Virginia Changed It's Laws So The Director Of The Prison System Could Run It By The Seat Of The Pants By William Thorpe

Once upon a life time ago, Virginia prison law was based on The State Board Of Corrections setting standards for the running of the prison system. Then it was changed to allow and permit The Director Of The Virginia Department Of Corrections, see Virginia Code 53.1-10 (powers and duties of Director) to pretty much free style and implement whatever ideas suited his/hers fancy, even under the guise penology, it is still speculative, because there is nothing empirical or scientific as science is understood about penology. I say this to make a point about some of the claimed philosophical underpinning of what the Virginia prisoner is subjected to. Everything that I say, all my observations are based on 44 years of continued imprisonment by the Commonwealth of Virginia, which for a major part has been in solitary confinement and its maximum and super max prisons and not because I have any crazy, dramatic and atypical convictions, but because I have objected to the extra-judicial treatment plyed by the Commonwealth's prison officials. In other words I know what above the law means for the Virginia prison official.

Upon encountering Virginia Code 53.1, one would think, its title, Prisons and Other Methods of Corrections, indicates a legally cogent and comprehensive basis for treatment of the Virginia Prisoner, till you realize after running into Va. Code 53.1-10, that the Director as Head Honcho of The Prison System is pretty much free to experiment as he/she sees fit (but then Virginia hasn't had a she in the position yet in these 44 years of my imprisonment and that alone should have the Virginia woman furrowing her brow, with why).A number of our ancients have given us the observation that the measure of advancement, development and civility of a society isn't to be found in its well fed or elites, but its marginalized and the marginalized in Virginia are its prisoners and the social environment that produces them. Now the elites would naturally have us it see it the other way around, that their social exclusivity is the measure of Virginia and its civilization, but our humanness won't allow us, the delusion. With this said I can now point out why the authority given the Director of The Virginia Department Of Corrections is the inevitable conclusion of the perversion of Virginia's civilization. Virginia's civilization, its political-economy is built on the backs of the chattel enslavement of Black People and to a lesser degree the indentured servitude of a type of white person. In maintenance of Virginia's society built on the enslavement of human beings an entire set of thinking was created by the enslavers to distort their activities and inure their behavior and its that way of thinking that is the "discretion" given The Director of The Virginia Department of Corrections, by Va. Code 53.1-10. In other words the authority requires the thinking and behavior of an enslaver. See this case, Ruffin v. Commonwealth 62 VA 790, where in 1871 the Virginia Supreme Court ruled, pretty much that the prisoner was less than human. Now this steadfastness to the enslavers thinking exhibited by Virginia's Supreme Court, in 1871 came on the heels of The Civil War, the bloodiest war in the Nations history, to date. Which more than makes my point that, enslaving Black People which was Virginia's civilization, not only distorted the thinking but it inured the enslaver to the offensiveness of their behavior. Because it is almost psychopathic and cult like that despite the well documented perdition of the civil war, by the likes of Stephen Crane which was literally fought to destroy, Virginia and its Sister rogue States affinity and compulsion to enslave, its Supreme Court could still pine for slavery as social class, that it found it in the Virginia prisoner. Despite the fact that the Nation begun to in 1944 (see the case Coffin v. Reichard 143 F.2d 443), repudiate the thinking in the Ruffin ruling and supposedly come to its senses, finding shame that once upon a time a Virginia jurist found it "normal" to give us Ruffin v. Commonwealth and Virginia's Supreme Court itself in 1919 without much fanfare denounced the Ruffin ruling, in Haynes v. Peterson 125 VA 730.The thinking required in The Director of The Virginia Department of Corrections is a resurrection of the enslaver.

It's a well kept but in the open secret that Virginia's as the rest of the Nation, prisoner population exploded after The Civil War and through The infamy of Jim Crow, because imprisonment as it was becoming a more palatable mechanism for slavery allowed it's resumption without the accompanying vulnerability to the criticism that had wrought The Civil War. We see its Faustian bargain in the enumeration and existence of The 13th Amendment to The Constitution of The United States, where if slavery had been relegated to The Rogue States of The Rebellious Confederacy, prior to the Civil War upon its conclusion it was Nationalized under the pretext of punishment for criminal conviction. So if the Civil War was fought to rid the Nation of slavery (which in actuality it was) why then would the victors permit its Nationalized resurrection? The answer is found in what those newly freed former enslaved black people, as prisoners became, workers and laborers rebuilding the Nation under the guise of penal punishment. All of this are facts which The Virginia Department of Corrections conceals under the euphemism, "public safety" as core mission. Virginia is a whole entity and regardless of its disparate components, regardless of the shortsightedness of its reactionaries in whose world view and interest, its Justice Infrastructure and Prison system labors. What the Virginia public, its taxpaying non elite have to ask is what exactly is The Director of The Virginia Department of Corrections accomplishing, when the philosophy deployed and effected by the Department is practically at odds, even at war with contemporary grasp and cognition of The Human Condition? So for example its not even debatable anymore that the Prisoner's stable family contact is fundamentally as important as nutritionally adequate meals, because for one, a stable family connection prepares the prisoner for reentry into society (which The Department claims is a core mission) more than the pro forma pep talks it gives prisoners, just as nutritionally sound meals saves the taxpayer, the State, Health cost (unless the State of Virginia, perversely wants to redistribute wealth into the medical and health care industry, by paying for prisoner health care that could've been prevented by giving prisoners nutritionally adequate meals to begin with) yet what we see The Director and Department doing is the opposite. It perverts, family association by subjecting it to averse and punitive treatment, which it also does to food, by deliberating starving prisoners at Red Onion and Wallens Ridge State Prisons and its all tantamount to the prison official withholding health care medication from prisoners as punitive sanctions, notwithstanding the fact that such medications are obligations on The Commonwealth of Virginia to ensure a wholesome treatment of the prisoner. But what we have is because The Director is left to keep on resuscitating that depraved husk of the enslaver mindset The Virginia Department of Corrections is stuck in this wormhole of professing "public safety", while doing all that it possibly can to undermine and betray it. Because what exactly is it teaching the prisoner, who will be released that lying, fabricating false infractions, planting contraband, denying meals and even when meals are provided, its a violation, posing its own set of questions of fraud?

By William Thorpe

I'm William Thorpe Virginia exiled me to the Texas prison system. I'm solitary confined at the Wainwright Unit