Why is this important?

This is not just about one prisoner — it’s about the dangerous misuse of state power to disappear, punish, and slowly kill people who speak out against abuse.

Ekong Eshiet is a survivor of torture who set himself on fire in protest after months of racist and psychological abuse at Red Onion State Prison in Virginia. Instead of getting meaningful mental-health care, Virginia shipped him out of state through the Interstate Corrections Compact (ICC). He is now in a control unit at Westville Correctional Facility in Indiana, facing a year of solitary confinement despite a documented psychiatric crisis.

This is a textbook abuse of the ICC. The Compact is supposed to be used for treatment, safety, or proximity to support — not as a tool of retaliation and “disappearing” whistleblowers across state lines. Under the ICC, Virginia is still the “sending state” and keeps legal custody of Ekong; Indiana is supposed to act only as its agent and treat him in a reasonable, humane manner. Both states have obligations under the Eighth Amendment, disability rights law, and their own statutes to protect his health and mental-health, not warehouse him in isolation.

What is happening to Ekong is part of a larger pattern: using solitary confinement, transfers, and neglect to break people who speak up. If the state can burn a whistleblower like this — after self-immolation, after public testimony, after he literally says “either you get me out of the hole or I die in here” — it sends a clear message to everyone still inside: stay silent or be destroyed.

We are acting now because Ekong’s life is at immediate risk, and because every record, complaint, email, and call helps build a public trail that can be used to challenge these abuses beyond his case. Protecting Ekong means pushing back on retaliatory transfers, fighting the torture of long-term solitary, and forcing public officials in both states to answer for what they are doing in our name.