“In here we have no plants to grow, but we cultivate anger”. It is with this anger, the women in prison in the Le Vallette prison – “the girls of Turin” as they call themselves – explain to us that on August 24 they began a “relay” hunger strike, that is, alternating fasting: to “express solidarity”, first of all, to “all those who have committed suicide, alone in a hot cell”. Fifty-nine people, in the first eight months of 2022. More than one every four days, fifteen in the month of August alone: two thirds of the year the total of cases in 2021 has already been exceeded. The strike will continue at least until 25 September, election day.
In the dossier of the Antigone association and of Ristretti horizons it is said that Italy
it has a low suicide rate compared to that of other European Union countries, but according to the latest data from the Council of Europe it is in tenth place among the countries with the highest suicide rate in prison. Inside, people kill at least 16 times more than outside. If this happened in the outside world, “we would have thought of a national emergency to be tackled with all the means available, even in the face of a resigning government, even with elections at the gates and with the obligation not to go beyond the business boundaries currents ”, said Patrizio Gonnella, president of the Antigone association.
People who committed suicide had an average age of 37. Sixteen of them were between 20 and 29 years old. Four were women (a high number if we consider that the percentage of the female prison population is only 4.2 per cent of the total) and 28 were of foreign origin: out of a penitentiary population composed of just under a third of foreigners, the suicide rate of inmates of foreign origin is almost double that of Italians.
From the few data available, it appears that at least 18 of the 59 people who killed themselves suffered from psychiatric diseases, some diagnosed, others presumed and under investigation. And that many of them were still awaiting trial. Almost all the prisons where suicides have occurred have a chronic situation of overcrowding, a word that reinforces a reinforcement, and that in some cases reaches 150 percent of the capacity of the structures. In almost all of these institutions, the number of psychiatric specialists and psychologists present is below the national average in prisons.
In the mid-seventies, with the abandonment of the Fascist prison regulation and the principles that inspired it, the prison changed: from a system based on punishments and deprivation, it became a system that, at least on paper, had to put into practice Article 27 paragraph 3 of the Constitution: “The penalties cannot consist in treatments contrary to the sense of humanity and must aim at the re-education of the condemned”.
The loss of freedom thereafter would no longer have to compromise any fundamental human right. Today the conditions of imprisonment and the execution of the sentence are confirmed instead as experiences that affect the bodies and minds of the detainees on a daily basis.
The hunger strike is not the first non-violent protest initiative by women in prison in Vallette. Last summer, for example, they launched a “cart strike”, that is, refusing the food provided by the prison administration. We managed to talk to the women who are now joining the strike asking them to tell us about the protest. “In recent years,” they say, “the conditions of detention have worsened and with the restrictions on covid there has been an escalation of suicides and acts of self-harm. Honestly we are tired of the blablabla and we are determined not to get crushed. The real crime is doing nothing ”.
Prison reform is often evoked but never actually addressed, not even today, by all the parties involved in the electoral campaign. The most recent example is that of the Commission for the innovation of the penitentiary system established in September 2021 by the Minister of Justice Marta Cartabia and chaired by Marco Ruotolo, full professor of constitutional law at the Roma Tre University: the work went slowly, the final report was delivered in December 2021 and apart from a few circulars there was no structural intervention.
What will happen after the elections remains an unknown, so the girls from Turin have decided to anticipate: “We are aware that there is an electoral campaign and we are aware that prison is the taboo par excellence: it is precisely for this reason that we slipped in this way and at this moment: to disrupt their propaganda tours ”. They also say they are “very scared” of the upcoming elections and that only very few of them will be able to go and vote.
Italy, in fact, is one of those countries that link the right to vote to the length of the sentence and, consequently, to the gravity of the crime committed. In fact, the right to vote is often not guaranteed even to detainees who have not lost that right: both because only those who reside in the same municipality where the prison is located can vote by mail, and because the procedure that allows people inmates to vote in prison is complex, few know it, the organization is uncertain and consequently the turnout is very low.
The girls from Turin tell us how the strike actually takes place inside the prison: “We declared this with a statement addressed to the Department of the penitentiary administration, to the regional superintendent (which deals with the staff and organization of services and penitentiary institutions, ed), to the supervisory court and to the director. We have attached the signatures of those who have joined with the dates. We opted for a relay race in order to find greater adhesions among our companions and to give the opportunity also to those who take drug therapies or to the elderly to give their contribution. Now we are 53 to carry on the strike, some of us are over seventy years old ”.
These inmates teach us a lesson in inclusiveness. With their struggle, they break into the monotony of days that are always the same in a place “where natural light does not reach”.
At the opening of the cells, at 7.30, the woman who begins the strike communicates this to the staff with a written self-declaration
When they started their strike they also proposed that uneaten or leftover food (and not just for the strike) be “donated to the people who needed it” out there, through some associations. “But we have been prevented. Our letter about the start of the protest had already been quoted by national newspapers, let alone if it was also known that we were doing something good for someone… ”.
They say that in the morning, when the cells are opened, at 7.30, the woman who begins the strike communicates it to the staff with a written self-declaration. This document arrives through various internal passages up to the management: “The sheet describes the event, that is, that the prisoner is on strike, and the reasons are given. Then the doctor visits the woman to whom the parameters are taken up to the end of the fast, which depending on the case can last one, two or three consecutive days: weight, pressure, blood sugar. In the self-declarations we reaffirm our motivations, we highlight the discomfort. And they do their paperwork ”. In other words, the administration limits itself to following the regulations, while “the whole prison community is waiting for something to change, for the inconvenience to decrease, above all overcrowding”.
The primary objective of their struggle, they explain to us, is that special early release be recognized for the entire prison population: “We have been working for years to ensure that it is granted,” they explain. In 2020, during the health emergency, the deputy Roberto Giachetti had presented a proposal on the special early release: it provided, with some limitations, the possibility of increasing the reduction provided for every six months of served sentence from 45 to 75 days, based on the good behaviour. If approved, it would expand the number of beneficiaries to ten thousand people, a notable change from current conditions.
“We would like to emphasize”, explain the girls of Turin, that “we do not ask for impunity or clemency, but given that the Italian prisons as structures do not respect the regulations of the penitentiary system and the European ones, and given that the organization is lacking for what concerns treatment and reintegration, we ask that, through an extension of the early release to 75 days, we are given back those rights that are not respected ”.
A measure similar to that proposed by Giachetti and claimed by the women of Turin had already been applied in 2013 after the so-called Torreggiani ruling with which the Strasbourg Court condemned Italy for the seriousness of the conditions of the detainees. The state had launched an emergency measure at the time, but the emergency soon reappeared.
“It’s bad to say, but it seems to us that they want to solve the problem of overcrowding by suicide or by making people sick. They do not have the courage to do anything to avoid losing votes, and therefore perhaps they think that it will resolve itself ”. It is also bad to hear this sentence, above all because, said without any note of victimhood in the voice, it seems to describe the reality of prisons all too well.
“The reality is this: prison is a social dump into which that part of humanity that you don’t want to deal with is thrown away. Whoever comes out of prison gets worse in soul and body ”. The Vallette inmates cite the number of suicides that some have defined as “state murders”. They explain that relapses are very high, that the paths for reintegration “are a chimera” and confirm that “prisoners and inmates with psychiatric problems are not treated for lack of medical aids and destabilize entire sections”.
This, they conclude, “is a bankruptcy system. The sentences are served in situations and structures on the verge of legality itself. In short, prison is the emblem of hypocrisy, of preaching good and scratching badly. It is said that prison should re-educate: but how can it re-educate something that gives you a bad example? We are asked to obey the law, but they should lead us by example. Otherwise they lose credibility, indeed they have already lost it ”.
Eating meals is an important part of life in prison: “It is difficult not to eat here, because it is also a way to occupy time and mind. Sometimes it’s an outlet, sometimes sugar becomes an addiction ”. Yet, despite the difficulty, and although some are afraid of retaliation for their adherence to the protest, they continue, together, united.
In the meantime, the protest also spread to a part of the men’s section of the Turin prison and of the Regina Coeli in Rome. In Verona, the inmates joined in a trolley strike. And also in Verona, a group called Sugar Bars and made up of the former inmates of Hodo Donatella, who committed suicide in the Verona Prison on 2 August, wrote a letter to the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella to strengthen the struggle of the inmates of Turin.
The voices of women in the Vallette, from inside, also reached outside, in the mountains of the Val di Susa. “It was important for us to meet Nicoletta, Fabiola and Dana”, they say. They refer to Nicoletta Dosio, Fabiola De Costanzo and Dana Lauriola, no tav militants imprisoned between 2019 and 2022 in Vallette for their political activity and who after serving part of their sentence in prison were under house arrest for several months.
“It was fundamental”, explain the inmates of Turin, “to stay in contact” with them and with the social dimension that surrounds them: the solidity of the bond between inmates has generated a new, unexpected space, shared by those inside and by those is out. “This made us change, it put us in another position. We are convinced that only if we do something, something changes: maybe not immediately, but it changes ”.