-Scott D Culp, Correctional Facility in Chino, CA
The labor-intensive aspect of the current war between Ukraine and Russia has the latter scrambling for able-bodied men. Taxing from the lowest hanging fruits of a dictatorship, Russian prisoners were openly pressed for conscription into the paramilitary “Wagner Group.”
I can certainly empathize with a convict seeking absolution from sins, especially clothed in the austerity of the State. Ours is a cryptic world where the foreshadow of a war involving our fraternal dis-order of brothers has us questioning our worth in society. Because of the economic costs of a regular army, the emergence of the privatized military industry has skyrocketed.
Some fifty-thousand prisoners bent the knee pledging fealty for the chance of repentance, “that is not perfect.” Yevgeny Prigozhin emptied the freaking prison system in Russia. There is historical precedent and contemporaneous links in ideology that point directly to a military doctrine accessing the pool of the prison industrial complex.
The primary characteristic of prophetic self-consciousness is an awareness of a call. Since childhood, there has always been an underlying unity of thoughts working towards rebellion.
These issues I write about are socially alive but not easily perceived without the benefit of tragic knowledge. Since society continues to magnify itself against us, then let us also boast. I’ve reached through prison bars to grasp on transitory shafts of light in the hope it would sustain me.
I found redemption cleaning prison toilets with gratitude for the blessings he didn’t take. There is no crystal-gazing insight into our lives except for one cold hard fact, our lot is like that of the Bedouin, a nomadic desert people, who have passed down a millennium of culture, beliefs and legends in the oral tradition.
Those forlorn Russian conscripts are no different from the Greeks fifth century BC condemned to row in the bowels of a trireme on the Aegean Sea. Gallows humor entered our lexicon chained to a bench, seated behind an ore. It’s then they postulated that the gallows would be better. Any prisoner worth his salt rises from those depths. Whether he’s ankle deep in shhh, or feeling the warmth of God’s hand in a shaft of light, our character is formed in the oblivion of banishment. Giovanni Giacomo Casanova 1725-98 was lionized for his escape from Mamertine (Maeertine Prison was where the Apostle Paul was locked up). In Casanova’s time, “cannon fodder” became synonymous with prison conscripts thrown at the breach. Like malware, the term “federally eff-ed” defines itself cryptographically. The violent notion suggested by or associated with this begs for some sentient machine therapist to illuminate the impact this bad software has had on our society.
The nature of prophecy is twofold; either inspired or acquired. For bank robbery I was imprisoned at USP Lompoc, “The New Rock” located on Vandenburg Air Force Base, and USP Atwater located on Castle Air Force Base. Being a prisoner doesn’t disqualify me from the position of prejudice, personal interest, and incredulity as to what variable some DC Think Tank used to convince our government to house federal prisoners on Air Force Bases.
I’d like to tell you those Russian prisoners are fighting the good fight, but I can’t. Vladimir Putin is a despot, and his attempts to resurrect the corpse of the Soviet Socialist Republic on the backs of prison conscription gives us an edgy glimpse inside the ideology that measures us as variables that approach zero.
Yevgevy Prigozhin, “Wagner Chief” gave an interview one cold night east of Bahkmut. He was surrounded by uniformly laid, dead Wagner conscripts. Eerily I watched as his breath vapor clearly set his life apart from the field of death.
In that moment, there were no good thoughts concerned with changing perceptions, there was no calling to breathe life into men shed of their criminal skin who took up faces from the ancient gallery.
In that moment my thoughts mingled with doubt as to whether this “Billionaire Strongman” knew the history of a Thracian prisoner named Spartacus.