I BEGIN: Virginia State and Federal Courts have fundamentally recognized, loss of earning capacity, human capital, opportunity and liberty as economic harm. Nonetheless, Courts have treated the loss of liberty as a primary baseline cost of imprisonment, but when conditions of the imprisonment exceed Virginia and United States Constitutional limits, causing measurable physical or psychological injury or deprive the prisoner of opportunities the State is not entitled to take then the harm becomes compensable and once harm is compensable, loss of productivity becomes a valid economic measure of damages. The question is also this, Virginia legislators along with the Courts bandy about supposed jurisprudential definitions of primary Social Contract terms as Liberty, Human Capital, Opportunity and Productivity that only are reflective of biases and interests, that require a general baseline of acceptance from the People of Virginia, in other words, if imprisonment is practiced in the name of the People of Virginia, it must and should require a denominator of cognizable purpose that is firmly in pursuit of the "unity of the people", yet its absence is what we have as observable facts of Virginia's Social Contract. So when the Commonwealth or State of Virginia deprives the Prisoner of opportunities it is obligated to provide, as codified in Virginia Law at Title 53.1,as mandated education, vocational training, rehabilitative programming or imposes conditions that destroy human capital, despite the fact that this formulation of issues of Virginia's imprisonment scheme is the least developed, the prisoner can then argue, you didn't just confine me, but you destroyed my productive capacity which you had no right to do. But because the Virginia citizenry isn't cued in on what is required for that perfection of the unity of the people or simply put that pursuit of unconditional equality under law, there isn't the necessary scrutiny of Virginia's imprisonment scheme, that will excavate it with clarity that it isn't a crass availability, a means of satisfying sadistic impulses. If imprisonment is supposed to be only a loss of liberty and the actual conditions destroy human capital, because the State of Virginia has purposefully and deliberately left vague and ill defined what its imprisonment conditions are beyond the deprivation of a relative and approximate freedom of action, what it presents then is the argument that Prison is not merely a deprivation of liberty but a State-engineered destruction of human capital. The State in its pursuit of Imprisonment may seize liberty, but it may not destroy the person and when it does the economic value of that destruction is compensable, because the State of Virginia primarily already sees the human being categorically in the political-economy terms of value. The State of Virginia as intimated and hinted by debates and fights over its imprisonment scheme in debates over overcrowding, solitary confinement, reentry, Department of Corrections budgets, rhetoric over Rehabilitation vs. Punishment. All of this reveal that Virginia knows that imprisonment destroys more than liberty, it destroys capacity, opportunity, and long term human potential. However no mainstream Virginia figure has the courage to say such outright, because saying it forces a moral and fiscal reckoning the State isn't prepared to face. Nonetheless every time the Virginia Politician talks about, workforce shortage, the need for "second chances" or the economic benefits of reentry programs is an implicit admission that the prison system suppresses human capital and reduces future productivity.
We also see this tacit admission in the fight against Solitary Confinement as exploited and deployed by the Virginia prison official, with opponents standing on arguments that show cognitive decline, psychological deterioration, and long term-functional impairment, which is the logic of "loss of productive capacity", just expressed in clinical terms. Virginia's wrongful conviction compensation is based on the idea that the State took more than it was entitled to take and the "economic value" of that loss must be repaid. We also see it in Juvenile Justice Reform, with the argument that Youth incarceration destroys, educational trajectories, earning potential and life time opportunity which are explicitly without euphemisms describing human capital destruction. What all of this shows and reveals is that systemic fly in the Social Contract ointment of The Commonwealth of Virginia, which fundamentally is an unwillingness to unconditionally without qualification recognize Human Life. Because the recognition of human life is due to the acceptance and understanding of terms of interaction and its stability as Law and its process that is due in its application. But because human life is recognized "conditionally", meaning it isn't accepted equally under law, which then reveals impunity or abuse, mistreatment, violations under the generality as, dehumanization. In otherwards even as the Social Contract as political-economy valuation and terms of relation of human life are firmly grounded as basis of the human condition and its variegated expressions. We see it accorded distinctions, classes, groupings, characteristics that show an extreme form of intellectual dysfunction and conceptual confusion irrespective of basis, even though purporting to realize the intellectual work of maintaining the social contract, what we see is just a crass indulgence of cutting off the nose to spite the face. In other words, even as human life is denigrated and dehumanized, it still is the only means and mechanism of actualizing value or that one and only purpose of it as the business of creating those conditions and circumstances for the existence of human life. Now, despite these herculean efforts of misinformation we as a people are bombarded with, by all the idealistic reactionary agents of futility, we are not stuck and caught up in an informational black hole of decrepit models of the ignorance's of the human condition. As a people we might not readily posses the characterizing language of our experienced antagonisms, but that doesn't mean that for example we are blind to the fact that if The Commonwealth will use the imprisonment model as application of its justice, the imprisoned shouldn't be subjected to conditions and circumstances that destroy their humanness. There is nothing about Virginia's construct of imprisonment that can be shown to be nothing less than sadism as implicit attitude towards human life and this isn't even indictment based on Virginia's history of the chattel enslavement of Black People, instead what we state is imprisonment cannot continue as its surrogacy.
By William Thorpe
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