Red Onion Prison Scandal: Hunger Strikes, Abuse, and Corruption in Virginia

Kevin “Rashid” Johnson writes about Virginia’s Red Onion Prison, which became the center of a growing scandal in 2024 as prisoners launched hunger strikes and self-immolations to protest abuse, triggering allegations of retaliation, witness tampering, and systemic corruption.

Virginia’s rural prisons came into the spotlight in 2024 after several prisoners at Red Onion Prison, myself included, went on prolonged hunger strikes protesting abusive conditions. Then a dozen more set themselves on fire in a desperate effort to be removed from those conditions.

Public Outcry Prompts Flawed Internal Investigation by Virginia Prison Ombudsman

Media exposure and public demands to close down the notoriously abusive prison and its sister supermax, Wallens Ridge, and to fire top Virginia administrators, prompted the newly created ombudsman’s office to promise a prioritized investigation of the prisons—an investigation conducted by an office that’s part of the very prison system it presumes to scrutinize.

Those of us calling for the shuttering of these expensive and unneeded prisons and to fire administrators made clear that such an investigation would go nowhere. The “prioritized” investigation was delayed for months as the ombudsman’s office was staffed, giving administrators at the prisons plenty of time to further sabotage an already rigged investigation process. Victim and witness tampering played a major role in their schemes—actions for which a judicial or legislative investigation would cite and punish these executives for contempt and obstructing justice, but in this case, the ombudsman’s office works for the very officials it presumes to investigate. There is no scrutiny of nor accountability for such efforts to undermine its investigations.

First, they retaliated against those prisoners who were vocal about the abuses at the prison. Those who spoke to state legislators and the media were branded as snitches to other prisoners, and one, Ekong Eshiet, even had his loved ones’ personal addresses given to other prisoners in efforts to target his family. These men were beaten by guards, had their personal property destroyed, foreign objects put in their food, and suffered many other mistreatments. This set an example to others of what they would suffer if they dared to speak out as witnesses and victims.

Second, they bribed and coerced prisoners in long-term solitary confinement to sign statements promising to not self-immolate and falsely claim they were receiving adequate mental health and medical treatment. This would contradict a pending class action lawsuit against the continued use of long-term solitary confinement and denial of adequate medical and mental health care at Red Onion Prison. If the prisoners didn’t sign these statements, they were left without electricity in their isolation cells, preventing their ability to use their electronic property. Signing these false statements would serve to undermine both the pending litigation and the impending ombudsman investigation. The ACLU recognized this and filed motions in the class action suit against this attempted coercion of false statements.

Third, they transferred several of the most vocal prisoner witnesses and victims of abuses at Red Onion Prison out of state and therefore out of reach of investigators.

Fourth, Red Onion Prison administrators moved to abuse and bribe prisoners to give false statements to investigators about conditions at the prison. Eric Thompson, one of the men who went on the hunger strike with me and others in latter 2023/early 2024, reported to prisoner advocates, including Kevin Jeanes, that Red Onion Prison Security Chief Johnny Hall directed him to give a false statement to investigators who recently visited the prison as part of the ombudsman’s investigation, in exchange for a promise to move him to better housing or he’d continue to suffer retaliation such as destruction of his property and guard harassment. Eric sent word to me that he had become so broken and desperate under these conditions that he went along with Hall’s bribe to give false statements to investigators and felt like a sellout. He said after he spoke to the investigators, Hall told him he was proud of him.

I have personal experience with Hall’s tampering with witnesses in this manner. He did it in my own federal lawsuit against him and other Virginia prison officials.

Retaliation and Witness Tampering Follow Legal Action Over Red Onion Prison Hunger Strike

During early 2024, attorneys with the Washington, D.C.-based Rights Behind Bars law firm filed suit on my behalf related to our hunger strike at Red Onion Prison and the mistreatments strikers were subjected to. In March 2024, I was temporarily removed from Red Onion Prison as a result of the suit but was returned in September. Upon my return, I faced immediate retaliation led by Johnny Hall. As was done with Ekong, attempts were made to instigate violent conflict between me and other prisoners by Hall and his staff spreading false rumors against me. They even attempted to bribe other prisoners to take hits on me. Instead of acting on these incitements, the prisoners confronted me and told me what these officials were doing. I promptly allowed many of them to speak to my attorneys Miriam Nemeth and Mark Krudys about what Hall and his staff were attempting to instigate. All of these prisoners told my attorneys they would bear witness to these schemes in court. On October 28, 2024, my lawyers filed a preliminary injunction motion with the court concerning this. A hearing was set on the motion, and the court ordered the prisoner witnesses summoned, but Hall got to them before the hearing. He threatened and bribed several of them to refuse to appear or to otherwise testify falsely, which was blatant contempt of court.

One witness, Terry Duncan, was transported overnight to court without his prescribed seizure medication, and ended up unable to appear in person as a result of having a grand mal seizure right before the hearing. Another witness, Jeremy Raymond, had his access to his tablet and to use the secured email system banned, and was ordered by Hall to be transported in a steel-lined van that Jeremy had been previously exempted from because being banged around in these vehicles during transport exacerbates a pre-existing shoulder injury he suffers from. Predictably, Jeremy refused to be transported to court in this van, which was Hall’s aim.

Hall and his staff have a long and well-established history and practice of intimidating and bribing prisoners to not give damaging evidence against them and their foul actions at Red Onion Prison.

Red Onion Prison Accused of Staging HBO Documentary to Conceal Racism and Abuse

As I reported in my 2024 article, “The Public Can’t Believe Anything Virginia Prison Officials Tell Them,” they did the same in staging a false image of Red Onion Prison in the 2016 HBO documentary, “Solitary: Inside Red Onion State Prison.” Not only did they stage false scenes in the video of a racially diverse staff and majority white prisoner population to hide the fact that the staff at the prison are totally white while the prisoners are near totally Black (to counter the notoriety of the prison for racist abuses), but they gave several prisoners free televisions, including informant Dennis Webb, to give watered down interviews to the program’s host.

This sort of lying corruption to cover up and subvert exposures of abuses at these prisons has been rooted in the purpose and use of these expensive and unneeded remote prisons from the beginning. As Human Rights Watch exposed in its 1999 investigation and report on Red Onion Prison, the prison was opened and operated from the outset upon lies fed to the public. Back then, these supermaxes were portrayed by then prison system chief Ronald Angelone as needed to confine huge numbers of chronically dangerous Virginia prisoners and those who were never going home. The HRW report found that before these supermaxes were even constructed, HQ officials had a study conducted of its prisoner population, which found that Virginia didn’t have even a handful of chronically problematic prisoners, and most of the men confined in them after they opened were soon to be released from prison.

The lies have since continued for 25 years in efforts to keep these unneeded prisons open to prop up the economies of poor rural white communities at the expense of poor urban Blacks, to keep their abusive and racist conditions hidden from public view, and to protect their operations chiefs from accountability. Who needs fringe Neo Nazi and Klan groups when the real racists and fascists are already in power?

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