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| Buckingham Correctional Center |
Virginia still houses prisoners who are parole eligible who have been repeatedly turned down for parole for from twenty to fifty years. As of this writing all parole eligible inmates have been away from their loved ones for at least nineteen years.
Virginia's Department of Corrections is holding about 4000 men and women in prison simply because the Parole Board will not give these prisoners a second chance, even though the only reason to hold them is to punish them and to keep the prison system at full capacity.
Many of those who are parole eligible are model prisoners and are first time offenders. The Board is keeping prisoners who are suffering mental and physical conditions deteriorating their lives and making it extremely hard for them to obtain gainful employment at an older age.
As prisoners grow older, the cost of their medical care increases dramatically. Virginia has a conditional release law for “geriatric” prisoners who are sixty years or older and have served at least ten years, or 65 or older and have served at least five years of their incarceration. Yet the Board is still not releasing prisoners unless they are near death. Virginia has the lowest parole grant rate in the entire nation!
Virginia also houses prisoners from foreign countries, mostly Hispanic and Asian, who are suitable for release and deportation, thus relieving the state of another monetary burden, yet all too often these, too, are systematically denied extradition.
Think of the money that could be saved and spent on schools and other projects if we stopped having the taxpayer pay for unnecessarily long prison stays. The total cost to incarcerate an average daily population of approximately 38,000 is $748.6 million, of which 4.8 % is from costs outside the corrections budget.
Please contact your lawmakers, the Governor’s office and news media to help correct the injustices created by the Parole Board and the current corrections system.
Charles E. Zellers, Sr., 1036758
Buckingham Correctional Center, B1-113-B
Box 430,
Dillwyn, VA 23938
3 comments:
Every one deserves second chances, and if this second one is for the better, why deny those people the chance of wanting to live their life outside under God`s will...I believed that CORRECTIONAL stands for corrections, for a chance,not for keeping prisoners to deterioration or if released, too old, to start anew, too late..then what is the essence of the word CORRECTIONAL? It might be time to think about revisions of the law...Why deserving for parole prisoners still being kept inside?What for?I feel for the writer of this letter, though I`ve never been in his shoes, but I understand where he is coming from...Can Discretionary Parole be applicable in this case? Paging Mr. President of USA.
I so agree with you. Our parole system in Virginia really needs a serious review.
Sorry for being so late in posting this and responding!
What second chance is there for the murder victim?
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