtain of secrecy, inhumane abuse, and racism. And while Virginia has been closing down many of its predominantly Black staffed prisons across the state, it has shifted resources and focused new prison construction projects in favor of operating prisons in remote, racially segregated regions of the state like where Red Onion and Wallace Ridge are located.
The strongest public protest and exposure needs to be directed at these unneeded and inhumane human warehouses. They must be opened up to broad public scrutiny and accountability and closed down. This exposure and protest should be continually directed against the Virginia Governor, Virginia Department of Corrections Director, Chadwick Dotson, the Senate, the State’s General Assembly, and every effort possible must be made to share this information and increase public awareness about these places, their inhumane conditions, and the desperation they are driving fellow human beings into in their pleas for relief.
This is Kevin Rashid Johnson coming through you from within America’s Gulag Archipelago. All of articles cited above can be read on rashidmod.com. That is R-A-S-H-I-D-M-O-D.com. Dare to struggle, dare to win. All power to the people.
These commentaries are recorded by Prison Radio.