In a two week span, at least a dozen Black men set themselves on fire at Virginia’s Supermax Red Onion State Prison. Two of these individuals, Ekong Eshiet and his cellmate Trayvon Brown, self-inflicted third-degree burns on September 15, 2024 in a desperate attempt to be transferred away from the prison due to the racism and inhumane conditions at Red Onion.
Officers have withheld medication, spit in Ekong’s food, isolated him from the outside world, violated his Quran, and used racial slurs against him. His mother said, “They call him ‘monkey,’ call him ‘n****r,’ and twist his name, ‘Eshiet,’ into ‘eat sh-t.”
“These were not protests, he made clear, but acts of desperation. Hoping to get out of the insufferable situation.”
-Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, a journalist and a revolutionary incarcerated at Red Onion, who spoke with Ekong. Rashid himself went on a 71-day hunger strike six months earlier in protest of conditions within the same prison.
Despite gestures from politicians and DA offices for reform, solitary confinement remains widespread in Virginia’s prisons and around the US:
Earlier this month, the ACLU released an alarming report that describes
hundreds of inmates in Virginia – including people with mental illnesses, juveniles and individuals who identify as LGBT – living in solitary confinement conditions for lengths of time that far exceed international standards.
Under the “Mandela Rules” adopted by the United Nations, no person should spend more than 15 consecutive days in solitary confinement. The ACLU report says Virginia’s inmates spend an average of 2.7 years there.
– Theresa Vargas, The Washington Post, May 2018
SOLITARY CONFINEMENT IS TORTURE
Solitary confinement causes irreparable physical and psychological damage, exacerbates violence in prisons, drives people to suicide, and makes it more difficult to reintegrate into society.
Over 122,000 people are kept in solitary in the US. It is one of the ruling class’s most vicious forms of social control of Black and other oppressed people. – Source: Solitary Watch
Kalief Browder, a teenager from the Bronx, was arrested at the age of 16. He was held at Rikers Island for three years without trial or conviction where he spent over 800 days in solitary.
He was released in 2013, but the devastating effects on his mental health persisted. He ultimately took his own life in 2015 at the age of 22. Kalief’s death sparked outrage and calls for reform. In 2023, city council passed a bill banning solitary in NYC jails, which Milk Dud Mayor Eric Adams blocked this year.
Our Chicago chapter has been going to Cook County Jail, a cesspool with so many human rights violations that it was investigated by the Department of Justice.
We’ve heard horror stories from inside of COs taking kids to areas off camera to beat them. The nightmares and injustices the people in Cook County face are endless. Link up with your local Dare to Struggle chapter or start your own so we can fight these inhumanities.
As “tough on crime” politicians play charades with their “progressive” counterparts around the country, over 1.2 million people languish in unfathomable conditions in US prisons.
To end the torture and brutality that incarcerated people face, we need to build a militant mass movement that rejects dead-end pursuits of reforms. We must instead unite the people living under mass incarceration to rebel against the prison system, within prisons and outside of them.
Dare to Struggle 