When the red light on an xbox turns red does it stay red

If you mean that all the lights turn red, this is an AV cable fault (i.e, buy a new one, or plug it back in), if there are three, then this is a general hardware failure, also known as "the red ring of death", and you should send this back to microsoft ASAP, two means that the xbox is/has overheating/overheated, and the one light is a hardware failure, but an error code will show on screen, contrary to the three red lights, where there is nothing you can do about it, you can quote the code and tell microsoft.