VOCAL VIRGINIA PRISONERS WHO SET THEMSELVES ON FIRE ARE TRANSFERRED OUT OF STATE (2025) By Kevin “Rashid” Johnson

Two of the most widely publicized and vocal prisoners who set themselves on fire during latter 2024 in desperate responses to racism and abuses at Virginia’s notorious Red Onion State Prison have been transferred out of state.

Ekong Eshiet has been transferred to the Indiana prison system and Demetrius Wallace has been sent to Maine.

Both of these men were recently featured in a special issue of the Virginia Defenders newspaper. The paper printed statements from both of them condemning the conditions, abuses, neglect and retaliation they endured for years at Red Onion that forced them to the extreme of burning themselves. (1) This feature was the culmination of months of their situations and suffering receiving broad media coverage, repeated appeals by them and their loved ones to government officials for relief from the abuses at the prison, and their enduring brutal retaliation at Red Onion for speaking out about those conditions.

But these transfers weren’t meant to remedy their suffering. They were timed to remove two outspoken witnesses and victims of abuses from the Virginia prison system on the eve of the system’s new ombudsman’s opening a long delayed but supposedly “prioritized” investigation into conditions at Red Onion. A self-investigation by Va prison officials that was meant to go nowhere before it began. Recall, the ombudsman’s own boss, the prison system’s director, Chadwick Dotson, initially responded with lying denials in the media to reports on the numerous prisoners who set themselves on fire and claimed nothing was amiss at the prison. His lies were exposed when media outlets, like The Appeal obtained internal emails from Red Onion administrators discussing prisoners setting themselves on fire and how to prevent future self burnings (2), and when state legislators who visited the prison went in the media condemning racist abuses in the prison, lack of adequate medical care and food, and conditions there as “inhumane.”

Under normal circumstances, hiding witnesses on the eve of an official investigation is called obstructing justice. But, as extensive media coverage of conditions in Va’s prison have shown over the past several months, high level Va prison officials are above accountability and operate with impunity. This impunity and lack of accountability was further shown in the total lack of any official or media response to the exposure of Dotson’s lying to the public.

Worse still, Va prison officials have a long history of using interstate transfers as retaliation and punishment against disliked prisoners, and especially those who resist and challenge abuses in their prisons. I was a victim of this abuse for a decade. As William Thorpe revealed in a recent article, before I was interstate transferred in 2012, they’d been doing this for decades. (3) Thorpe, a Va prisoner, was himself transferred out of state and is right now being held in the notorious Texas prison system in response to his role in challenging abuses in Va’s prisons and as the lead plaintiff in the widely publicized Thorpe v. Clarke class action lawsuit against Va’s ongoing abuses of solitary confinement.

In fact the use of interstate transfers as a weapon of political repression and retaliation was one of the many abuses for which the Va prisons system was charged, exposed and convicted during the October 2023 “People’s Tribunal on Virginia’s Prisons, Jails & Detention Centers,” held in the Greater Richmond Convention Center. This tribunal already investigated and CONVICTED Va officials of ALL the abuses that the new ombudsman is supposed to investigate. Indeed, a key demand and purpose of the tribunal was to seek independent oversight of the prison system to compel accountability because of its total lack of accountability. But, now to the end of further thwarting this self-investigation, the same prison system has removed two of its most vocal victims and witnesses of abuses at Red Onion who have received wide media publicity to other states. Oddly, certain so-called advocates, including some who supported the People’s Tribunal, are now endorsing a staged investigation by an ombudsman who works for the same prison system.

This reflects the corruption of a government that is unaccountable to the governed and prisoner advocates who are unaccountable to the imprisoned.

Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!

All Powder to the People!

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Endnotes:

1. The Virginia Defender, Vol. 21, No. 1, Issue 76 (Winter/spring 2025) http://www.virginiadefender.org

2. Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg, “Prisoners Burned Themselves So Staff Recommend ‘Making Them Pay Money,’ ” The Appeal, Jan 8, 2025

3. William Thorpe, “Just as Virginia Slave Owners During Slavery Would Ship Certain Enslaved to Other Plantations, The Virginia Department of Corrections Has Kept Up the Practice by Shipping Certain Prisoners to Other States” Nov 27, 2024