Criminal Justice Reform, Law, Virginia Commonwealth State, Prison Reform, Prison Advocacy blog
Wednesday, December 23, 2020
Tuesday, December 22, 2020
Gratuitous Violence, Punishment, Religion and Family Friendly By William Thorpe
The forces of gratuitous violence meted out as penal punishment, for itself exploit and hide behind civilized morality. So for example prison officials will say they are all about promoting the stability of family in a prisoner's existence. Because the prison official recognizes civilized morality anticipates and expects it who will disagree that family is good? So the prison official dresses up their deeds in the language of family-friendly but in practice, the prison official's actions make a mockery of family-friendly.
Now consider this, crime, punishment, prison, and religion have went hand in hand in this nation. Despite the fact, religion has historically been present and co-existed with prison, the imprisonment as equally as it permeates society and it has played a one-dimensional role, it has ignored the family-friendly gambit of the prison official's gratuitous violence meted out as penal punishment. So for example despite the family-friendly pronouncements by prison officials. What we see in practice are road blocks, impediments and obstacles erected ingeniously between the prisoner and family with tacit approval by religion irrespective of faith or denomination as affirmative penal punishment. Which despite the gratuitous violence accepted as a fact of the prison condition we see the impotence of religion to call out the prison official's behavior as not only family unfriendly but violative of civilized morality.
If religion is to mature beyond its idealistic singularity and become materially objective it must confront the gratuitous violence meted out as penal punishment by the prison official.
William Thorpe is held in Solitary Confinement at the Eastham Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice
Sunday, December 20, 2020
Fool’s Gold and Igniting Fires | Mieka Polanco | TEDxJMU
Saturday, December 19, 2020
Will Become Another Problem Our Sapience Solves - By William Thorpe
They terrorize us in life to scare us with death.
Wednesday, November 11, 2020
Never Surrender By TyJuane Pridgen
By TyJuane Pridgen
Invisible To Society by TyJaune Jerrell Pridgen Imprisoned at Virginia's Wallens Ridge State Prison
Sunday, November 1, 2020
Sunday, August 30, 2020
Jerry Givens Is Dead, So
Just because Jerry Givens expressed criticism of his former function as a professional state executioner in Virginia's death penalty murder scheme absolves him of nothing. Because his criminality of murdering human beings was not his singular crime to be accountable for but is the collective responsibility of the people of the Commonwealth of Virginia in whose name Jerry Givens murdered people. So when opponents of Virginia's death penalty murder scheme memorialize Jerry Givens as a progressively-critical voice in the criminal justice reform movement, it ignores and glosses over the fact that Jerry Givens as a prison guard was not simply one who idealistically repudiated the death penalty. But one who embodied all that is wrong with the prison official. Jerry Givens as a prison guard in the 1980's at the Virginia State Penitentiary was a crooked corrupt and malfeasant guard who framed prisoners with phony, fake and contrived charges. He assaulted prisoners who were handcuffed and shackled. He was the typical prison official taking extra-judicial liberties, unaccountable.
It is understandable that anti-death penalty advocates would embrace Jerry Givens and his idealistic repudiation of the death penalty and opportunistically rehabilitate him despite the fact he was a self-confessed murderer of 67 human beings. Because it relatively envelopes opposition to the death penalty with the argument of the confessed ala Saul of the New Testament into eponymous Paul.
But the flaw of this line of thinking by anti-death penalty opposition to the death penalty as it exists in American politics, particularly the political-economics of the former Confederate states and their neo-formulated revisionist narrative, has nothing to do with biblical redemption and confessions and anticipating social-sympathies upon such is a fool's errand,
What anti-death penalty advocacy needs is a robust polemic and the Jerry Givens of history as all petty tyrannical state functionaries who later come to their senses on a speculated conversion cannot be messenger and medium for its practices. Not when proponents of the death penalty and the extra-judicial designs of prison are pushing their reactionary politics and the concurrent hypocrisies of justice as a deliberate and specific type of social control.
By William Thorpe
William Thorpe is held in Solitary Confinement at the Eastham Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice
Wednesday, July 1, 2020
The Two Questions of Prison Reform By William Thorpe
- Who is to be imprisoned
- And for how long, sentence and terms
Monday, June 29, 2020
We at VAPAC Acknowledge Inc. Magazines Response
Racism as an antagonistic fact of our social contract and compact was on full display in the emotion recognition submission of The Jargonator Feature of the Inc. Issue in question with the stereotype trope of black masculinity as criminal.
On April 20, 2020 VAPAC [Virginia Prisons Accountability Committee] notified Inc. Magazine of the offense and indefensible feature
On May 5, 2020, Editor in Chief Scott Omelianuk responded constructively.. We at VAPAC acknowledge Inc. Magazine's actions and we respect it. Particularly the declaration that.....
Sunday, June 21, 2020
Whats Wrong With Dick-Sizemore, His Support For Covid-19 & The Politics of Prison & Death By William Thorpe
So here we have Dick Hall-Sizemore in his April 11. 2020; Early Prisoners Release Will Not Help Much post on BaconsRebellion.com giving us another scratch your head moment.
Dick Hall-Sizemore begins his work with "Governor Ralph Northam has announced that he will ask the General Assembly for authority to release from prison those offenders with a year less to serve on their sentences in order to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus in prison. He stressed that only those who have demonstrated good behavior and would not pose a threat to society would be eligible." And Dick Hall-Sizemore had so much of a problem with it that he took thirteen paragraphs stating such.
Again we have to move beyond head-scratching to head shaking, because didn't Hall Sizemore tell us that prisoners in question are those with a year or less to serve and have demonstrated good behavior? Let this sink in, "A year or less to serve." Meaning a prisoner could have served 44 years on a 45-year sentence with a year to go and Hall-Sizemore is telling us that 44 pounds of flesh years aren't enough on a 45-year sentence and if that prisoner hasn't been "corrected" and "rehabilitated" in Dick Hall-Sizemore's judgment and to his liking by his Confederates at the Virginia Department of Corrections [VADOC] then release from prison in light of the COVID-19 pandemic is a nonstarter.
I responded to Dick Hall Sizemore, not because his 4/11/20 post is coherent, cogent with insight and enlightenment. But I respond to Dick Hall Sizemore in particular because for too damn long we have been subjected to the schizophrenic intellect of the Hall-Sizemore's of the land seizing the narrative and distorting it to suit and fit their idealistic and reactionary politics and his post is another pathetic exercise.
I begin with the only response the COVID-19 pandemic ask of government, the state and it's prison official is release
Sunday, June 14, 2020
What Covid-19 Presents Within The Prison Setting Is Something More Fundamental & Basic By William Thorpe
The post adds nothing nor does it obfuscate. Because the question is not about governmental behavior during a circumstance, [pandemic] that imposes unlawful and illegal conditions on "lawfully" imprisoned persons. That question is already settled. The U.S. Constitution 8th amendment and its jurisprudence are clear, Government cannot subject prisoners to conditions that mortally impact life
Nor does COVID-19 present a novel question within state-organized violence of prison and it's administration despite its novel Corona designation. The issue at hand is simple:
- Under what circumstance are prisoners released
- Under what circumstance are prisoners treated with the same rationality of law that transformed them into prisoners,
- And under what circumstance will speculators and speculations on prison and prisoners set aside colloquial impulses and come to terms with the fact contradictions ignored mature into antagonisms of hypocrisies and delusions mocking the social contract and its politic-law underpining.
Consider this: A prisoner having served 20 of a 30-year sentence for armed robbery and COVID-19 happens. So lawfully and within the social contract, there can only be one action and
response
The COVID-19 Pandemic presents prisoners, families, allies, advocates and the taxpaying citizenry including victims of crime [because victims of crime should stand shoulder to shoulder with the advocacy that government, its prison officials are not up and above law and its politics] with the opportunity to unequivocally and unambiguously confront that governmental presumption of unconditional seizure and possession of the prisoner
There is only one action for government during the COVID-19 Pandemic relative to the prisoner and prison and that is
William Thorpe is at Eastham Unit in Texas in Solitary Confinement since 1996, Virginia exiled him in 2019 to Texas
Monday, June 1, 2020
Prison Is Speech By The State and It's Organized Violence By William Thorpe
Monday, May 18, 2020
Attacking The U.S. Postal Service Is A Violation of The U.S. Constitution and Why It Is A Criminal Justice Reform Issue By William Thorpe
"The Constitution of the United States of America
Article 1 Section 8
The Congress shall have power........To establish Post Offices and post roads"
Monday, May 4, 2020
Monday, March 23, 2020
NPR's Michelle Martin, Accountability and the 4/16/18 South Carolina Incident
On 3/1/20 NPR's [National Public Radio] Michelle Martin allowed the whatever his name, Director of South Carolina's Department of Corrections to escape his accountability by continuing the mischaracterization of the 4/16/18 killing of 7 prisoners and 17 injured at South Carolina's Lee Correctional Institute as a simple matter of Gang activity.
Whether or not the immediate cause of the 4/16/18 violence was gang activity is besides the point. Had NPR's, Michelle Martin prepared for the 3/1/20 media event, which not only included the Director evading his accountability, but 3 hand-picked South Carolina, prisoners representing the purported reform of the South Carolina prison system. She would have held to account the irrelevant named Director for practices of South Carolina's Department of Corrections that not only are found to be unconstitutional hence illegal but on its face fostered the environment that enabled the death of 7 prisoners who were not sentenced to prison to die.
There is a specific reason why we typically find the prison systems of southern former Confederate Slaves holding states, especially those that scream the loudest of their Conservative values, of which South Carolina is one, violating the equality before the law underpinning of their social relations. Which is the extra-judicial existence of prison officials being above the law and the lack of accountability.
Gang activity isn't any more corrosive than the malfeasance of the prison official who having swore toe uphold the law behaves above it, and for NPR's Michelle Martin to interview the whatever his name, Director of South Carolina's prison system and not make this obvious point. Actually, ask who really is to blame for the death of those 7 prisoners during the 4/16/18 incident, is it the prisoners who killed fellow prisoners the Director of the prison system whose malfeasance fostered and enabled the killing of the journalist who failed to hold to account prison officials who have the legal and professional responsibility for the lives of prisoners.
By William Thorpe
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