Virginia’s new prison ombudsman will investigate allegations of abuse at Red Onion State Prison after reports of people incarcerated there intentionally burning themselves over the facility’s conditions.
Living conditions at the Wise County facility have been the subject of scrutiny for years. Red Onion has faced lawsuits over its use of solitary confinement, including settling a case in 2021 with one man who was kept in solitary confinement for more than 12 years.
Recent reports of people burning themselves to get transferred out of Red Onion over claims of beatings, mistreatment and retaliation led the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus and prison reform advocacy groups to call for an independent investigation.
During a Virginia House Public Safety Committee meeting on Monday, Corrections Ombudsman Andrea Sapone said her office — created within the state inspector general’s office to offer independent prison oversight — will prioritize an investigation into Red Onion.
The state inspector general’s office “takes all allegations of abuse seriously,” Sapone said after being asked if her office can prioritize the probe. “So, Red Onion investigation will be prioritized as soon as we have a full staff to do it correctly.”
Maggie Sotos, spokesperson for the Office of the State Inspector General, told VPM News there are five ombudsman specialist positions that still need to be filled. An offer has been extended for one, and the office is in the process of finalizing the others.
Sotos added that OSIG couldn’t speak to how long the investigation will take and what it will entail, but “the investigation of Red Onion will be thorough, independent and objective.”
At Monday’s committee meeting, Virginia’s top corrections official said the six self-harm cases were not tied to a protest over conditions at Red Onion. He also challenged claims of long-term solitary confinement and a lack of mental health resources at the facility.
“There’s no evidence whatsoever that there was any kind of a plot or any kind of a protest,” VADOC director Chad Dotson told the panel. He said “they did it because they wanted to get away from Red Onion,” adding that two of the six have a history of “self-directed violence.”
While Dotson said there were six cases, multiple prison reform advocates told VPM News they’ve heard as many as 12 people incarcerated at Red Onion have intentionally burned themselves in recent months.
Dotson said claims of “some kind of big plot” were “ginned it up on the internet” by an incarcerated individual and that those who don’t like repercussions for bad behavior would “continue to complain” about Red Onion. As VPM News previously reported, an incarcerated correspondent with Prison Radio had been reporting on conditions at the prison — and was being transferred from Red Onion as part of a settlement.
Dotson said he believes Virginia has the safest prison system in the U.S., but that “Red Onion is different” because it houses some of the commonwealth’s most violent offenders. He told the panel 88% of the nearly 800 people incarcerated at Red Onion at any given time have a violent conviction.
He invited the committee members to visit Red Onion and insisted that VADOC is “happy” to share how it works.
“There are no conditions that they're truly protesting, other than being up in the mountains and away from their family and friends and it being harder for them to manipulate staff and harder for them to smuggle in contraband. Those are the only conditions that are present down there,” Dotson told the committee.
Prison reform advocates, people previously incarcerated at Red Onion, state lawmakers and loved ones of people held at the facility disputed Dotson’s assertions.
Geri Greenspan, senior staff attorney with the ACLU of Virginia, told committee members the ACLU doesn’t have independent information on the self-harm incidents. She added that the reports are consistent with what the ACLU has heard from dozens of clients over the last six years about the conditions in the step-down program at Red Onion.
Hundreds in VADOC custody have been put into “indefinite and long-term solitary confinement” in the step-down program, Greenspan told the panel.
The program is meant to allow those in confinement to take steps to progress back into the general population, per VADOC. But a 2023 class-action lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Virginia on behalf of plaintiffs who say they spent years in solitary confinement claims the program has wrongly kept people in confinement. (The case is ongoing in the Western District of Virginia.)
“The conditions there are incredibly harsh and harmful to prisoners’ physical and mental health,” Greenspan said. “I want to stress that these conditions have persisted over many years, multiple lawsuits and multiple wardens. It is clear that this is a systemic problem, not just the result of a few bad apples.”
Advocates said the overuse of prolonged solitary confinement — what Virginia’s prison system refers to as “restorative housing” — has exacerbated mental health issues for incarcerated individuals and increases the likelihood of self-harm and suicide.
During Monday’s meeting, Dotson pushed back on the mentions of “long-term solitary confinement.” He told the panel the reason advocates were using the word was to connect in their mind with something that happened “20, 30, 50 years ago.”
“There is no long-term solitary confinement in the Virginia Department of Corrections right now,” Dotson said. “You can't talk about what happened in 2018 even, and compare it to what we're doing here today.”
Natasha White, the community engagement director at Interfaith Action for Human Rights, was one of the speakers who addressed the panel after Sapone said her office would investigate Red Onion.
White challenged Dotson’s claim that prison violence has grown in states that have taken steps to limit solitary confinement.
Hassan Shabazz is a prison rights advocate who spent 23.5 years in Virginia’s prison system, he told VPM News, including a year of solitary confinement at Red Onion. He said his time there led to PTSD that he couldn’t recognize until he was released in 2022.
“One of the main things that I remember when I pulled up to Red Onion State Prison was that there was a graveyard right in the back,” Shabazz said in a phone call.
To Shabazz, the graveyard was a symbol of what was expected for people incarcerated at Red Onion. He described a degrading, fearful experience while at Red Onion that led to depression for him and others.
“I remember guys not ever wanting to get out of their cells, because of the degrading process that they used to take you out,” he said. “Stripping you down, putting the dog chains on you, putting you in leg irons just to go to the shower.”
Shabazz, who wrote two reports for the Virginia Defender while incarcerated at Dillwyn Correctional Center, said he studied while in solitary confinement and eventually became a paralegal.
After he was released, Shabazz co-founded a prisoner rights advocacy group: the Virginia Prison Justice Network. He told VPM News that he’s heard from “people inside Red Onion” that 12 people incarcerated there have burned themselves.
Reports of the self-burning incidents at Red Onion don't surprise Shabazz because of the physical and psychological threats of being there.
“I know why those guys are going to those lengths and why they feel like they have no other recourse,” Shabazz said.
Red Onion isn’t the only prison in rural Virginia facing allegations of abuse. NPR and The Marshall Project reported this week that a federally-run prison in Lee County has faced scrutiny over an alleged culture of violence by the guards.
