She wrote that the Virginia Department of Corrections Solitary Confinement practice was giving "second chances to all offenders even those inmates deemed to be the most dangerous." What this talking point exposes and it is merely a talking point because Harold Clarke the Departments Director said the same thing weeks earlier; is the idealistic nature of what the department supposes is a defensible explanation for its behavior to the people of Virginia for what it does in their name.
Because the issue and criticism of the department's practices and its prison officials are not about magnanimity. The Department doesn't have the privilege from the people of Virginia to dabble in philosophical suppositions when its duties are codified in Virginia law and the Constitutions of the United States and the Commonwealth of Virginia. The only relevant question for the department is its compliance with law and nothing in Virginia law of the Constitutions of the United States and Virginia permit prison officials to imprison prisoners in Solitary Confinement without end based on suppositions and retrograde assumptions of the American Prison Experiment.
If the Department is self-assuredly correct in the Goldilocks-pristine nature of its prison practice then let it be transparent and allow adversarial accounting of its behavior and practices. Imprisonment under Virginia legal jurisdiction should not be a construct erected on colloquialism and presumptions society has rejected per virtue of progress and common sense.
William Thorpe is held in Solitary Confinement at Red Onion State Prison since 1998
