Anna Beniamino: Pathophysiology of the prison monster: poisons and antidotes (October 2024)
Article translated and published in Spanish in “Tinta de Fuga,” periódico anárquico contra las prisiones y la sociedad carcelaria, no. 7, segundo semestre 2024.
PHYSIOPATHOLOGY OF THE PRISON MONSTER:
POISONS AND ANTIDOTES
Stories of mice and men
In pharmacology laboratories, antidepressants are tested with an experiment of exquisitely human cruelty: a mouse, drugged or “nature,” is submerged in a glass cylinder half-filled with water and the time of desperate swimming before immobility overtakes is calculated.
Usually the rodent without psychotropic support tries to climb along the cylinder and jump for 5 minutes before giving up; antidepressants lengthen desperate swimming attempts by a few minutes before resignation overtakes.
Stripped of the cynicism it conveys, the Porsolt or “desperate swimming” test is a useful allegory to illustrate the current situation in Italic jails and this summer’s trickle of suicides and riots in the overcrowded, dilapidated communal sections1, a charcoal of forced cohabitation in cramped spaces, in a word humiliating human dignity: drug-induced apathy and depression, the ubiquitous “therapy,” desperate attempts at reaction that often take self-harming forms, backyard hegemonies, desolidarization, childish brawls, where there is a constant pouring of suggestions and models from TV dramas, which is then the lobotomizing diversion that overcomes “therapy” in the pervasive echoing from cell to cell.
To the pathological infantilization of the individual, the prison works methodically, depriving him not only of freedom of movement, but also of that of minimal choice in the course of the day: the idiotic and incomprehensible regulations, the extreme bureaucratization of every minutia of daily survival. Depersonalizing mechanisms that deprive one’s humanity, the application of which essentially serves to establish the pressure of the repressive structure (and the individual’s capacity for resistance or adaptation), are handled aseptically, feeding a meat grinder where reactions can cover the entire range between anesthetized apathy and revolt as an assertion of subsistence in life rather than claim.
This Dantesque bedlam is overlaid and counterbalanced by the fragmentation and consequent isolation of differentiated sections and circuits. In most compas one finds oneself as well as in small numbers, divided from the rest of humanity in chains, locked between high-security sections and, even more isolated, in 41bis2 circuits.
High-security sections have an additional internal separation to avoid contact between those accused of “terrorism,” domestic and international (AS2) and those of “mafia-style criminal conspiracy” (AS3) and related offenses, to avert, in the eyes of the legislature, monstrous criminal chimeras due to cross-species interbreeding3. Or, more prosaically, even if only to prevent the spread of a basic knowledge of one’s rights as a prisoner, a subject on which political prisoners are normally better versed, as they come from more literate backgrounds on the subject and are more prone to the consequent dialectic.
In AS, with the rubber stamp of the “mafia” or “terrorism” formula, an opposite strategy is applied to the overcrowded common sections: separation between prisoners, removal from the place of residence to make contact with family members more difficult, reduced contact with the outside world (fewer interviews, 4 hours monthly, and fewer phone calls, 2 monthly of 10 minutes each), heavier sentences, with less if any possibility of alternative sentences under the aegis of 4bis o.p. 4.
Then there is 41bis, the bottom of the well, the bottleneck of the repressive funnel where it is easier to get in than to get out, in the highest degree5, with a further exacerbation of solitary confinement, intracarceral and extracarceral: a one-hour interview per month with partitioned glass and audio-video recording; almost total postal censorship; limitation of items allowed in the cell, including books and music CDs, the purchase of which is in any case made very difficult, if not impossible; one hour of air time per day in cramped, netted yards and with socializing with up to three other prisoners (in fixed groups selected by management).
This prologue, unpleasant, is to explain a minimum the difficulties and contradictions experienced, as antiauthoritarians, in facing and fighting prison these days in these shores.
The strategy of isolation, sterilization of human contacts and rescission of solidarity networks is obviously not an Italian prerogative but, as our Chilean comrades are well understanding, a practice that is spreading and being perfected there as well, as in the aggravation of Francisco’s conditions of isolation and the restructuring of the Alta Seguridad. Just as everywhere the restructuring of detention facilities combines punitive logics toward the individual refractor with those of a “Fordist” efficiency of preventive repression aimed at creating compartmentalized and incommunicative levels to more effectively and aseptically manage control, inside as well as outside.
The cage and its reverse: the same society in prison as outside?
That of defining prison as a mirror of society has the flavor of those clichés too repeated to be effective.
I do not know if mirror but often the distillation, the quintessence of repressive practices related to social and political restructuring, in more blatantly authoritarian forms (the more aseptic ones of the EU and the more boorish ones of national sovereignisms are equivalent in this respect, see the anti-immigration policies and the ongoing war propaganda) in a West that still cannot get over the fact that it is in the midst of a crisis and is trying with one hand to stem the leaks of a sinking ship with securitarian manias and with the other to grab as much as possible to line its pockets before the shipwreck.
Restructuring in an authoritarian sense is also accomplished through a sterilization of the very narrow spheres of radical criticism and opposition, sterilization that is often preemptive, with a noticeable lowering of the threshold of tolerated: crimes of opinion are now the target because the action has already been punished in draconian forms. Work is done on the construction/deconstruction of the enemy, monstrification/emptying of meaning and trivialization of the demands of those who struggle or those who are not homogeneous to the collective imagination as propagandized by the media.
In the Italian context, the rhetoric of the “anti-mafia struggle” and “anti-terrorism struggle” of the last 25 years of the last century has not only produced special legislations with repressive-jurisprudential double tracks, but has obsessively inculcated them in public opinion. Quite distinct phenomena are now encompassed in terms whose sole purpose is to justify greater repressive rigor on “categories” that cannot be defended regardless. The reunification in DNAA, National Anti-Mafia and Anti-Terrorism Directorate, to optimize repressive work is not accidental.
If in the AS2 sections the numbers are really small, the AS3s are filled with constant and continuous operations against “organized crime,” with the “mafia method,” a container in which to let in a little bit of everything, from the street drug dealer with the family that becomes a “clan,” to vote buying, usury, money laundering … basically the exhausted, expendable and dumpable labor force used by institutional politics for its business. A “middle class” compared to the humanity crammed into the common sections in perpetual struggle for survival.
More crude, but the social pyramid of oppression is concentrated in the prison funnel with its opportunisms, racisms, collusions between state and territorial potentates. In light of this, that nefarious passage (which the editors of Tinta de fuga have described as the paradox of the citizen/policeman and the prisoner/prisoner), the refinement of techniques of control, the last rung of voluntary servitude whereby hierarchies of control and exploitation are created for opportunism or quiet life, can also be interpreted. Hence apathy or revolt. Revolt still feared by power-holders.
The context of economic and political crisis is leading to the approval of a decree law with a package of measures dubbed “security” that will hit very specific targets: prisoners and immigrants locked up in CPRs (the centers where migrants awaiting repatriation are detained), environmentalist protesters, grassroots unionism, anarchist press, home occupiers-in short, a gag on the squares and self-organization of struggles in light of the various “emergencies” to be repressed.
Specifically, prison riots of the lockdown period for covid, CPR fires at the hands of inmates, hunger strikes and protests are being responded to with new offenses punishing incitement to disobey laws inside prisons and CPRs (committed by inmates themselves or by free people who have direct communication with them, either by correspondence or through garrisons outside prisons) and riots, within which passive resistance is also made to fall. This is not an oxymoron but the criminal configuration of an additional sentence to those who protest by undermining prison “order” and “security,” and into whose vague formulation can fit anything from beating to air-stop to hunger strike, if carried out in more than 2 people.
On the same track (the tightening of sentences and the configuration of new crimes) are a series of targets, with a shameless whirlwind of handcuffs and batons supported by the rationale of satisfying the citizen-cop.
New crimes and aggravated punishments are configured for a number of practices related to “public order management” both in daily life and at rallies and demonstrations. Specifically, harmless demonstrations such as Last Generation-style environmentalist demonstrations (self-adhesive sticking on asphalt, washable defacement) come into the repressive eye; roadblocks move from administrative to criminal offenses; the scope of enforcement of particular prohibitions as a preventive measure is widened (with removal from the urban area up to 48 hours before an event); housing squatting and anti-eviction picketing are penalized more heavily; pregnant Roma mothers or those with children under one year old go directly to jail without deferment of punishment; and penalties for begging are aggravated. Last but not least, police leeway is facilitated with articles that cover their on-duty and off-duty violence: increased punishment if violence, threats and resistance to a public official are carried out against a policeman, ex officio prosecution for “minor or very minor” injuries to them, and … possibility for members of the various police forces to use 24-hour, on-duty and off-duty, weapons and batons, without a license to hold them, and legal protection for members of the military and police investigated for crimes committed during their duties.
There is no shortage of disturbing profiles of expanding criminal impunity, on the possibility for intelligence officers and agents to infiltrate terrorist and subversive associations and related commission of crimes. Conversely, if one possesses and/or disseminates texts containing information on weapons and dangerous substances usable “for purposes of terrorism” … up to 6 years of imprisonment and revocation of Italian citizenship for those convicted of crimes of terrorism and subversion of the democratic order.
Times of war are always accompanied by practices of control of the streets and the press seen as the internal enemy to be nipped in the bud. Sometimes these attempts succeed, sometimes they only strengthen the motives and numbers of eye-openers.
In the specifics of anti-anarchist operations, we had already witnessed the change of pace that occurred during and after the hunger strike mobilization against 41bis and hostile life imprisonment and with operations Scripta Manent, Renata, Scintilla, Prometeo, to arrive at operations Sibilla and Scripta Scelera where the target is the anarchist press in court for its “instigatory” role and where, as in the case of Alfredo’s tenacious hunger strike, jurisprudential sleight of hand transformed the very physical endurance, the stubbornness of persisting in life after months of fasting, into an “instigatory” element toward the solidarity movement and thus justifying his remaining in 41bis as an instigator… That is, the democratic mask is off, you are prosecutable as an internal enemy, an obstacle to the maintenance of order regardless of the facts, by the mere fact of your existence.
Enemy construction, the role of media … and the cracks in the network
Enemy construction is certainly not a new phenomenon in repressive strategies but, in current times of habituation to shameless overexposure/denial, it takes on Orwellian aspects, with use of media and social media to easily arrive at the result of mass domestication and disciplining. Compared to other years and other places where censorship is prevailing in court, today, in times of digital information and social media, censorship works … through media overexposure, schizophrenic and equally lethal.
On the occasion of the very lively, international and multifaceted mobilization for Alfredo and against 41bis, the media bass drum showed a growing and morbid interest with political instrumentalization certainly but … with rather interesting communication short circuits. Institutional political factions, government and opposition, arguing, in parliament and on TV talk shows, about the dying anarchist under special regimen and, as a result … voluntarily (a little) or involuntarily (a lot) highlighting the flaws in the imposed narrative. What is a current media tactic of overexposure/cancellation is methodically applied in these latitudes-and I don’t think only here.
Think globally of what is happening on the genocide of the Palestinian people on live TV now downgraded to normal horror administration, with daily counts of dead children, bombed hospitals and starving survivors. Or to the daily count of prison suicides, in August a hallmark of Italian TV news, now in oblivion. However, this alternation between media hammering and oblivion is interrupted by the irruption of reality, by the ability of the advocates of social warfare to this imposed order to break the painted screen.
The media limelight is reversible at a moment’s notice, but the spotlight intermittently turning on and off should not dazzle the refractory and interrupt the continuity struggles.
Wide-ranging, short- lived struggles
In an apocalyptic and alienating context such as the one described so far, it is not difficult to find reasons to struggle, but rather which ones to choose first and how to carry them on steadily without getting caught up in those mechanisms that pervade the whole society – inside and outside – of apathy, short memory and amnesia, whether voluntary or induced. The feeling of an unequal and dead-end struggle certainly paralyzes, yet sometimes the anarchist minority manages to set a proper pace for itself, qualitative if not quantitative, which is not just refractory stubbornness but something that leads to tangible results, partial or more far-reaching, which we do not always manage to grasp in the immediate but which are there.
I begin, in order to simplify the discourse, from two personal examples that nevertheless gave me a perspective of change, of active intervention, not inertia with respect to the impositions of captivity. In the course of these years in prison I happened to carry out two hunger strikes of fair length, aware of the limitations of the instrument and at the same time of the rationality of this option, in jail: the first which, together with me and two other anarchists in L’Aquila, where we had been transferred to a new section of AS2 and where they wanted to impose a treatment overlapping for some stretches with 41bis, had been joined by other anarchist comrades in prison, accompanied by a mobilization of the anarchist area outside; the second, certainly better known, in accompanying the first stretch of Alfredo’s very long hunger strike against 41bis and hostile life imprisonment. The results were there, however, partly similar, partly different.
In the case of the women’s AS2 in L’Aquila, it came, after a month of fasting, to a first transfer then to the actual closure of the section within a couple of months, making evident the difficulty of the penitentiary administration to manage the situation both at the bureaucratic/local level and to take charge of the effects of a mobilization that brought attention to a prison like L’Aquila, a 41bis fortress hidden in the mountains.
In the case of the strike on 41bis and hostile life imprisonment, there was a partial positive result on the specific objectives but a defeat on Alfredo’s conditions of detention, with his remaining in the 41bis regime, “justified” by the success of the mobilization itself. However, a broader repressive project was stemmed, both on the Scripta Manent single trial and the broadening of anti-anarchist strategies. One managed to break, for a not inconsiderable time, into the media/censorship narrative with a good level of italic and international mobilization, putting the facts on the table.
Hearing Alfredo joking from the back of a cell, via videoconference, at the only possible moment, during the hearings about the murderous inconsistency of the fake guaranteeism flaunted by the various government scum was and is an unrecoverable message; to see the media embarrassed to have to claim that ‘these anarchists had a life or 30-year sentence for a “political massacre” of which no one had a trace and thus implicitly that the whole framework reeked more of political revenge and silencing against the anarchist milieu rather than of ordinary management of a judicial case; to see talk of prison and 41bis after they had been a taboo for years, dust to be swept under the carpet, to see a few cracks in the monolith served and will serve some purpose.
The same critique that is currently going on about the current authoritarian turn and the collapse of the prison system suffers, whether one likes it or not, from bringing uncomfortable and thorny topics out of the restricted spheres of movement, of course much of the democratic outrage is outraged, only to quickly move on to another topic with the same sterile indignation… but something remains including the ability of anarchists to regenerate and gain new blood, not to grow old, to intervene in different contexts.
As anarchists we are always good at throwing ourselves into the struggle, in revolutionary moments or not, often ahead of our time, we are, however, bad managers in the long run, there is reasoning to be done.
The ghost of representation, of delegation, sometimes paralyzes, and it is right to always have our antennae straight to pick up (and fight) the risks of political instrumentalization or authoritarian mechanisms, but without expiring in self-defeating lapses in esteem and tension that are only functional for the other side.
Calling for a certain continuity, re-learning to have a certain constancy in struggle and discussion, without fossilizing, I think is the first exercise of critical thinking, if then someone wants to classify it as instigation… these are the risks of the trade… anarchist.
Anna,
Rebibbia, October 2024
Notes:
1 75 suicides from the beginning of 2024 to September, among those officially counted, and an uncalculable number of protests, some with significant results such as the damage and unusability of some common sections such as Regina Coeli, Beccaria juvenile, etc.
2 In 41bis as of 2024 there are about 740 people of whom about ten are women. Almost all are locked up on charges related to so-called “organized crime” apart from 3 communist BR-PCC prisoners in solitary confinement in 41bis for 19 years, one anarchist, Alfredo Cospito, as of May 2022, and a handful of those charged with Islamic terrorism.
3 Beginning in the 1970s, the high number of riots that also arose as a result of the coexistence of prisoners from armed struggle experiences and prisoners for common crimes who became radicalized in prison meant that in the Italian prison system there is a specific focus on dividing prisoners, based on “dangerousness,” into differentiated regimes and circuits. Differentiation is compounded by removal from places of origin and into prisons that are often difficult to reach, outside cities, on islands, etc.
4 4bis o.p. is an article in the Italian prison system that makes certain crimes “hostile” “to the granting of penitentiary benefits” with “ascertainment of the social dangerousness of those convicted of certain crimes”… ça va sans dire… ‘mafia’ and “terrorism,” with a request for an “assessment of severance of ties with the organization to which they belong”… by the same police organs that led to the arrests.
5 From being a regime of non-renewable emergency, it has been stabilized over the years: 41bis applies for 4 years and is renewed every 2 with a direct entry decision by the Ministry of Justice, at the request of the National Anti-Mafia and Anti-Terrorism Directorate, and a revocation assessed only by the supervisory magistrate in Rome, centralized in jurisdiction.
[Published in Spanish in “Tinta de Fuga,” periódico anárquico contra las prisiones y la sociedad carcelaria, no. 7, segundo semestre 2024 | Text in Italian received by mail and published at https://lanemesi.noblogs.org/post/2025/02/03/anna-beniamino-fisiopatologia-del-mostro-carcerario-veleni-e-antidoti-ottobre-2024/]