At Red Onion State Prison, an acrid haze of mace hangs in the air and mingles with the smell of burning flesh. Tormented, isolated, and brutalized, men are taken from cities to this rural mountain-top prison near Pound, Virginia, where they have gone on hunger strikes and are now setting themselves on fire.
“I have a release date,” Ekong Eshiet said during a recent phone call to Prison Radio, a nonprofit organization dedicated to amplifying the voices of incarcerated people. “I don’t want to catch any more time. But the abuse is unbearable. . . . I’m trying to get off of here. I’m doing my best, I’m going about this the right way, I guess, with the hunger strike. But if I have to, I don’t mind setting myself on fire again, and this time I’ll set my whole body on fire.”
Unlike other outlets reporting on the conditions at Red Onion, Prison Radio has had firsthand contact with many of the men setting themselves ablaze, as well as with their families. To date, Demetrius Wallace, Trevaun Brown, Deandre Gordon, Ekong Eshiet, Charles Edmond Coleman III, and seven other as-yet-unnamed men at Red Onion have burned themselves. According to their testimonies, caustic, searing third-degree burns have become infected. Burns were made worse by lack of treatment and vicious prison guards who sprayed the wounds with capsicum mace. The guards’ degrading epithets—among them the N-word, and “You monkeys are just proving Darwin was right”—only intensify the pain.
As these incarcerated men attest, their choice to burn themselves—by holding a handmade device that emits an electrical current directly on their skin until it erupts in flames—is an attempt to assert their humanity. It is an act that seeks to cut through the degradation and violence that hangs like a pall over every interaction at Red Onion. The men are responding to conditions that are as routine as they are dehumanizing.
Since its construction in the 1990s, Red Onion State Prison, in Wise County near the border with Eastern Kentucky, has been the site of many disturbing reports. The snarling, vicious dogs in the canine unit are always on hand, ready to be put to use enacting the violence they’ve been trained to perform. Men suffer violence and religious persecution if they insist on kneeling to pray; they are beaten, and their Bible or Quran thrown to the floor. Racist brutality in the form of beatings, often accompanied by racial taunts, frequently occur in response to a mundane request or an assertion of dignity. Victims are often naked and prone, with their hands handcuffed behind them. There’s no meaningful recourse, because writing a grievance, and thus questioning the authority for these violations, results in being thrown in the hole and being denied water, clothing, and pencils. In retribution, guards turn off phones and shut down tablets—the only lifelines to home and lawyers.
The burnings have the explicit goal of getting these men “off the mountain”—out of this supermax on a remote mountain in the westernmost part of Virginia. These desperate acts are painful cries for help in the face of no other options. And yet they’re an act of hope. In their intense pain, through emergency surgeries and skin grafts, these men have finally been seen and heard by the outside world, by outside doctors, by us, and by Prison Radio listeners. After delaying treatment and holding Eshiet, Brown, and Wallace in isolation, prison officials were forced to send them in a van to the Evans-Haynes Burn Center at VCU Health, the only public burn unit in the state for skin grafts and one of the oldest in the country.
Yet even with this care, cruelty has a way of standing in the way. When the hospital called Eshiet’s mother, informing her that her son was in emergency surgery, she packed her belongings and jumped in the car, only to receive a call from the prison. “Don’t bother coming, we are not going to allow you to see your son,” she recalled prison officials telling her.
This trip off the prison mountain did not come easily. The severity of their injuries was compounded by the sluggish response of the prison. Wallace, who underwent two surgeries and a painful skin graft during a fourteen-day stay at the hospital, told us in a written statement: “I wasn’t sent to the hospital until two days after I set myself on fire because Major Johnny Hall told his staff not to send me immediately.” His caregivers noticed. “At the hospital the doctor questioned why I wasn’t brought in when the burns first happened,” his statement continues. The doctor “was upset that I had developed a serious infection as a result of the delay that had to be treated before the surgery could be done for the burn.”
(Inquest sent the Virginia Department of Corrections a detailed request for comment in connection to the various reports and allegations in this article. A spokesperson responded but didn’t address or deny any of them, noting that the department “does not typically respond to groups writing from an advocacy-based mission with the appearance of operating as a journalistic news outlet.”)
Me and several of my revolutionary brothers, here at this warehouse, self-immolated ourselves with inferno as a desperate call for help. By tormenting myself in the flames I was hoping that I would escape the torment that I suffered at the hands of these racists: physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.
—Letter by Ekong Eshiet, as read during a community meeting at the Richmond-based Virginia Defenders for Freedom, Justice & Equality on December 7, 2024
Many of the stories we have from Red Onion State Prison—of harassment, torture, and attempts to control the public flow of information—have made it out of that isolated facility through the reporting of Kevin “Rashid” Johnson. Writing from the inside, Johnson is a senior incarcerated correspondent for Prison Radio; for decades, he has exercised his First Amendment rights as a news gatherer. He has long been a thorn in the side of the Virginia Department of Corrections, which has steadfastly denied that the self-immolations are in response to its deplorable conditions of confinement.
Speaking up against the state is dangerous, and those who do are targeted. Yet on October 18, 2024, after meeting Eshiet while being housed next to him in the infirmary, Johnson called Prison Radio and recorded “Self-Immolation in Virginia Prisons,” a five-minute audio essay outlining the bullying, racial intimidation, religious disrespect, and torture suffered by Eshiet—torture so bad that he elected to set himself on fire in an effort to be transferred from Red Onion. When Johnson overheard Eshiet talking about the self-immolations, Johnson went into reporter mode and asked him to explain.
“He told me simply that the racism and abuses—the hard and inhumane conditions at Red Onion—were so intolerable that he and others were setting themselves on fire in desperate attempts to be transferred away from the prison,” Johnson reported. “These were not protests, he made clear, but acts of desperation, hoping to get out of an insufferable situation.” He added: “For me, the tragedy of what Ekong expressed was compounded by the fact that I understood his situation all too well.”
In addition to featuring Johnson’s reporting—which has documented the retaliation the men at Red Onion are suffering as well as the prison’s denials of any wrongdoing—Prison Radio has spoken with Eshiet, his mother, and his sister. Marsha Pritchard, his mother, reported to us that since arriving at Red Onion in June 2024, her son has been subject to racial abuse, medical neglect, and psychological torment. His mother describes the horrific racial abuse: They call him “monkey,” the N-word, and twist his name, Eshiet, into “eat shit.” Eshiet told his mother that guards pepper-sprayed, tazed him, and rubbed pepper spray directly into his burn wounds. They then beat him as punishment for speaking out. According to Pritchard and Ekong, the prison has deliberately altered his medications. Officers have also spit in his food and taken his tablet (his lifeline to the outside world). During a raid of his cell, prison guards threw his Quran onto the floor. Eshiet reports that he is being threatened with being transferred to another prison out of state. Understandably, he fears for his life.
When it was built in the mid-1990s, amidst the peak of mass incarceration and national prison-building, Red Onion was among the most expensive facilities in Virginia’s $1.5 billion carceral infrastructure. Since those days, conditions at Red Onion have made the facility notorious, earning exposure by the likes of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. The prison’s rural, isolated location, exacerbated by a race divide between guards and prisoners—guards are almost exclusively white while the men incarcerated there are almost exclusively Black and brown—sets the stage for endemic racism and abuse. The people incarcerated there, working in coordination with their outside supporters, have initiated lawsuits, grievances, lobbying, and extended hunger strikes.
But as advocates see it, Red Onion needs far more than sunlight and lawsuits. “Persistence and collective effort must be used to close Red Onion and Wallens Ridge State Prison and abolish solitary confinement,” Natasha White, director of community engagement with The Interfaith Action for Human Rights, in Richmond, Virginia, said at an event in December, sponsored by the Virginia Defender newspaper.
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Amidst growing concern regarding violations of human and constitutional rights, in April 2024, Virginia’s governor, Glenn Youngkin, signed into law legislation that creates an independent Department of Corrections ombudsman. Yet the office of the Virginia inspector general has yet to fully implement the legislation, and there’s been few details from the state on what steps are being taken to conduct investigations and undertake the newly mandated reforms.
Oversight is imperative because the prison officials at Red Onion would prefer to bury the story—and our correspondents along with it. Red Onion’s warden originally denied that men had set themselves on fire when asked by the press in November. Only after the governor’s office issued a press release did the prison acknowledge that six men had received burn treatment care at an outside burn facility. From our reporting, we know that the prison initially kept the wounded men in isolation in the prison infirmary, held them in solitary confinement, and only transferred them off the mountain when their wounds became infected.
As punishment for his sharp reporting, Johnson was held incommunicado in solitary confinement. He managed to reach Prison Radio on Thanksgiving when he got access to a phone, and he again reached us on December 7, when he was transferred to Kean State Prison. Miriam Nemeth, Johnson’s attorney at Rights Behind Bars, told Virginia Public Media that while she’s secured an agreement for his transfer out of Red Onion, she’s concerned about others who are incarcerated there. Nemeth said Johnson has been repeatedly subjected to solitary confinement—and started a hunger strike right before he was going to be held there again.
“These are extreme actions that should signal to all of us that something is really wrong,” Nemeth said. “No one deserves to be kept in conditions that are so bad that they need to stop eating for seventy days, or they need to light themselves on fire to get out of those conditions.”
As the experiences of Johnson and others reflect, those who file a grievance or a lawsuit are thrown in the hole and isolated in a restricted housing unit. Extended isolation is intended to torture anyone who complains or who is not compliant. All their papers and personal items are taken along with the ability to call or communicate with the outside world.
For example, in 2016, Tyquine Lee, an incarcerated resident at Red Onion, suffered excruciating mental health symptoms after 600 days in isolation, according to a lawsuit filed on his behalf. That’s in flagrant violation of the international standards outlined in the Mandela Rules, which established that solitary confinement lasting more than fifteen consecutive days is a form of torture. Lee’s mother described his confinement in harrowing terms. “Every day, he was locked in an 80-square-foot concrete cell,” she wrote in the Washington Post. “He missed endless showers and was not permitted to even step outside of his cell. He also was fed inconsistently and was sometimes given food covered with particles of his jail cell and maggots.”
She added: “His health deteriorated sharply. He lost 30 pounds and was as thin as a toothpick. He lost the ability to speak in words, and spoke only in strings of incoherent numbers or barked like a dog.” Lee was eventually released and the lawsuit settled.
Notably, the governor of Virginia refused to sign a law passed by the legislature in 2024 that would have outlawed extended placement in solitary confinement and the restricted housing unit. Governor Youngkin has until March 24, 2025, to sign SB1409, which has passed both houses of the Virginia legislature and would abolish the indiscriminate use of solitary confinement in the commonwealth.
Public exposure and public pressure seem to be the only strategy to move prison officials toward corrective action. Without pressure, they remain in steadfast denial. It took Red Onion warden David Anderson and Virginia Department of Corrections director Chadwick Dotson more than a month to publicly admit that men were burning themselves. Their recognition of reality came only after being confronted by the words of the burned men, which were broadcast on radio reports; by the records of the treatment they received at the Evans-Haynes Burn Center; and finally by questioning from the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus and the governor’s office.
When prison officials finally responded in late November, they did so by diminishing the importance of this story. Dotson, the VADOC director, labeled the coverage “cheap political points by advocacy groups who pursue prison abolition and policies that would make Virginians less safe.”
Yet Holly Seibold, a state delegate representing Virginia’s Twelfth District, which includes Red Onion, saw things differently. Her observations, as written in an email to Dotson, matched what many incarcerated men were experiencing—and noted how distinctly Red Onion stood out from other institutions she’s visited. Among other abuses, Seibold described a four-hour “outdoor” period during solitary confinement consisting of being “shackled and placed in a steel cage outdoors, where they are left to stand, sit, or walk in circles.” She adds:
In many cases, inmates have expressed a preference for being shackled to a table in their pod rather than enduring this mandated outdoor ‘recreation’ time. This is not a temporary measure. For many incarcerated individuals, this has been their daily reality for years.
What is next? Returning to Red Onion after receiving treatment at a burn unit in Richmond, Demetrius Wallace all but confirmed that the harassment, torment, isolation, and denial of humanity continues. “Everything is still the same, stuck me in the hole, still being denied access to my JPay [the for-profit e-messaging service Virginia makes accessible to its incarcerated population], or my actual phone.” This is the horrifying reality for Wallace, Eshiet, and ten other men incarcerated at Red Onion—all of them witnesses to unspeakable realities that pushed them to the brink. Their testimonies speak to the tragic depths of abuse faced by those within the U.S. prison system—and how resistance can sometimes lead resisters to acts of last resort.
Since Johnson first alerted us to the crisis at Red Onion, Ekong has shifted tactics and commenced a hunger strike to protest their abuses, but the administration has so far refused to address his concerns and those of the other protesting men. In the absence of other means of protest, hunger strikes have long been a tactic of protest inside prison walls—in this country and abroad. When Johnson encountered Eshiet in the infirmary, he himself was recovering from symptoms of prostate cancer—which the facility had neglected to appropriately treat—as well as the impact of his own extended hunger strike, which had been coordinated with other incarcerated men to protest the torturous use of solitary confinement at Red Onion.
To be clear, there are no good prisons anywhere. In this respect, Red Onion is not unique. Yet at Red Onion the conditions are so appalling and intolerable that people are doing the unimaginable in order to change their circumstances. Shedding light on the human rights abuses at Red Onion is a way of shining a spotlight on conditions throughout the nation. We may succumb to despair and wonder: What are we to do? Released political prisoner Jalil Muntaqim reminds us, “We are our own liberators.” It is incarcerated people who are leading this fight, but we must follow. Risking his own life, Johnson stood in resolute solidarity with the twelve self-immolators at Red Onion and reported on their plight. He continues to stand up and speak out on their behalf. The impacted men continue their protest, despite their lack of access to the media or the organizing potential that people outside of prisons have. What they cannot do, we must do—speaking up, speaking out, applying pressure wherever we can. Lives are at stake.
You can hear more stories and testimonies from people imprisoned at Red Onion, as collected by Prison Radio and its correspondents, at this link.
Image: Jr Korpa/Unsplash
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