Prison Reform In Virginia and The Richmond Catholic Diocese Office Of Social Ministries By William Thorpe

On April 4th, 2019; The Catholic Virginian announced that the Virginian Catholic Diocese out of Richmond, Virginia was committing $10k to prison outreach out of its Office of Social Ministry. As a Virginia prisoner now exiled to a Texas Prison Solitary Confinement cell, I didn't applaud nor recognize the declaration then nor do I applaud it now, neither am I simplistically being critical of the Richmond Dioceses entrance into prison reform in Virginia.

What I however state is despite the enormous historical harm, destruction and violence the Catholic Church and its thought has wrought and unleashed on the human condition. It stands that redemption for both the church as an institution and prison and imprisonment as a social and political exercise is the willingness to side with the transparency of institutional accountability. Meaning the query of reform as a realized and mature fact.

The Commonwealth of Virginia recently abolished its use of the death penalty, a use that was racist and arbitrary. Nor was it's dismissal based on any truism save political will      because its reactionary Republican and hypocritical white-evangelical Christian supporters who saw its imposition and use as means to the end of attaining speculative political power haven't relinquished, surrendered nor abandoned its utility as a political weapon. To wit, Donald Trump, a defeated and trounced in his refection bid, Republican President who was obscenely supported across the board by white     Evangelical Christians and corporate and Conservative Catholics, deploying the death penalty and its killing of prisoners as a spectacle, a blood lust orgy, compromising whatever remnant of judgment his supporters had, during the last days of his presidency. A deed so savage in its presumptions and anticipations that were Roman Caesar's who perfected the use of blood lust orgies resurrected with all their pagan sensibilities we would see them recoiling from the cowardice of the killings     yet was there an uproar and Ecclesiastic condemnation from the Catholic Church.

The Church despite its historicity of contradictions stands as subject and object of accountability. So yes, the work of prison reform recognizes the role the Catholic Church can play, when it reconciles its hypocrisies and is true to its mission. Because doesn't society claim that the validation of what in practice is nothing less than crass suppositions has its font from the church and its thought?

The church has the authority to demand accountability and transparency of the institutionalization of justice and the work of prison reform ask for it.

I'm in solitary confinement at the J.D. Wainwright Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

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