GOVERNOR SPANBERGER HAS A COUPLE OF PREACHERS ON HER VIRGINIA PAROLE BOARD: WE NEED TO DO A DEEP DIVE ON WHAT IT SAYS ABOUT VIRGINIA'S IMPRISONMENT SCHEME By William Thorpe

Pictures are taken from the internet and are used for illustrative purposes only

First of all let me establish that personally I don't have an issue or problem with Religious representatives in any governance and administrative role and positions in the Commonwealth of Virginia's Social Contract, because Religion is as any other institutional establishment expressed as value, terms and relationship of Virginia's Social Contract, notwithstanding whatever presumptions institutions of the Social Contract orient their inherent identity, they're no more than aspects of the sum and whole. With this said, let's get into, this here we go again formulation of Virginia's imprisonment scheme's recognition that Parole isn't a step child but an integral dynamic. Various narratives have in pursuit of their specific and particular intentions played footsie with Virginia's Paroling dynamic, from Virginia Republicans under Governor George Allen of the racist "macaca" infamy, who abolished it in 1995, then Virginia Democrats unable to assert that there is nothing about the Commonwealth's Justice Formulation that is absolute as such Parole, Pardons, Commutations and all its various terms are necessary because we are dealing with the human condition and being, have allowed a vacuum to persist, which reactionaries and their shortsightedness have filled with their stagnancy. Yes Religion as institution does lay claim to an idea that irrespective of its revelation, which is relatively upon the biases of its human medium, is at times beacon and at others, bane to humanity, with the responsibility as focus of the consequences being on us as humanity to point out when it is straying a field, becoming something that is antagonistic as such must be opposed and resisted. From the Pennsylvania Quakers and their polemic on the Nations imprisonment scheme, which as a matter of fact realized the entity, "Penitentiary" through, the role Religion, in its Christian and Black Muslim aspects played as embodied in Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X in the continuing work of perfecting the unity of the people and not to gloss over the Biblical defiance expressed by Nat Turner and John Brown, Religion has been that two-sided coin at War with itself in this work of human development, maturity and realization, speaking for us the people, then to us, at us and finally against us with everything dependent on us the People, our ability to understand and question. Which is where we are with this presence of two Religious persons, Reverend Tyrone Nelson, Pastor of Sixth Mount Zion Baptist Church and Bishop Kevin White of Covenant Church in Portsmouth, on this newly constituted Virginia Parole Board under the Democratic Administration of Governor Abigail Spanberger. I BEGIN:As much as Virginia's Government embodied in the Parole Board places the onus on the Virginia prisoner or imprisoned Virginian, the reality is we have to have clarity, meaning we have to accept and come to terms with certain fundamental realities of Virginia's imprisonment scheme which Parole is component. Because Virginia's imprisonment scheme is constructed and erected on the still smoldering embers of the charnel plantations of Virginia's political-economic exploitation of the chattel enslavement of Black People and the Indentured servitude of a type of White Virginian. None of this is indictment, but what it ask is, we have to firstly come to terms with the fact that none of this has been confronted in a legitimate and practical manner on the logic that no one is flotsam.

This is what I mean by, Virginia's Imprisonment scheme is constructed and erected on the still smoldering embers of the charnel plantations of Virginia's political-economic exploitation of the chattel enslavement of Black People and the indentured servitude of a type of White Virginian. First of all the literal characterization of the words stand unopposed. Virginia's imprisonment scheme as it currently exist was a direct and intentional effort to undo what all the artillery and rifle shells along with saber slashes of the Civil War resulting in Lee's Appomattox surrender had settled in blood and gore. The ink wasn't dry to the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of The United States and its conditional abolishment of slavery, when the traitorous losing Confederacy, which Virginia held its Presidency, expressed their incorrigibility and psychotic affinity for slavery with the prompt, exploitation of the condition for its continued existence......"except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction", with enactment of thinly veiled and concealed laws to entrap the newly freed from slavery Black People and return them to the labor, purpose of slavery. So Prison and Imprisonment across the former slave holding Confederate States, including Virginia assumed a new purpose and character as it took on a new pathway, which was conviction of violation of any of the "Black Codes" that were popping up like popcorn. Before I continue, to those who will see this talk of "slavery" and retreat to that tired and dishonest specious and spurious commentary of "all of this slavery this slavery that was in the past, in history", well besides stating the obvious which is, the existence of all of life is in history, the present or now is only a potential with the realization and substance firmly in history. Secondly the argument that slavery or any other issue is without merit, because it's of history only reveals, "exploitation", impunity and the accountability aversion which are typical of the asocial and corrupt. Thirdly as I write human beings are being slaughtered between Israel and its opponents, because of what, a narrative of history, a history that its presumptions accord ten fold the duration of American and Virginian chattel slavery and what is funny is the same minds and hearts who scurry like roaches when the kitchen switch is flipped, in declaring that the slavery critique should be abandoned are the same ones who without any hint of irony, most vociferously and violently defend and are in support of whatever logic claimed by the warring parties in the Israel and Palestine speech. Fourthly what do they think birthdays, National Independence, Anniversaries, commemorations and lastly but not least, the very thing that makes us as humans, human, our memory and memories are about? To get back to this analytical deep dive on the presence and existence of Religious representatives on the Virginia Parole Board. What I'm outlining isn't to be taken as a final word on anything. Instead I anticipate that this topic is seen as what it actually is, a Godsend opportunity to hold Virginia's imprisonment scheme accountable and its dynamics subordinate to the People of the Commonwealth, with the necessary discussion it presents. I continue: Despite the fact that I haven't presented a comprehensive account of the current dynamic of Virginia's imprisonment scheme as birthed post-Civil War, the necessary records are available for the curious.

For thousands of years the human condition and its various Social Contract expressions existed without nothing we will recognize as the postindustrial construct of Prison. Not to digress into why industrialization emerged in the embrace of the idea of Prison and its evolutionary development to our current notion, what matters to this work of critiquing the presence of Religious representatives on Virginia's Parole Board, which by the way isn't novel and that all the more demands our current scrutiny, is the fact Prison is a fairly and relatively new institution. Even Colonial Virginia despite the fact it was populated by the socio-person and human being, who over thousands of years as Homosapien has remained with the same propensities and dispositions for deviance along with what we currently catalog as criminality, didn't see fit nor necessity compel, Prison as we again currently recognize it. So what this tells us and this is contrary to that porous sophistry produced by the current class of reactionaries on the Supreme Court of The United States, that there are class of disputes that require a logic and formulation that is set in stone, which in practice is nothing more than the speech of the dictatorship of conservatism and its exploitation and deployment of political supremacy to aver, distort and hold onto a world view whose window has long past sped past the vista. Because this is exactly where we find ourselves with Virginia's tango with the Parole component of its imprisonment scheme under the assumption that what ails it, why it has an antagonistic existence with the People of The Commonwealth and the Imprisoned Virginian is it lacks the Religious world view and it's discernment. The circumstance however with Virginia's Parole dynamic has nothing to do with who dispenses it, but everything to do with the unambiguous understanding that it exist as an affirmative anticipation. To understand this we have to see Virginia's imprisonment construct as it is a Frankenstein creation while denying that Frankenstein is being shocked into animation. Because if Virginia's imprisonment scheme was structured to exploit the conditionality of the abolishment of slavery done under the wink and nod of purveyors of impunity, in other words those who fundamentally denied that the enslaved were Human, which we have the words of Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy's President as proof, that the...."inequality of the white and black races" was "stamped from the beginning", then imprisonment is another dimension of this "stamped from the beginning", dehumanization and no one will suggest with a straight face that Virginia's operational philosophy of its imprisonment scheme and that of the Virginia Prison official isn't dehumanization regardless of its defensive logic. The victorious Allies didn't reject the Nazi defense of "following orders" during the accountability proceedings at Nuremberg, instead they rejected it under the simple recognition that the condition of humanness, the unqualified recognition of Human Life precedes orders. The Allies understood what orders are to a soldier, hell, they were soldiers, what they rejected in the Nazis was their conditionalizing Human Life, the Allies weren't without their own hypocrisies and contradictions, but what their existence at Nuremberg in that moment in time and History tells and reveals (not that we needed anymore confirmation),is, Human Life is the denominator and its recognition is the arbiter of accountability. So what the presence of Religious representatives on Virginia's Parole board points to is, what side of the coin are we being presented with, because we cannot become real and honest about Parole as component of Virginia's imprisonment scheme if the structural basis isn't restructured, with accounting and isn't that the work of Religion?

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