Black Men Incarcerated In Virginia’s Red Onion State Prison Reportedly Set Themselves On Fire Amid Documented Abuse Behind Bars

At Red Onion State Prison in Virginia, where 12 Black prisoners reportedly set themselves on fire in a terrible two-week span this fall, attorney Miriam Nemeth was likely horrified — but probably not shocked.

Speaking with truthout.org in February, Nemeth said the only water her client – Kevin Rashid Johnson, 53, who is also a journalist confined at Red Onion who underwent a two-and-a-half-month hunger strike at the beginning of the year – was allowed to drink was his cell’s own toilet water.

The courageous journalism of Rashid Johnson

It was alleged treatment like that and more reported by Business Insider, the Appeal and other outlets – only giving prisoners food that had maggots crawling in it; handing out severe beatings; subjecting them to electroshocks; denying them critical medical care; keeping them locked in solitary confinement for as long as 15 years – that led to the unimaginable choice to self-immolate in September, Rashid Johnson said.

The men weren’t insane, according to Rashid Johnson, who has long told the world about the alleged torture prisoners were subjected to at the hands of the state of Virginia, where the shift toward hate has been upticking harshly for at least a decade. They were desperate, he said. Setting themselves on fire seemed the only way to make it out of Red Onion, Rashid Johnson explained.

Listen here to Rashid Johnson’s eyewitness commentary, recorded by Prison Radio.

On Nov. 20, the SF Bay View printed that commentary in which Rashid Johnson reported:

“Since opening in 1998…Red Onion has operated without oversight in regions where the local populations are culturally conditioned to secrecy and hostility to outside scrutiny. Which makes for prisons shielded by a 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 opening and operating prisons in remote, racially segregated regions of the state like where Red Onion…(is) located.”

As of this writing, prison officials who initially denied anything at all happened in September and that there were no prisoners with burns, admitted on Monday that four men had indeed “burned themselves.”

They claimed it was not self-immolation, just electrical burns.

Incarcerated now for 34 years, Rashid Johnson has been risking his life to get people to pay attention. The hunger strike was one act, but his broadcast and written commentary over the years is likely what has opened the door for some in the media to peek in. But doing so and really looking isn’t something mainstream media has chosen to do, despite the multiple accounts of documented torture at Red Onion, named for the mountain in Wells, Virginia, upon which it was built.

Red Onion prison

Wells, located in the state’s Marshall County and roughly 360 miles from the capital city of Richmond, is an unincorporated town in Southwest Virginia. It’s isolated, rural, white and segregated. The men who work at Red Onion hail largely from Wells and its neighboring similar towns. For the white, non-incarcerated residents in the area, the supermax prison provided employment and saved their families after the coal mines shut down.

Mostly urban-born and Black men have been sent to Red Onion, allowing the towns to thrive with steady work. But far from simply being the facility it advertised itself as, one that would house “the worst of the worst,” a large swath of the men confined there came from other districts, municipalities and states.

It was an economic scheme: states and cities who’d been over-incarcerating men got around rules to reduce their populations by paying Red Onion to take them, criminologist and recently retired executive director of the Sentencing Project, Marc Mauer, reported in his work, Entrepreneurial Corrections. Other Virginia prisoners were transferred to Red Onion and charged with an administrative – not criminal – infraction.

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