SPEECH AND PRISON REFORM IN VIRGINIA III By William Thorpe

In I and II of this fundamental component of prison reform in Virginia, I stated the obvious which is all social facts are SPEECH which in turn is packaged and organized as Politics. However just as there are two sides to social facts and realities, politics and its practice has its two sides when it confronts anything that is questioning, challenging and calling out its status quo, meaning requiring reform or change and nothing spells this out more than, Prison Reform in Virginia. So what we see in Virginia are the unimpeachable, irrefutable and indisputable facts of the corruption and impunity of the Virginia prison official as witnessed by the prisoner, families of the prisoner, some prison officials, even certain conscientious victims of crime, revelations at pseudo over sight hearings, post-event investigatory reports. Then we have compendium, chronicles of Court action upon Court action documenting, detailing the savagery and barbarity of the Virginia prison official done under the political partisanship permissiveness of the people of Virginia. All of which express and exhibit that inchoate murmurings of injustice that is ever present as lattice of the Social Contract, which is rendered inchoate by the type of and side of politics practiced by a type and sort of reform advocacy. Now the basis for prison reform as I've already stated are an exhaustive existence of facts that are unbiased and nonpartisan, I mean the event of a Virginia prison official racially slurring a prisoner, is a fact, irrespective and regardless of sophistry of defense conjured up by the Virginia Attorney Generals Office, who legally represents offending prison officials. So if the event(s) anchoring and underpinning the narrative of prison reform are social facts meaning it is accessible to all, then the reform narrative should reflect that. In other words, prison reform in Virginia should command the moral authority of civic responsibility upon the simple proposition that the prison official of all, must be a paragon of compliance with law and this requires an energetic SPEECH. So let's take the case of JAMYCHEAL MITCHELL and the words of Judge REBECCA BEACH SMITH instructive and illustrative of SPEECH.

I want to excerpt certain salient comments by U.S.DISTRICT JUDGE FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF VIRGINIA, NORFOLK DIVISION, REBECCA BEACH SMITH IN THE CASE OF ADAMS v. NAPHCARE INC. 2019 U.S DIST.LEXIS 45534, dealing with the incident of JAMYCHEAL MITCHELL, who was arrested for allegedly shoplifting $5.05 worth of pop and snacks from a 7-Eleven on April 22, 2015 and his subsequent death in a Virginia State Hospital on August 19, 2015 in his own feces and bodily fluids after wasting away from his original arrest weight of 180lbs to 144lbs, because a State Judge Morton V. Whitlow upon the realization that Mr. Jamycheal Mitchell required mental health care for competency to go through the due process of law due to the alleged $5.05 shoplifting, ordered him to a Virginia State hospital, which became Mr. Mitchell's death sentence, thereby becoming another unimpeachable, irrefutable and undeniable fact of prison reform in Virginia. I now excerpt what Judge Rebecca Beach Smith had to say and its role in the SPEECH OF PRISON REFORM IN VIRGINIA. She wrote in her opinion in the above cited case....."WHILE INSTITUTIONAL AND INDIVIDUAL ACCOUNTABILITY IN THIS MATTER REMAINS WOEFULLY LACKING, THE CASE AND RESULTING SETTLEMENT AT LEAST BRING ABOUT SHARPENED FOCUS ON, AND HEIGHTENED PUBLIC AWARENESS OF, THE PROBLEMS OF INCARCERATING MENTALLY ILL INDIVIDUALS. ONE RESULT OF THIS HEIGHTENED AWARENESS WAS THE ENACTMENT OF THE JAMYCHEAL MITCHELL LAW IN THE VIRGINIA LEGISLATURE. see act of March 24, 2017 (*JAMYCHEAL MITCHELL LAW*), CH 759,2017 Va acts 1383 (codified as amended at Va.Cod Ann.sec.53.1-2,53.2-5,53.1-127 (2013 and Supp.2018),and codified at Va. Code Ann. 53.1-69.1 (Supp.2018) ( New Virginia Code sec.53.1-69.1 OUTLINES PROCEDURES FOR THE "[R]EVIEW OF DEATH OF INMATES IN LOCAL CORRECTIONAL FACILITIES).THE REVIEW AND OVERSIGHT OF THE PROBLEMS OF ADDRESSING MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES THROUGH CORRECTIONAL FACILITIES APPEARS NOW TO BE AN ONGOING ISSUE OF PUBLIC CONCERN. CONSEQUENTLY, THIS CASE AND THE RESULTING SETTLEMENT, TOGETHER WITH CONTINUED EFFORTS TO IMPROVE THE SYSTEMIC BUREAUCRATIC AND INDIVIDUAL FAILURES THAT LED TO MR. MITCHELL'S SHAMEFUL DEATH, DO GIVE IMPORTANCE AND MEANING TO HIS LEGACY."....." ALL THIS BEING SAID, THE LACK OF HUMAN DECENCY SHOWN MR. MITCHELL CAN NEVER BE RECTIFIED. THIS CASE EPITOMIZES THE MAXIM "MANS INHUMANITY TO MAN" ROBERT BURNS, MAN WAS MADE TO MOURN A DIRGE (1784)(MAN INHUMANITY TO MAN MAKES THOUSANDS MOURN").[All that I've excerpted are from Rebecca Beach Smith, Federal Judge].Now I continue with the work of SPEECH AND PRISON REFORM IN VIRGINIA, what I've excerpted from Rebecca Beach Smith makes all our points from all basis and perspectives, because a careful read and study of her opinion and the entire incident of Mr. Mitchell, through Virginia's legislature coining a law in his name makes the point of all that we state, as it presents us with the question, what exactly is our Judge Smith telling us.

.I do like what Judge Smith had to say in her opinion and ruling, not because she is giving us original insight, but she ties up so neatly, what I'm saying with this SPEECH AND PRISON REFORM IN VIRGINIA work. I remember the Jamycheal Mitchell incident, but when one is a member of a target group and demographic as I am, Jamycheal Mitchell's experiences are the fabric of the Black American experience, Nationally and of course in Virginia, which I can objectively say, state and declare is its historical and antecedent architect, so yes I paid attention to Mr. Mitchell's situation not as an academic indulgence but as another revelatory yard stick of the industrialization of the administration of impunity and lack of accountability. I begin: the details of the Jamycheal Mitchell incident allege, shoplifting of $5.05 worth of pop and snacks from a 7-Eleven, so a State Judge did what law and common practices suggested, he placed Mr. Mitchell on the multimillion Dollar assembly line of Virginia's State Hospital operations, which is what Judge Rebecca Beach Smith, characterized in her opinion with....."[T]his case and the resulting settlement, together with continued efforts to improve the systemic bureaucratic and individual failures that led to Mr. Mitchell's shameful death". I do have to say this, I recognize and realize the effort in Judge Smith's writings, imbued with the integrity of her sense of self and the affront the Jamycheal Mitchell incident presents to her but then I'm also reminded of a letter President Dwight Eisenhower is alleged to have written about the horrors he witnessed upon liberating Nazi death camps, to which he supposedly observed that and I paraphrase, that he never thought such levels of mans depravity and inhumanity to man existed. Of course Eisenhower was rocked by what he encountered in those Nazi death camps, just as Judge Smith was rocked as she said in her 30 years of being a Federal Judge by the Jamycheal Mitchell incident, still though the honesty of our sense of self and morality isn't based on how shocked or rocked by terms of a human condition which for whatever reason we never actually and really paid attention to its effrontery and incredulity till we are subjected to its accounting. Because what America did President Dwight Eisenhower grow up in that the horrors of a Nazi death camp in the 20th century became his measure of mans depravity to fellow man? Wasn't the disembowelment of the enslaved pregnant Black woman as punishment by the enslaver horrific? or wasn't all those laws and State Constitutions declaring chattel enslavement of Black People horrific enough, I mean what is worse the fact that the Eisenhowers of the world didn't have the presence of mind to recognize the pure unadulterated depravity and horrors of Jim Crow segregation, that banality is an insidious corruption hypocritizing that sense of self, till one is shocked with the graphic.

Judge Smith despite her herculean professional efforts is unable to conceal that inherent lawlessness and impunity of a system that birthed Jamycheal Mitchell and then subsequently administered his demise and death. We see this with her initial declaration, "While institutional and individual accountability in this matter remain woefully lacking,...." and what I find instructive and revealing with Judge Smith's comments, is this inherent systemic lawlessness and impunity displayed by Mr. Mitchell's experience isn't an aberration or anomaly, but is the natural character of a Social Contract and its status quo that accepts it as that profane "cost benefit analysis ". In so many words, yes Magna Carta wrestled recognition from King John, but despite the passage of millennia, that dismissive, dictatorial and supremacist tendency, is in principle an operative term of the Social Contract and human condition and is still with us. Just as it was herculean for Judge Smith, it is herculean for the emergence of the necessary type of politics, to make accountability not an exception and herculean but a natural and common state, which she recognized with her..." All this being said, the lack of human decency shown Mr. Mitchell can never be rectified...... ".What Judge Smith allows us to face up to, which is what this work on SPEECH AND PRISON REFORM IN VIRGINIA enables is, the debate isn't about the political-economic interest of Virginia's imprisonment scheme post The Commonwealth's defeat in The Civil War, in other words the focus isn't on that back door reintroduction of unremunerated labor post Civil War, but now that The Commonwealth's imprisonment scheme is formulated under the "politics of public safety and its partisan exploitation", we disagree with Judge Smith with her posit in her opinion.." The review and oversight of the problems of addressing mental health issues through correctional facilities appears now to be an ongoing issue of public concern".Our disagreement has a historical character because,".....the problems of addressing mental health issues through correctional facilities appears now to be an ongoing issue of public concern "., isn't new, a serious amount and percentage of Virginians have as long as I've been imprisoned by the Commonwealth exerted enormous amount of energy decrying its antagonistic circumstance. What is a correct assessment is Virginia's status quo are incapable of staking no other position than that expressed by Judge Smith and we see this because despite the conditions and circumstances at Virginia prisons proper and not mere local facilities inducing and causing an unacceptable amount of suicides, the JAMYCHEAL MITCHELL LAW, which Judge Smith extols and touts as a positive and responsive outcome of Mr. Mitchell dying in his feces and bodily fluids ONLY extends to Virginia local facilities and Jails. In other words even as Virginia's legislature makes the cursory noises of recognizing Mr. Mitchell's humanness, it cannot bring itself to hold The Virginia Department of Corrections and its State facilities accountable under the rubric of MITCHELL'S LAW, thus making a mockery of its own actions, and its this type of politics and its partisan narrative we must change for Reform of Virginia's imprisonment scheme. What we do welcome from Judge Rebecca Beach Smith is her subtle indication, recognizing that bureaucracy and systemic and I add intransigence are mere symptoms of the political and that as I've noted ties in neatly with our recognition and assertion that the work of holding the Virginia prison official accountable and reforming the Virginia prison system is with THE SPEECH OF POLITICS.

By William Thorpe

I'm William Thorpe Virginia exiled me to the Texas prison system. I'm solitary confined at the Wainwright Unit and if you feel any kinda way about this work contact me by Securus email using the Texas prison number #2261982