Red Onion State Prison Obstructs Prisoner Complaints While Touting It's Reduction

The Virginia Department of Corrections, [VADOC] recently has been touting the reduction in Prisoner complaints and grievance at Red Onion State Prison, its primary Solitary Confinement Prison.  As indicative that its self-claimed Solitary Confinement Reform is progressive. and Red Onion State Prison [ROSP] is a well-managed and operationally ethical prison, where it's officials and rank and file guards comply and follow U.S. and Virginia laws and prison procedures, policies.  The truth, however, is the purported reduction in prisoner complaints and grievances by the ridiculously obscene amount of 75% and 71% respectively is the result of ROSP and VADOC officials at its Western Region Ombudsman employing gimmicks, gambits that obstructs and impedes Prisoner filing of complaints and grievances.  Click Here  to see example of grievance department declined to process and file.  A violation upheld by the Western Region Ombudsman under contradictory reasons.  Click here  to see VADOC grievance procedure OP 866.1, which clearly shows the grievance by William Thorpe should've been processed and filed and the Western Region Ombudsman was complicit in obstructing its filing.

Posted by vapac

Prison Reform, Political-Economy and "Open Political Action"

Is Prison Reform as envisioned by the Barack Obama Presidency and Senator Jim Webb of Virginia a co-opt and preempt of organic Prison Reform?

Historically Prison Reform, which is to mean advocacies by persons and groups towards the purpose of achieving a reform of imprisonment and the way it is used in the United States has floundered and hasn't achieved its objectives. If some of it's objectives were realized it was concessional ploys by government. Firstly as a means of co-opting reforms evolutionary direction and secondly tactical maneuvering that strengthens the governmental position all the more firmly. A classic example of this is the Anti-Death Penalty position and advocacy, with the way government, maneuvered by strengthening that weakness of the governmental position and then enforcing it even more draconic ally after the revision and correction of that which made Capital Punishment susceptible to attack by it's foes.

Prison, as used in the U.S. is a means of controlling elements of society who because of their economical oppression are politically and socially marginalized. What this means in the broad sense is, those members of society who because of their manner of interaction with the economy are without the political and social basis to demand substantial access and positive recognition from society are the one's laws and imprisonment are designed for. It doesn't take much to realize that if an element of society lacks the means to stably interact with it, decisions made and the resulting behavior will run counter to society's laws and as such will result in imprisonment. Elements in society who for the most part meet this controlling imperative have been Black people (descendants of enslaved Africans) and the poor blue collar worker or the ubiquitous "working poor".

U.S. society and government does not view its Black elements and blue collar working poor as productive beings in the Political-Economical sense. But it views the population in question first and foremost as a group to be controlled. This antebellum mindset dates back to it's feudalistic and royalist origins when common people were to be controlled and rigidly tied to the land by their so-called betters, in a statist undertaking of Political-Economy. Even with the advent of industrial technology and it's socialist production, those societies of which the United States is a historical offspring simply carried over the feudalistic mindset to socialist industrial production. Of Which even if the so-called commoners, "working poor" of the United States society, Black people and the poor blue collar working Whites are not in practice feudalistically tied to the land they are in principle just as much tied to it due to their lacking of that substantial means of removing themselves from that imperative of control.

The issue of Prison Reform is also the question of what is the structure and development of the materialist-dialectic of American Political-Economy. In other words, if the issue is what is to be done with the predominant imprisonment of Black people and the poor White people, the answer lies with the radical reputation of the American Labor narrative and the speculative-value antagonism. It also lies with a heightened political grasp of the "working poor", to clearly and starkly contrast the divergence of interest within Political-Economy dynamic of their condition. This means not allowing the status-quo and it's support functionaries to describe and define facts as they see fit.

Historically Prison reform holds the position that "open political action" is a specific intellectual activity with the final arbiter the very cause for it's practice and as the Barack Obama Presidency and Senator Jim Webb's initiatives outline the question it preempts organic Prison Reform.

Written by William Imprisoned In Solitary Confinement at Red Onion State Prison Since 1998

Hostages, Captives and the Contradiction of the Prisoner Dialectic

This fails me. There is the ubiquitous parade of Psychologist and so-called experts each dispensing "expert" advice on the Psychological trials and adjustment deficit for released former hostages and captives. Statistics are hurled about showing the Socio-Dysfunctional rates of former hostages and captives, be it Divorce, Suicides or physical trauma and the qualifier is the statistics represent persons detained as hostages, held captive for ransom for the various reasons. Consequently private and public resources are expended in efforts of support for and rehabilitation of the former hostages and captives.

On the average Tens of Thousands of Prisoners held in American Jails and Prisons under relatively similar conditions as hostages and captives are released yearly without an assessment of their experience within the linguistic and critical framework of released hostages and captives. This begs this question is inhumane, and barbaric treatment of a detained human being in all it's sensory deprivation and physical mistreatment dependent only on the clinical and academic distinction of legal and illegal?

Is the existential reality of the detained subjects experience of injustice, inhumanness,, and barbarity a contradiction mitigated or aggravated by the mere means of it's procedural application?

By William

William Thorpe is confined in Solitary Confinement At Red Onion State Prison Since 1998

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WE ARE

We are "The Wretched of the Earth",
the suffers of injustice,
the bearers of the yoke of oppression.

We are the down-trodden,
the exploited,
the repressed and we can always rest assured to be manipulated and compromised.

We are The People,
The Populations, The Masses. We build civilizations, we construct edifices and structures attesting to the creativity, ingenuity, and expression of humanity.

We are the basis and foundation that prosperity, wealth, and stability are built on. We surmount the insurmountable. We labor as "Beast of Burden" and the rule is we do all this in the pursuit of anothers interest. We always place anothers welfare above ours. We compromise our lives and settle for wretched existence in consequences of our pursuits of alien ideas.

We are Human Beings. Yet we settle for Civil Rights instead of Human Rights. Some of us claim ignorance as a justifiable reason for subjugated, subservient existence we call our Human Condition.

Those of us who exist in societies that the rule is an exchange of labor for Capital, meaning the dictated means of acquiring and attaining the necessities of life: water, food, shelter, and clothing, experience it's consequences as an inequity of their material realization, an inability to attain that maximal realization of their Human potential.

Those of us who exist in societies that the rule is allegiance to the state, garners you the basics in life experience the injustices and inability of the state to contend and deal with the frailties, whims and caprices of it's human elements, those petty tyrants who at every inch of the way exhibit that rat like frenzy of rats abandoning a sinking ship, grasping and grabbing what their placement within the state machine allows as the wretched masses once again look on
stupefied--- our blood was shed for this?

Those of us who exist in societies that the rule is fiat of theocracy, experience the hypocrisy of human sensuality and sentience totally at odds with the sapient potential of human realization. We persistently encounter that infantile inability of the theological basis to come to terms with the profane cause-effect of the material basis defining and determining that exponential parameter of our lives and condition, which as a result repress and alienates us the masses from our humanness---which in effect produces that one dimensional Human Being we all know so well.

We, "The Wretched of the Earth" have the obligation of understanding that all these factors and conditions that bring us so much despair, grief and anger have no other solution than ourselves. We hold in our hands the turn of our destiny and the relative means to direct our lives upon that path of maximal realization of which the legacy of humanness is our inheritance. The progression of humanness lies with us because we are humanity.

We are the People,
The Populations, The Masses. The frustrations we revel in permitting our articulation of that defeatist slogan "that's the system and that's the way it is", illustrates our continued submission to an existence that takes everything out of us and puts nothing back. It drains us of our humanness and replaces it with the illogical and a humanistic urge of oblivion under the guise of redemption.

By William Thorpe

William Thorpe is confined in Solitary Confinement at Red Onion State Prison