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By Scott Culp
The labor-intensive aspect of the current war between Ukraine and Russia has the latter scrambling for able bodied men. Taking from the lowest hanging fruit of a dictatorship, Russian prisoners were openly pressed for conscription into the paramilitary, “Wagner Group.”
I can certainly empathize with a convict seeking absolution for sins, especially clothed in the austerity of the State. Ours is a cryptic world where the foreshadow of a war involving our fraternal disorder of brothers has us questioning our worth in society. Because of the economic costs of a regular army and the emergence of the privatized military industry has skyrocketed, some 50,000 prisoners bent the knee pledging fealty for the chance of repentance, “that is not perfect”. Yevgeny Prigozhin emptied the prison system in Russia. There is historical precedent, and contemporaneous links in ideology that point directly to military doctrine accessing the pool of the prison industrial complex.
The primary characteristic of prophetic self-consciousness is an awareness of a call, since 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 at 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 peoples” 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, and tasting the taskmasters’’ lick as the bilges froth up the rubbish of human excrement with every swell of the wave. It’s then they postulated that the gallows would be better. Any prisoner worth his salt rises from those depths. Whether ankle deep in shit, 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 “Mammertine Prison was where the Apostle Paul was locked up.” In Casanovas’ time “cannon fodder” became synonymous with prison conscripts thrown at the breach. Like malware the term, “federally fucked” defines itself cryptographically. The sexually and violent notion, “suggested by or associated with” begs for some sentient machine therapist to illuminate us on 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 U.S.P. Lompoc, “The New Rock” located on Vandenburg Space Force Base, and U.S.P. 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 D.C. think tank used to convince our government to house Federal Prisoners on air force bases.
I’d like to tell you that 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 an 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 breathe vapor clearly set his life apart from a field of death. In that moment there were no 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.
