PRISON REFORM IN VIRGINIA REQUIRES SHEDDING OUR INABILITY TO CONFRONT CONTEXT By William Thorpe

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

Some years ago, a Judge in Northern Virginia, who was a World War II veteran said this and I paraphrase to someone convicted and was about to be sentenced, that the convicted was the most violent person he had ever encountered. If my memory serves me right the accused was convicted of stabbing someone over 70 times !,of course it was a display of violence, but that is where we begin to cut our noses off to spite our face, because the issue and question isn't about the deed or act. Okay let's get at it, the Judge was a World War II veteran !!! come on the man had been in a war that birthed and witnessed the utter transformation of human behavior, Kids, were being crucified in the Ukraine, human beings were herded into enclosures and gassed as process of extermination, so many incendiary devices were used that the very air people breathed incinerated their lungs, perdition itself walked on two legs. There wasn't an aspect, facet and expression of human behavior and capacity that wasn't on full revelatory display, violence became just a pro forma default. I can indulge in the construct of superfluousness and become as that Northern Virginia Judge who had no problem in pronouncing the commission of an over the 70 times stabbing of a human by another human as being the most violent act he had ever encountered but I'll be disingenuous.

I started this work with the title PRISON REFORM IN VIRGINIA REQUIRES SHEDDING OUR INABILITY TO CONFRONT CONTEXT, because without the honest grasp of context what we end up doing is maintaining and supporting the sisyphean toil of warring with the quixotic windmills of the specific emergence at the expense of the systemic environment that permits, allows and enables specificity in the first place. The thing is the attitude and propensity to expend labor on the specific as it relates to the issue of crime and deviance, which necessitates the prison reform formulation has value for a segment of Virginia's population. In other words people make a living off maintaining the narrative of ignoring the systemic cause of the specific deed, or to state it, the beneficiaries of the status quo narrative of criminality and its opposition to reform see the relationship as the individuation of criminality irrespective of its heinousness as a culling of the herd albeit, a controlling mechanism that ensures that primary and fundamental focus on the business of being human, which is labor or work because without work or labor the necessary circumstances and conditions for human existence are nonexistent. Here is the contradiction that matures into antagonisms that exposes the human condition of idiocy, regardless of reason. Because as soon as we accept that humanity is capable of "behavior", period without gradation then our interaction and the subsequent relations stands on "context" and it is with context that we find that we have clay feet or that idealistic protection of that metaphorical "sacred bulls" or its other colloquial feint, "boys will be boys", with the flip side being context or mitigation is rarely, seldom or never given to the subjects and objects of the status quo narrative. Or in its other expression the subjects of the controlling motive and its various mechanisms are defacto less than, "other" and practically dehumanized, because if the very presence and existence of the human condition is context based or contextual and if there is wilful and deliberate intent and effort to ignore, overlook and deny, context then humanness itself is dehumanized. This brings me back to that World War II veteran Northern Virginia Judge, who had no problem in pronouncing the convicted before him as the most violent person he had ever encountered. In human affairs we get the place and purpose of hyperbole, but hyperbole is left to the circumstances of our everyday interactions and leadership and those with its bully pulpit, which a judgeship is category shouldn't indulge in it's undisciplined suppositionary speech, because it has far reaching consequences of distortional proportions, because the quintessential value of our human condition as expressed in the various social contracts, is that perfection of the unity of the people which reform or encompassing and utilitarian speech is basis. Yes "speech" distortions whether deliberate and insidious or colloquial ignorances can and will for a period serve exploitive ends of inducing disunity among the people while constantly struggling to stay a step ahead of the inevitable and inexorable reckoning and accountability. A quick example of this is the Confederate monument to Lee on Richmond's Monument Avenue and its encounter with the inevitable reckoning because it's existence was speech of disunity, which is the same space occupied by Virginia's anti-prison reform status quo and their short sightedness. There is nothing contradictory with the people of Virginia pursuing the repair of harm, what our speech of reform asserts is, Context.

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