Emil McLeod
Six prisoners at Red Onion State Prison in Virginia have burned themselves with improvised devices made from electrical wiring since the beginning of this year in the hope of securing transfer to other prisons for medical treatment. Four of these incidents occurred on or after September 1st. The prisoners have cited the intolerable conditions of the prison, the abuse of the prison guards through violence and racism, alongside indiscriminate use of solitary confinement on prisoners, as reasons for their desperate attempt to escape through self-harm.
Red Onion State Prison is a notorious prison that has been previously investigated by the NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) for gross violations of prisoners’ rights. In their report, HRW noted that “Inmates who pose no extreme security or safety risk are subjected to unnecessarily restrictive controls and are arbitrarily deprived of the activities and freedoms available ordinarily even in maximum security prisons.” The report continues by mentioning that guards use excessive force, including firing on inmates with shotguns, and threatening prisoners with violence and subjecting them to racist remarks. “Conditions at the facility are necessarily harsh and degrading. General population inmates are confined in their cells more than twenty hours a day. In segregation, inmates are isolated twenty-three hours a day,” according to the report. Inmates are “…denied educational, behavioral, vocational, and work programs and religious services.”
Red Onion State Prison was the subject of two recent lawsuits, one in which a man hallucinated speaking with his dead parents after being kept in solitary confinement for over 12 years, and in the other case prisoner Tyquine Lee was isolated for over 600 days and began speaking incoherently in numbers and dropped over 30 pounds. The most recent story of the horrors of the reactionary dungeon, Red Onion, was broken by the political prisoner Kevin Rashid Johnson and posted by the radio program Prison Radio. In an audio recording posted by Prison Radio, Ekong Eshiet, one of the prisoners who burned himself, stated that guards discriminate against him because of “my race, my last name, or my religion.” Eshiet added that, “I don’t mind setting myself on fire again. This time I would set my whole body on fire before I have to stay up here and do the rest of my time up here.” Eshiet set his leg on fire on September 15th, hoping to receive a transfer to another prison to receive medical treatment, but was treated for minor burns at Red Onion instead. He began a hunger strike on October 23rd to continue his protest of the vile and intolerable conditions at Red Onion.
Prisons are a part of the repressive arm of the reactionary State and serve primarily to subdue and annihilate certain sections of society, especially sections of the working class. According to a report published in May 2023 by Solitary Watch, more than 122,000 men, women, and children are held daily in some form of isolation in U.S. prisons and jails. The United States continues to maintain the largest prison population in the world.
