This is a Comrade Pitt. I’m calling in with a commentary.
This story is about an article which was by the Virginia newspaper, how they reported how the COVID-19 pandemic exposed their most contraband, namely drug, do not come through prison visitation rooms as the DOC has repeatedly tried to shape such narrative over the years.
The story was also republished on the October 2021 issue of Prison Legal News by Kevin Bliss. The Virginia DOC asserting that contraband solely comes from prison visitation room, they use it as a pretext to subject our family and friends through a degrading, dehumanizing, and intrusive body search procedure.
They even went as far as authorizing strip searches of minors, which received a lot of backlash, rightfully so. But despite the backlash, the secretary of public safety, Brian Moran still tried to justify strip searching minors by saying, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”
Well, he’s right, but what he failed to admit was that most contraband actually come through prison staff who are never subject to the same degrading, dehumanizing, and intrusive body searches that our loved ones are subjected to.
Since March 2020, Virginia, like most prisons, stopped contact visits from prisoners’ loved ones, but this does not stop contraband from coming into prisons which exposes the mere fact that our loved ones were used as scapegoats by being subjected through degrading, dehumanizing, and intrusive strip searches, simply because the Virginia DOC did not want to face the truth that it was their own staff who are responsible for bringing the vast majority of contraband inside prisons.
About two months ago or so, our fellow prisoner here passed away as a result of a drug overdose. And in the past three or four months, there have been two others who also have overdosed on fentanyl. It certainly didn’t come through prison visitation rooms.
Where it came from isn’t a mystery though. This explains why I call these places department of corruptions as opposed to what they try to portray themselves as department of corrections as they claim.
These commentaries are recorded by Prison Radio.
