Mauro Palma: prison multiplies evil – Giuseppe Rizzo

Palma, on the other hand, has taken another route. Since 2016 he has been president of the National Guarantor of the rights of persons deprived of their liberty, an independent body that deals with prisons but also with centers for migrants, compulsory health treatments (tso) and residences for the elderly. Today he has two degrees Honorary in law and is regularly invited as a jurist to lecture and lecture at universities around the world. Mathematics, however, has remained a continuous bass in his life: “Jails are full of horrors, numbers help me to take my thoughts elsewhere”. And they are not just a distraction: Palma graduated with a thesis on the formalization of language and with Walter Maraschini wrote a mathematics textbook that sold a million copies. “We criticized the way she was taught in high schools,” he says after ordering vegetable patties. “That text was a bit of a minority leader in the discussions of mathematics in those years.”

Despite the book’s success, Palma was conflicted. Born in 1948, gray hair, blue suit and blue and white striped shirt, he says that it was not easy to decide which path to follow: “In the seventies I was doing research on fractals, even if they weren’t called that yet, while around me the world was burning”. In Rome he participates in demonstrations, paints and attends the free school of the nude at the Academy of Fine Arts, studies Chinese because he is “fascinated by the idea of ​​a non-phonetic language”. But above all he approaches the manifesto group, Rossana Rossanda and Luciana Castellina, and begins to write about prison.

Jail does not enter her life as a consequence of her political commitment, but with a twist: “A friend of mine was killed by her ex-boyfriend shortly after she came to my house. The killer wrote a letter to us friends looking for a comparison. This shocked us, but I agreed to see him on the way to Regina Coeli, a stone’s throw from here. That was the first time I set foot in a prison.”

There Palma immediately understands that prison “does nothing but multiply evil, because there are no projects, empowering people, alternatives to cages”. In parallel with the hearings for the murder of his friend, he follows the political trials of the seventies and with others from the manifesto participates in the debate on a political solution to the armed struggle.

When that experience runs out, everyone takes their own path, but Palma continues to deal with justice and prison, founding the magazine Antigone in the 1980s, which will later also become an association. “In the following decade there was a fundamental change of pace: for the first time we in Antigone were allowed to enter prisons throughout Italy as observers”. And so Palma and his team followed live the monstrous growth in the number of prisoners, which rose from 24,000 in 1990 to 53,000 in 2000, up to 67,000 in 2010.

“Impressive figures, due in part to the drug law approved in 1990, but also to the dismantling of the welfare state and the affirmation of decorum as a tool for criminalizing and punishing those who do not fall within the ranks and are perceived as a threat, from the poor to addicts”.

Today, recalls Palma, there are 1,180 people in jail because they are sentenced to less than one year. Those who have to serve one or two years are two thousand. Among them are many homeless people, foreigners, petty offenders. “Do we really think they are a threat to society? Those behind bars for serious or associative crimes are about 13,000 out of 53,000. The rest are journeys that have not found answers in the area and have ended up in jail”. Prison is the answer to everything: to psychiatric illness, to alcohol or drug addiction, to poverty. And when bars aren’t enough, violence is used. “In the 2000s, first as a member and then as president, I was at the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture,” says Palma. “I have seen the signs of torture in police stations in Chechnya, in refugee camps in Kosovo, in interrogation places in Macedonia. I learned to give weight to this word and to recognize different types of violence”.

According to Palma there is a common thread that links some of them: “The beatings, humiliations and cruelty in the Bolzaneto barracks during the G8 in Genoa in 2001 and in the Santa Maria Capua Vetere prison in 2020 are the tools of gang violence , territorial, which explodes because the other is seen not as a person who has committed a crime, if he has committed one, but as an enemy, a threat to one’s authority and even to one’s existence. Preventing all of this is not easy. But if we don’t imagine alternatives to prison, if cages are the only answer, preventing it becomes impossible”.

The two men from Palma’s escort, who has been under guardianship for years, make him understand that it’s getting late.

It’s half past two and the guarantor has a meeting in the senate. Another appointment to talk about trampled cages and freedoms. Only in the evening will there be some time for math again.