We at VAPAC Acknowledge Inc. Magazines Response

In March/April 2020 issue of Inc. Magazine, we were reminded that as government is of, by, and for the people. Antagonisms within the social contract and compact are therefore expressions of the people and grasp of what it means to be held accountable.

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.....

"As a staff, we are aware of the need to confront systemic racism in our work".

So as: Government is of, by and for the people, we at VAPAC understand that individual accountable actions as Inc. Magazine's within our social contract and compact is also how we resolve systemic racism

By VAPAC

*NOTE*  "SALUTE" to VAPAC our grassroots committee for educating proactively in addressing racism 

Further Reading

•  Why we aren't working on June 19th        Inc.com

Whats Wrong With Dick-Sizemore, His Support For Covid-19 & The Politics of Prison & Death By William Thorpe

I want to begin asking Dick Hall -Sizemore's groupies on BaconsRebellion.com, LarryTheG,  Steve Haner, Nancy-Naive Acbar, Reed Falwell 3rd, TooManyTaxes, djrippert  to name a few. Have they ever experienced Dick Hall-Sizemore being anything else than a shill for the Virginia Department of Corrections? Has Hall Size-More spoke on the myriad documented and archived malfeasance and criminality by Virginia Prison officials?

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       not of some prisoners as the toe testing politics of what is to be done with prisoners is cowardly being practiced by politicians and a sizable but miserable amount of prison reform advocates and activists         but release of all prisoners.

Imprisonment Is Conditional on Law and the Underpinning Politics

Imprisonment first and foremost is conditional because it is conditioned by its legality. There is nothing in the circumstance of the imprisonment of the prisoner that gives the prison official unconditional rein to hold in confinement and detention a prisoner unconditionally. Every class of prisoner from those sentenced to be murdered to those on house arrest, the imprisonment is subject to whether government, the state and it's prison officials have the legal right to detain the prisoner. The prisoner during the imprisonment discovers, new facts, new evidenced and presents such discovery to government, the state, its court, and judges either seeking release, a new trial of sentence reduction, a circumstance that can and will alter the condition of being imprisoned. So there is nothing in the imprisonment circumstance that implies, as soon as the prisoner is in the cluches of the prison officials     the seizure and condition is final. 

Secondly, the legality of the imprisonment is dependent on the viability of the politics underpinning the legal structure that imprisoned the prisoner. So for example and history is replete with examples of as soon as a political system is extinguished whether, by revolution or civil and external wars, prisoners are released from their imprisonment. i.e. America, France, Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, all revolutions to name a few. The COVID-19 pandemic presents us with such a circumstance. Furthermore, we are informed by our pre-COVID-19 pandemic politics that the world as we knew it has changed. That there is an emergence of a new social compact, to wit new politics, which is underscored by the socialistic political-economy we are experiencing. From trillions being pumped into the economy by the federal government and the Federal Reserve Bank      to where society at large resembles prison even to the prison jargon of "lockdowns." And as a final nail in the legality coffin, there is nothing in U. S. Virginia, Texas law that asks a prisoner die during a pandemic as part of the terms of the sentence. As a matter of fact U.S. Virginia, Texas law prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, but the thrust of what I'm saying is the COVID-19 pandemic is one law and its political underpinning never factored or considered, therefore government, the state and it's prison officials lack any authority from the social-compact to maintain seizure of the prisoner under the illegal condition created by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Dick Hall-Sizemore Is Lawless With Reactionary Impulses

It isn't that Dick Hall-Sizemore is incapable of understanding the conditionality of imprisonment and the illegal circumstance the COVID-19 pandemic imposes on the condition. But the fact is Dick Hall Sizemore appraises law in a lawless extrajudicial manner specifically as a mechanism to be wielded in controlling the other. So therefore the extrajudicial expectations and logic of his 4/11/20; post is nothing less than it's continuation.

Naturally, Hall-Sizemore can only support the COVID-19 pandemic and its death by default as an anticipation of his idealistic and reactionary politics of prison and death. Sizemore closes his post with, "To be fair to the Governor, however, he cannot just practically throw the prison gates open as some are advocating" reveals Dick Hall-Sizemore's lawless and reactionary impulses, because unless Hall-Sizemore is suggesting that the COVID-19 pandemic hasn't introduced an illegal condition upon imprisonment which I have shown that it has, then the only cause of action for government and the state is to "throw the prison gates open" and release all prisoners.

William Thorpe is in Solitary Confinement at Eastham Unit of the Texas Department of Corrections

Related 

• A State-By-State Look at COVID-19 in prisons  (The Marshall Project)
• Virginia Department of Corrections clears 230 prisoners for early release - Virginia Mercury 

• "People are dying" : Concern over COVID-19 sparks push for prison release

• Race, Power and Policy:Dismantling Structural Racism

What Covid-19 Presents Within The Prison Setting Is Something More Fundamental & Basic By William Thorpe

Okay, good old Virginia exiled me to Texas so it took a few stops for the old pony express to drop off the April 5, 2020 Bacons Rebellion: Virginia Jails and Prisons Brace for Pandemic post by Anonymous.

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     yet every single aspect of prison pre-COVID-19 and post does and will, due to the lack of accountability.

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.

What COVID-19 presents and does within the prison setting is something more fundamental and basic       it exposes the irrationality of governments anticipations as prison officials who are no more experts on anything, despite their idealistic pronouncements conjured whole cloth, hocus pocus like, for example, designations like, "the criminal mind of the prisoner" shibboleth intended as expertise to justify their existence, when confronted with the fact that prison as a lawful and legal construct has no basis to maintain detention of prisoners who were not sent to prison to be harmed of killed whether extrajudicial or by Ribonucleic Acid elements. So the question is simple how does law address the condition of the human being transformed into prisoner by its dictates during an epochal emergence that considers nothing than its cataclysmic logic, as COVID-19 does?

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      release. Because there isn't a governmental action that guarantees that the lawfulness that resulted the detention will assure the prisoner and the community that he will remain uninfected and unimpacted by COVID-19. The Prisoner wasn't sent to prison to die and COVID-19's default action is killing. COVID-19 is a condition no law or social-contract can ask a human to its subject. Yet discussions of what is government to do during the COVID-19 Pandemic within the prison setting as the April 5. 2020 Virginia Jails and Prisons Brace for Pandemic post speculates are indulged in as if the prisoner is an unconditional property and possession of government and its organized violence and that is not so.

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      when no such condition of absolute possession within the human condition exist and not even the politics of death and prison can distort it.

There is only one action for government during the COVID-19 Pandemic relative to the prisoner and prison and that is       release.

William Thorpe is at Eastham Unit in Texas in Solitary Confinement since 1996, Virginia exiled him in 2019 to Texas

Prison Is Speech By The State and It's Organized Violence By William Thorpe

The colloquialism "The only thing prison provides is time and what the prisoner does with the time is solely his choice."

On the surface and superficially it sounds commonsensical making all the sense in the world because it fits the narrative of the national status quo and its pursuit of a supposed responsibility and its individual accountability. But upon scrutiny, we find it is just another gibberish and idealistic utterance in the employ of the controlling functions of the state and its national status quo. And why should we simply stop with prison being the only environment requiring the accountability of individual responsibility        Lets expand it to general life, beginning with the argument point from our political and religious reactionary brethren, the life begins at conception demagoguery and let's hold that construct of life responsible and accountable for itself independent of the mother and humor at its collapse in the objectivity of its anticipation. Which by the way as much as our reactionary brethren push for life at conception, the fact it is still based on the responsibility and accountability of the mother as an independent anticipation, in no uncertain terms mocks the responsibility and accountability supposition.

And it makes the same point, that as much as the controlling mechanism of the status quo expects a self-policing imperative with our buy into a superficial and speculative grasp of individual responsibility and accountability. The fact remains, prison provides more than time. Prison is speech by the state and it's organized violence. Prison as function of the state assumes responsibility and accountability for and of the imprisoned in dicta to provide.

Thus the responsibility and accountability of the state to the prisoner as it exercises it's organized violence speech of imprisonment should not be excused nor apologized away with the naive and delusional observation that the prisoner in and for theirself should have the presence of mind and ambition to experience the passage of the imprisonment time in a supposed manner when the very lack or bias of the supposed is what resulted the prisoners confinement to begin with.

The adage "the devil is in the details" isn't sophistry and society and its inherent relations cannot escape its scrutiny and consequences of those relations will compel such scrutiny regardless of whether we are intellectually-material enough or still indulging in the intellectual-liberalism of our subjectivity. Because even the sun bows down to reason as the practice of our brethren in 1789 reminded us and again we were taught from 1818-1828 that colloquial traditions and culture are just that mechanisms of the supposed, to be brushed aside as feeble articles of backwardness while new realizations in the employ of progress enable the emergence of a new culture and tradition which in the prison context is reform and holding state and it's organized violence responsible and accountable.

By William Thorpe