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Title: Locked Up Author: Alfredo M. Bonanno Date: 2008 Language: en Topics: prison, repression, abolition, Elephant Editions Source: Retrieved on 2021-05-12 from https://archive.elephanteditions.net/library/alfredo-m-bonanno-locked-up Notes: Original title: Chiusi a chiave : una riflessione sul carcere Allaria, [1997]. Elephant Editions 2008. Translated by Jean Weir
Prison has come out of the shadows into the limelight, as not a day
passes without some allusion to âsolving the problemâ of the Stateâs
overflowing dungeons. Advances in surveillance technology are offering
alternative models of isolation and control that could see a large
number of the lattersâ potentially explosive inmates defused
andâopportunely tagged or microchippedâsent back to the urban ghettos of
capital from whence they came. The main obstacle, bolstered by some
retrograde attempts to gain votes through a sworn intractability
concerning the âenemy withinâ, is powerâs need for mass consensus from
those it had led to believe that the Stateâs protection racket and
promise of long custodial sentences were the ultimate social guarantee.
The dilemma has given space to a whole range of social cops in an
ongoing battle that the sycophantic media have not missed the
opportunity to illuminate. The occult world of prison never fails to
provide good headlines for those in search of a frisson, âenlightened
discussionâ or fodder for animated pub talk (the latter often concluding
with a call for the reinstatement of the death penalty).
In actual fact, we are witnessing the labour pains of a transitional
period concerning the whole question of sanctions and punishment in
accordance with the requirements of post-industrial capital. The reality
of enclosure, of being locked up in reinforced strongboxes for days,
years, decades on end, is truly in contrast with the prevailing model of
social democracy, which would prefer the perfect world of identity and
participation also for those who accept the prison condition as their
rightful penance.
And so once again, following the feminist issue, the work issue
(flexitime, mobility), ecology, etc., we come to the point where the
ever-adjusting requirements of power meet the solicitations of the
concerned left of the left, obsolete Stalinists and renegade
revolutionaries head on. Abolish prison! has become the slogan of the
moment, backed up with myriads of tomes, specialist theses on prison
conditions and alternative accountancies of crime and retribution worthy
of the fathers of the Inquisition.
Separation is the essence of politics, and by isolating prison from the
State and capital as a whole, the harbingers of social surgery can find
allies across the whole societal spectrum from priests to social
workers, university professors to ex-cons. There is an answer for
everything in the fantasy world of alternatives, every bad coin has its
flip side. But the totality of prison is is not simply a place, it is
also a condition, the antithesis of which is freedom. By the same token,
the absence of freedom is prison and only when we perceive the latter as
our own condition, realising that it is just a question of degree, will
we be able to enter the destructive dimension completely, without
measure. Only if we combine empathy with projectuality, disgust for the
institution and its putrid essence with hatred for the invisible
shackles that bind us all, will we be capable of divesting ourselves of
the viscid altruism that dams up the free-flowing energy of revolt.
Prison is not a domain reserved for âspecialistsâ such as those who have
done time themselves or have a particular rapport with individual
prisoners, it is the underlying reality of everyday life, each and every
discourse of capital taken to its logical conclusion.
The words that follow were spoken by a comrade in struggle, a struggle
where prison has always been present both as a grim reality and an
essential objective in the extensive destruction that âstorming the
heavensâ implies. Little did he know as he wrote the introduction to the
Italian publication of the transcription from Rebibbia prison in 1997,
that a six year sentence awaited him as the outcome of the infamous
âMarini trialâ. It should not go unsaid that, after being presented for
public crucifixion as head of an inexistent armed gang, three of these
years were for a âcrime of opinionâ, i.e. for the written word, the
other three for an unsubstantiated accusation of involvement in a bank
robbery. But that is not what we want to talk about here. Neither victim
nor political prisoner, what follows are not the prison memoirs of
Alfredo Bonanno, but a contribution by a comrade among comrades, a
prisoner among prisoners, to a struggle that will continue until all
prisons are destroyed and not one stone of them is left standing.
Perhaps the transcription of a meeting between comrades with its subtle
tonal nuances, smiles, intensity and laughter becomes monochrome and a
little difficult to follow in the austere pages of a pamphlet. The tools
of the writer were aside in favour of the irrepeatable moment, the
unique encounter of mind and spirit that occurs between comrades when
they meet and talk face to face. The discussion meanders from an
immediate clarification that it will contain no vestiges of
specialisation, to various anecdotes illustrating some personal
recollections of life behind bars, to underlining precise tendencies in
the evolution of punishment, etc., all linked by one guiding thread: the
impelling need to destroy prisons along with the rest of the structures
of capital. Nothing less will do. No concession to the pleasure of
immediate gratification granted by success in single issue reforms. No
taking refuge in complicated specialist inquests for the initiated. No
negation of the individual in the name of âsubsumptionâ. Prisons are
undeniably objective, material structures, but there are as many of them
as there are prisoners, because like every other moment of life in
society, prison is both a collective and a uniquely individual
experience.
One of the main themes of the discourse is the project of power that is
already underwayâand would be much more so were it not for the problem
of mass consensus that needs to be re-educated to accept new repressive
trendsâof separation between âirreducibleâ prisoners and the others, the
ones that are willing to participate in their own âre-educationâ and
re-insertion into the social marasmus. It is essential to grasp this
concept. As science gradually takes over the task of social control from
that previously carried out by law, a vast proportion of the prison
population will be created as a result of behavioural misdemeanours as
opposed to conscious lawbreakers. The latter will tend to become a
minority of irreducible âoutlawsâ who are not prepared to obey the rules
of society, be they outside or within the prison walls. The great mass
of prisoners will be orientated towards re-insertion through
behaviour-modifying courses and alternative forms of control using all
the paraphernalia on offer by a proliferation of technological gadgets,
mobile phones, curfews, etc. For the rest, the intrepid âoutlawsâ the
prison gates will be sealed for ever. And, to quell the weeping of the
abolitionists, these containers need no longer even be referred to as
âprisonsâ. Some less offensive euphemism could be found in order to
remove them from the latterâs attention: a triumph for democracy and
reform.
The struggle against prison is therefore a struggle that concerns all of
us, not as something separate and specialised, but an essential
component of every struggle against capital and the State. The discourse
becomes comprehensible if we enter it as active participants, becoming
for a moment one of these comrades in that hall in Bologna so many years
ago, with pounding hearts ready to take on the world. Where are they
now? We donât know, but we are here, and that is what counts. Letâs
destroy all prisons now!
Jean Weir
London October 2008
Prison is the mainstay of the present society. Often it does not seem
so, but it is.
Our permissive, educative society allows itself to be guided by
enlightened politicians and is against any recourse to strong measures.
It looks on scandalised at the massacres dotted all over the world map,
and seems to be composed of so many respectable citizens whose only
concerns are respecting nature and paying as little tax as possible.
This society, which considers itself to be far beyond barbarity and
horror, has prison on its very doorstep.
Now, the mere existence of a place where men and women are held locked
up in opportunely equipped iron cages, watched over by other men and
women wielding bunches of keys, a place where human beings spend years
and years of their lives doing nothing, absolutely nothing, is a sign of
the utmost disgrace, not just for this society but for a whole
historical era.
I am writing this introduction in Rebibbia prison and I donât feel like
changing a word of the talk that I gave in Bologna a few years ago. If I
compare the thick headedness of the prison institution today with that
of my experiences recounted in the text published below, I see that
nothing has changed.
Nothing could change. Prison is a sore that society tries to in vain
conceal. Like the doctors in the seventeenth century who treated the
plague by putting ointment on the sores but left rats running around
among the rubbish, today, at every level of the prison hierarchy
technicians are trying to cover up this or that horrible aspect of
prison, not realising that the only way to face the latter is to destroy
it. We must destroy all prisons and leave not one stone standing, not
keep a few around in order to remember them in the way that humanity has
done with other constructions that testify to the most atrocious infamy.
Now someone who tends to beat about the bush will ask: how can we
destroy prison? How can we get rid of it completely in a society like
this, where a bunch of bosses called the State decide for everybody and
impose these decisions by force?
So, the best of these squawkers, the quick-witted with hearts of gold,
try to mitigate prisonersâ suffering by giving them cinema once a week,
coloured TV, almost edible food, weekly visits, some hope of being
released before the end of their sentence and everything else. Of
course, these good people want something in exchange. After all, thatâs
not asking too much. They want prisoners to behave and show respect to
the warders, acquire the capacity to resist years and years of
inactivity and sexual abstinence, undergo psychological treatment by
specialised personnel and declare, more or less openly, that they have
been redeemed and are capable of returning to the society that expelled
them for misbehaving.
I have been a frequenter of prisons for more than a quarter of a
century, so can compare a few things. Once prisoners literally lived in
an infamous disgusting hole visited by rats and various other creatures.
They only saw the light of day for a few minutes, did not have TV and
could not even make a cup of coffee in their cells. The situation has
certainly improved today. Prisoners [in Italy] can actually make meals,
even cakes, in the cell. They have more hoursâ recreation in a day than
they used to get in a month, and can have extra visits and make a few
phone calls to the family. They can work for a decent wage (half the
average wage outside), watch colour TV, have a fridge, a shower and
everything else.
Of course prisoners accept these improvements, theyâre not stupid. And
why not. They also accept paying the price, by showing themselves to be
good and condescending, arguing with the guards as little as possible
and telling stories to the educators and psychologists who hang around
the corridors like shadows, waiting for it to be time to go home and for
the end of the month to pick up their salary. Apart from the obvious
consequence of lowering the level of the clash in prisons, nobody in
this scenario really believes that the prisoner will be re-inserted into
so-called civil society. It is a farce that each player recites
magnificently.
Letâs take the priest for example. If he isnât stupid he knows perfectly
well that all the prisoners who go to mass go to meet prisoners from
other wings whom they wouldnât otherwise see. He accepts that with the
hypocrisy of his trade and gets on with it. Of course, now and again
some prisoner will show a sudden faith, enlightenment on the road to
Damascus. But this, the priest knows perfectly well, is functional to
the treatment for getting out on parole or having a suspended sentence
or another of the many benefits provided for by the law but subordinate
to the approval of the custodial personnel, educators, psychologists and
also the priest.
What was clear when one was face to face with the police becomes hazy
inside. Today nearly all prisoners are losing their identity as such and
are accepting permissive changes that are gradually trapping them within
a mechanism that promises not so much to redeem them as to let them out
a little before the end of their time.
As the attentive reader of this little book will see, there is a line of
reasoning that claims to want to âabolishâ prison. Now, to abolish means
to ablate, i.e. eliminate, an essential component from society. Leaving
things as they are, this abolition would be impossible or, if it were to
come about, it would turn out to be in the interests of power.
Letâs try to go into this. The only way to do something serious about
prison is to destroy it. That is no more absurd or utopian than the
thesis that wants to abolish it. In both cases the State, for which
prison is essential, would have recourse to extreme measures. But
specific conditions of a revolutionary character could make the
destruction of prison possible. They could the create social and
political upheaval that would make this utopia come true, due to the
sudden absence of the power required for prison to continue to exist.
In the case of abolition, if it were to happen progressively it would
mean that the State was providing for prison in a different way. In
fact, something of the sort is actually happening. As I will show,
prisons are opening up. Political forces that were once quite cut off
from them now enter them regularly. There are all kinds of cultural
manifestations, cinema, theatre, painting, poetry; all these sectors are
hard at work. This opening also requires the prisonersâ participation.
At first, participation seems to eliminate disparity, allowing everyone
to be equal; it means that people donât have to stay locked up in cells
all day and gives them the possibility to talk and make their demands
heard. And this is true, in that the ânewâ prison has taken the place of
the âoldâ. But not all prisoners are prepared to participate. Some still
have their dignity as âoutlawsâ, which they donât want to lose, so they
refuse.
I am not proposing the old distinction here between âpoliticalâ and
âcommon lawâ prisoners which has never really convinced me. Personally I
have always refusedâand continue to do so now in the prison where I am
writing this introductionâthe label of âpoliticalâ prisoner. I am
referring to the âoutlawsâ, those whose lives have been entirely
dedicated to living against and beyond the conditions established by
law. It is clear that if on the one hand prison is opening up to
prisoners who are prepared to participate, it is closing down on those
who are not and want to remain âoutlawsâ, even in prison.
Given the advances in control in society, the great potential of
information technology in this field and the centralisation of the
security services and the police, at least at the European level, we can
well imagine that those going against the law in the not too distant
future really will have the absolute determination of the outlaw.
We can sum up by saying that the project of power for the future is to
abolish the traditional prison and open it up to participation, and at
the same time create a new, absolutely closed version: a prison with
white coats where the real outlaws will end their days. This is the
prison of the future, and those who are talking about abolition will be
happy, in that in the future these prisons with white coats might not
even be called by such a hateful name, but rather clinics for mental
patients. Isnât someone who insists on rebelling and affirming their
identity as an âoutlawâ in defiance of all propositions to participate
in society, absolutely mad? And do mad people perhaps not constitute a
medical rather than a penitentiary problem?
Such a society, having a greater capacity for social and political
control, would call for everyone to collaborate in this repressive
project, so would have less need to have recourse to sentencing. The
very concept of sentencing would be put in question. Basically, most of
the prison population today are people who have committed âcrimesâ such
as taking drugs, drug dealing, petty theft, administrative offences,
etc., which from one moment to the next might no longer be considered
such. By removing these people from prison and reducing the probability
of more serious offences such as robbery and kidnapping through
increased levels of social control, few actual real crimes will remain.
Crimes of passion could very well be dealt with through recourse to
house arrest, and that is the intention. And so, who would remain in
prison under such conditions? The few thousand individuals who refuse to
accept this project, who hate such a choice and refuse to obey or put
themselves down. In a word, conscious rebels who continue to attack,
perhaps against all logic, and against whom it will be possible to apply
specific conditions of detention and âcureâ closer to that of an asylum
than an actual prison. That is where the logical premise of prison
abolition leads us in the last analysis. The State could very well
espouse this thesis at some time in the not too distant future.
Prison is the most direct, brutal expression of power, and like power it
must be destroyed, it cannot be abolished progressively. Anyone who
thinks they can improve it now in order to destroy it in the future will
forever be a captive of it.
The revolutionary project of anarchists is to struggle along with the
exploited and push them to rebel against all abuse and repression, so
also against prison. What moves them is the desire for a better world, a
better life with dignity and ethic, where economy and politics have been
destroyed. There can be no place for prison in that world.
That is why anarchists scare power.
That is why they are locked up in prison.
Alfredo M. Bonanno
Rebibbia prison, 20 March 1997.
Voici le temps des Assassins
Rimbaud
The prison question is something that anarchists and the revolutionary
movement in general have been involved in for a long time. We come back
to it periodically because for many of us it is something that touches
us directly, or touches comrades close to us, whom we love.
To know what prison is like and why it exists and functions, or how it
might cease to exist, or function better according to oneâs point of
view, is no doubt a very interesting subject. I have heard many talks,
conferences and debates in the past, particularly about ten years ago.
At that time reality was seen analytically due to a certain marxism that
was boss of the political scene both culturally and practically, and the
main aspect of the debate on prison was the âprofessionalismâ with which
it was carried on.
One was usually listening to, or imagined one was listening to, someone
who knew something about prison. Well, thatâs not the case here. In
fact, I donât know all that much about prison. Iâm not aware of knowing
much about prison and Iâm certainly not a specialist on the subject, and
even less someone who has suffered all that much, âŠa bit, yes. So, if
that is the way you see things, I mean from a kind of professional point
of view, donât expect much from this talk. No professionalism, no
specific competence. I should say right away that I feel a kind of
repulsion, a sense of profound disgust for people who present themselves
on a particular subject and split reality up into sectors declaring, âI
know all about this subject, now Iâll show you.â I donât have that
competence.
I have had my misfortunes of course, in the sense that I first went to
prison over twenty years ago and, in fact, when I found myself locked up
in a cell for the first time I found myself in great difficulty. The
first thing I wanted to do was destroy the radio, because it was a very
loud transmission and after a few minutes locked up in there I felt as
though I was going mad. I took off a shoe and tried to smash the object
that was making such an obscene din. The noise was coming from an
armoured box screwed into the ceiling next to a light bulb that was
constantly lit. After a few minutes, a head appeared at the peephole of
the armoured door and said, âExcuse me, what are you doing?â I answered,
âIâm trying to âŠâ, ââNo, thatâs not necessary, all you have to do is
call me, Iâm the cleaner, so I switch off the radio from outside and
everythingâs okay.â At that moment I discovered what prison was, and is.
There, that sums up my specific culture on the subject of prison. Prison
is something that destroys you, that seems absolutely unbearable, ââhow
on earth will I be able to survive in here with this thing driving me
crazyââŠsnap, a little gesture, and itâs over. This is my professionalism
on prison. And it is also a little personal story concerning my
imprisonment.
There have been many studies about prison of course, but I know little
about them. Bear in mind that these studies have not only been carried
out by specialists of the sociology of deviance, but even by prisoners
themselves, and funded by the Ministry. One such study concerns Bergamo
prison. I saw it and found incredible desire and capacity to do so, who
even manage to sell this nonsense off as something interesting. To me
this theoretical posing is nothing but sociological gymnastics.
The main supporters of prison, without actually realising or desiring
it, are the prisoners themselves. Just like the worker who sees himself
in the dimension of the factory, if he is a factory worker, or in any
case in the chains that hold him down. As Malatesta said, being
accustomed to the chains we donât realise that we are able to walk, not
thanks to them but in spite of them, because there is something that is
unclear. Often, when talking to a prisoner who has done twenty, even
thirty yearsâ prison, he will tell you about all the woes of prison life
etc., of course, but you also realise that he has a love-hate
relationship with the institution, because basically it has become his
life. And that is part of the problem. So you realise that you cannot
work out a critique of prison by starting off from the ideas and
experiences that come out of it, because the experience is certainly
negative and full of repulsion and hatred of the place, but it is always
ambivalent, like all experiences of life. I have lived this myself and I
canât explain how I felt it growing inside me. Human beings are not
automata, they donât see things in black and white. Well, it happens
that the instant you get out of prison you have the sensation that you
are leaving something dear to you. Why? Because you know that you are
leaving a part of your life inside, because you spent some of your life
there which, even if it was under terrible conditions, is still a part
of you. And even if you lived it badly and suffered horribly, which is
not always the case, it is always better than the nothing that your life
is reduced to the moment it disappears. So, even pain, any pain, is
better than nothing. It is always something positive, perhaps we canât
explain it but we know it, prisoners know it. So they are precisely the
first to support prison.
Then there is common sense, this massive stumbling block, that cannot
see how it would be possible to do without prison. In fact, this common
sense pushes proposals for the abolition of prison up a blind alley,
showing them to be ridiculous because such proposals want to have their
cake and eat it, whereas it would be far easier to simply say, âprison
is necessary in the present state of affairsâ. How can I put the
jewellerâs right to safeguard his property before my right to take his
jewels at gunpoint, I who have no money and nothing to eat? The two
things are a contradiction. How can I overcome this contradiction by
putting it at the level of a universal contract or a natural right
desired by God, the Devil, Reason or Kropotkinian animism? The only way
to look at the problem is the elementary one: if all goes well, I take
the money, if it doesnât I do my time. I have spoken to many robbers and
one of the first I met said to me, âListen, you who can read and write,
take a piece of paper and do the sums. How much can I earn in three
years working in a factory? (At the time the factory wage was about 15
million [old lire] a month). And, he continued, âIf I do a robbery and
it goes well I take more than 15 million: 20, maybe 30. If things go
wrong I do three years and Iâm back where I started. Moreover, if it
does go wrong, Iâm not working under a boss who drives me crazy for
three years, or in Germany, sleeping in Portacabins. Iâm in jail and at
least Iâm respected here. Iâm a bank robber and when I go out into the
yard Iâm seen as a serious person, not a poor sod that lives from his
labour.â Frankly, with all my science, I was at a loss for words. What
he said didnât sound wrong to me, even at the level of basic economics.
And what could I say? âBut, you know, you canât touch propertyâ. Heâd
have spat in my face! Or, âThe scales are wrong, you must set them
rightâ, but then for him they had tipped the scales once and for all. As
Fichte, who knew something about philosophy, or at least he thought so,
said, âWhoever has been defrauded of what is due to him on the basis of
the social contract has the right to go and take it back.â And he who
said that was certainly not a revolutionary or even progressive.
Common sense prevents us from imagining society without prison. It does
well, in my opinion, because common sense cannot always be ignored, and
a society under the present conditions of production, with the existing
cultural and political relations, cannot do without prison. To imagine
the elimination of prison from the present social context is a fine
utopia good only for filling up the pages of books by those who work in
the universities and write in the pay of the State.
The rest, in my opinion, is an absolute waste of time, at least for
those who understand anything at all. It might be that I didnât quite
get these texts about abolishing prison. Yet I seem to have noticed that
some of the people who support abolition, whom I actually know, are the
same as those who once called themselves, Iâm not saying Stalinists, but
at least supporters of the chatter of historical materialism on prison,
i.e. they supported the analyses of prison as a reality that is strictly
linked to production. These same people are for the abolition of prison
today because the current ideas are no longer Stalinist or authoritarian
but are of an anarchist or at least libertarian nature. Apart from these
peopleâs extraordinary capacity for political evolution, which never
ceases to amaze me, I insist that, in any case, concepts such as
abolition are still stupid, even if they call themselves anarchist. And
why not? Can anarchists not talk rubbish? Thereâs nothing strange about
that. Thereâs no equation that says anarchist equals intelligent;
anarchists are not necessarily intelligent in my opinion. I know many
stupid anarchists. And Iâve encountered many intelligent cops. Whatâs
wrong with that? Iâve never seen anything strange about that.
Yes, the concept doesnât seem difficult because abolition,âat least as
far as I can see, but perhaps I didnât quite get it, and we are here to
clarify our ideasâthe abolition of part of something, is an ablation. In
other words, I take a part and cut it out. Society, of which prison is
an indispensable component today, should therefore take prison and get
rid of it like you do with a rotten piece of something. You cut it out
and throw it in the dustbin. That is the concept of abolition. Abolish
prison and put some other kind of social organisation in its place. In
order not to be a prison in all but name, it must not foresee sanctions
or the application of a sentence, law, the principle of coercion, etc.
What they possibly donât want to see is the fact that abolition of
prison implies the upturning of the situation that is juridically
created between the victim and the perpetrator of the crime, the
so-called guilty party. Today, a separation is between the victim and
the guilty one is carried out, and with prison this separation becomes
clear. Victim and guilty party must never meet again, in fact they will
forever avoid each other. I will certainly never go to Bergamo to look
for the jeweller whose shop I robbed. He would call the police as soon
as he saw me, thereâs no doubt about that.
What happens in the case of abolition? The two protagonists of the
âillegalâ deed are not kept apart, on the contrary they are put in
contact through negotiation. For example, they establish what the
damages amount to together and instead of going to prison the person
responsible for the âillegalâ deed pledges to repay the damage, in money
or through work. For example, it seems that there are people who are
happy to have their houses painted, I donât know, that sort of thing. In
my opinion, these absurdities start off from a philosophical principle
that is quite different to that envisaged by the law.
The separation of the âguilty partyâ from the âvictimâ also depends on
the specific situation, except in cases where this was caused by passion
or uncontrollable emotions. In most cases, not only does the guilty one
try to escape to save the booty or his skin, he also tries to have as
little contact with the victim as possible. Then there is the other
aspect of separation, that which is institutionalised by the
intervention of the judge, the lawyer, the court, the prison. So, not
only separation from the victim but also from society, with the
aftermath of the particular attention paid to re-entry into society. In
order to avoid too brusque a contact there are often precise police
practices: you leave prison, the police patrol picks you up immediately
and takes you off to the police station, and you are identified again.
You are free because you have finished your sentence, but they are not
satisfied. Hence the expulsion orders from certain towns, etc.
Abolition does not foresee any of this. It is a more complex concept,
and cannot be grasped immediately. But there remains this curious
logical anomaly: in theory ablation is possible, in practice it is
impossible in a social context where prison is obviously an essential
component.
The destruction of prison, on the other hand, clearly linked to the
revolutionary concept of destruction of the State, exists within a
process of struggle. In order for what we said earlier to be fully
understood, our discourse must not be based on models of efficiency, as
that would distort it. The struggles we participate in and their
consequences can never be seen as getting something in exchange for what
we do, of necessarily getting results from what we put on the carpet. On
the contrary, we are often unable to see the consequences of the
struggles we participate in, there is a very wide relational dispersion
and the end results cannot be foreseen. We have no idea what might
happen as far as other people active in the struggle are concerned,
comrades doing different things, changes in relations, changes in
awareness, etc. All of these things come later, when we think everything
is over.
We are having this discussion here tonight, and for me this is also
struggle....Because it is not enough for me just to talk for the
pleasure of hearing my own voice, and I am convinced that some new ideas
are entering your heads, just as I am experiencing the joy of being here
and feeling your physical presence. We are talking about something close
to my heart and I will take this gift you are giving me away with me.
Just as I think I can give you something to take away with you that
might bear fruit at some time in the future, in another situation,
another context. And that has nothing to do with quantity or efficiency.
If it means anything at all it means something in practice, in the
things we do, in the transformation we bring about, not in the abstract
realm of theory or utopia. That is what I am trying to say about the
destruction of prison. Because as soon as we put ourselves in this logic
and begin to act, even in discussions like this evening, or with other
things that we wonât discuss here but could go into tomorrow or at some
time in the near future, we begin to transform reality. Prison becomes
one element of this transformation, and by transformation we mean
destructionâpartial destruction in view of the final destruction of the
State. I am aware that this concept might seem too rash or too
philosophical. But as soon as we start to think about it becomes clear
because it becomes a basis for all the actions we carry out every day
and for the way we behave with those close to us, those we relate to and
who put up with us every day, as well as those whom we see from time to
time.
The revolutionary project is also this. There is no such thing as
separate worlds, the world I live with my companion, with my children,
with the few revolutionary comrades I have met in my life who want to
overturn the world, all absolutely separate. Thatâs not so, itâs not
like that. If I am a bastard in my sexual relations, I cannot be a
revolutionary, because these relations immediately transfer themselves
into the wider context. I might fool one, two, three people, then the
fourth will take me to task and I canât deceive them. There must
necessarily be unity of intent, that elective affinity that links me to
all my actions, in any context whatsoever, in everything I do, which I
cannot separate.. If I am a bastard, it will come out sooner or later.
But letâs get back to our argument which we seem to have left a long way
off.
Letâs look at the whole question of prison, the sentence, the judiciary
that supports and makes the sentence possible, and I think that most of
you here know more about this than me.
I think it would be good if we were to agree on a very simple line of
thought: the concept of the sentence is based on one essential
principleâ the privation that a given person suffers for not having
behaved according to pre-established rules. Now, if we look carefully
here, we see that this concept applies to many things, even
interpersonal relations. But it only concerns particular sanctions when
one finds oneself faced with the law, a State structure that is capable
of enforcing the sanction according to pre-established rules, or at
least within the ambit of these rules.
What does the State want from the sentence? Not just the State today,
which we know to some extent, but the State in general as it has
developed over at least the past three hundred years. What does Power,
which has not always defined itself the State, want to attain? In the
first place it wants to make the so-called guilty party submit to a
higher level of physical control than is usual in the so-called free
society.
I repeat, I donât have any specific competency in this field but from
what I have read, and it isnât much and perhaps not even up to date, the
process of control is now mainly entrusted to information technology,
data gathering, etc. Basically, the universal recording of our details
that is being carried out by the authorities (for example I have seen
that they are even filing us through our electricity bills) is, so to
speak, a roundup strategy that will end up netting all the fish, so only
a few will manage to escape. But this filing is only an approximation.
Some countries are far ahead in this field, with very efficient
procedures, yet even in these countries there is still some space for
extra-legal, even if not exactly âoutlawâ, activity in concrete terms.
The project of power is certainly omnipresent and intends to include
everyone in this data gathering. The more effective preventive control
is, the more the State becomes boss of the territory. It is no
coincidence, for example, that there is so much talk about the Mafia, to
the point of overstepping the boundaries between myth and reality, where
it is not clear where one begins and the other ends. I donât know if
itâs worth going into this question which, although fascinating, is not
very important in my opinion. However, there can be little doubt that
this is being exploited at the moment, also for the mysterious aim of
reaching an equilibrium between the political parties⊠But, apart from
all this, the establishment of strong preventive control should make
prison, at least as we know it, far less necessary. So, the function of
the sentence is control, and the more this function spreads to the point
of becoming preventive, the more prison will tend to change.
We must bear in mind that prison is quite different today to what it was
twenty years ago. It has changed more over the past ten years than it
did over the last hundred, and the whole process is still moving at this
rate. Today, the so-called model prisons are not all that different from
the maximum security prisons of the eighties. I donât want to split
hairs here, but, in fact, although there were particular forms of
control in the maximum security prisons, that was not the main
difference. I was held in a maximum security wing similar to Fossombrone
at a time when such places existed, and was under article 90 for a few
months, so I know what it means: naked body searches every day, dozens
of guards outside the cell door every morning, and everything else.
These aspects are certainly terrible but they are not the main thing.
There are no effectively maximum security prisons left [in Italy] today.
Nowadays they may have fewer hoursâ sociality in some places, the
exercise period may only be allowed in twoâs or threeâs, but in the
future everything could get much worse. Why?
When control covers the whole social territory the so-called spontaneous
prison population will be greatly reduced. Many âcrimesâ will be
declassified and there will be less institutional imprisonment (possibly
through the use of electronic devices such as âTrasponderâ, electronic
bracelets that set off an alarm if you go beyond the assigned perimeter,
and so on). Then, yes, there will be a real change in the prisons that
remain. Here isolation, psychological torture and white coats will take
the place of bloodstains on the wall, and science will be applied to
obtain the total destruction of the âoutlawsâ who have no intention of
negotiating with the State. That is how we see prison evolving, and I
believe that studies are already being carried out on the subject. There
would no longer be any need to keep on calling the places of physical
annihilation that remain âprisonsâ, in fact they could be called
anything at all. For example, it would be sufficient to qualify
someoneâs behaviour as insane in order to have them locked up in a
mental asylum. And if the law prevents us from calling these places
asylums and they are called âJesus Christâ, they will still be places
where people are being killed slowly.
So, as I said before, the law wants to control but it also wants to
bring the offender, i.e. he who has marked himself with breaking the
rules, back to ânormalityâ. It wants to apply an orthopaedic technique
to those who have behaved differently, draw them into the system and
render them innocuous. It wants to ensure that this deformed behaviour
will not repeat itself, and prevent any damage, or presumed damage, to
the community.
There is a great contradiction here. Although it no longer fully
subscribes to the orthopaedic ideologyâand we will see within what
limits it does accept itâthe judiciary realise that the sentencing
actually makes the âdifferentâ more dangerous. So, on the one hand they
want to rehabilitate deviants through the use of the sentence and on the
other this makes them more dangerous. In other words, it gives the
individual access to a process that makes him become more of a danger to
society, which might have been quite accidental up until then.
The distinction I mentioned is based on the existence of a not clearly
identifiable minority of rebels that constitute the real community of
outlaws inside the prisons. These irreducible individuals have none of
the political characteristics that a debate in the sixties tried to pin
on them.
I think that any distinction now between âpoliticalâ and âcommonâ law
prisoners that existed for a long time and caused so much damage in my
opinion, no longer has any reason to exist. This distinction was
sometimes even proposed and supported by anarchists in the seventies and
the first half of the eighties. At that time it was adopted by power in
order to maintain a certain equilibrium. For example, when you called
the jailer, the politicals would shout âagenteâ (officer) and the other
prisoners âguardiaâ (guard). So as soon as you heard someone shouting
âagenteâ you knew that they were a comrade. There, something so simple
created a distinction that, moved into other areas often came to be
distorted by power and transformed into an instrument of recuperation.
This distinction between political and common law prisoners was never
really valid anyway in my opinion, except for those who wanted to use a
part of the prison population for their own ends: the growth of the
militantâmilitary and militantâparty, the possibility of building up
power relations inside the prison and the plan to use the
âlumpen-proletarianâ prisoners. In a few cases, certain elements were
even used to carry out low works of justice, in plain words, as
murderers to kill people. Have I made myself clear? This has taken
place. We are talking of an historic responsibility that some of the
personalities who once led the old marxist-leninist combatant parties
and are in free circulation today took upon themselves. Some of our own
comrades were also killed that way. Not because this distinction was
made, but by an instrumentalisation of its consequences. It put
so-called common prisoners at the disposition of some of those who
defined themselves political prisoners in order to increase their
bargaining power inside the prison or with the Ministry in order to get
certain results. This ran parallel to the militaristic practice of the
management of power or âcounterpowerâ outside (each to their own taste)
and the central importance of the industrial workers, guided by the
party that was to lead them to their emancipation. These are all
dinosaurs today as far as I am concerned. Theyâre not in touch with
reality as I see it, at least I hope theyâre not, maybe Iâm wrong.
It might be useful to pause here for a moment in order to clarify our
opposition to any struggle for amnesty, something that raised more than
a few objections a number of years ago, even among anarchists.
The situation has changed now concerning relations between the prisoners
who insist on positions wrongly defined as irreducible and those who
have entered into negotiation with the State. At that time, 1985â86 I
think, I published a book, âAnd we will Always be Ready to Storm the
Gates of Heaven Againâ*, which many considered to be a criticism of the
validity of a âstruggle for amnestyâ. The prevailing idea at the time
was contained in Scalzoneâs so-called manifesto which carried,
precisely, the proposal of a struggle for amnesty and this was also made
by some of the anarchist movement, with the usual lack of comprehension.
But that was, letâs say, a secondary effect. It wasnât the main aim of
the book. The important thing, still today, is that nobody has the right
to say, âComrades, the war is overâ. First, nobody declared this war in
the first place and so, until proved otherwise, no one can decree the
end of it. No State declared the war, nor did any armed group have the
idea of declaring one. The reasoning is characteristic of the militarist
logic, the logic of opposing groups that decide to call a truce at some
point. No one can tell us that âthe war is overâ, even less so when the
reason for doing so is simply to justify oneâs own desistence.
If I donât feel like carrying on, given that no one can be forced to
continue if they donât feel like it, I say, âMy friends, a man is made
of flesh and blood, he canât go on to infinity. So, if I donât feel I
can make it, what must I do? Sign a piece of paper? I donât carry out
impure actions, I donât get comrades arrested, Iâm simply making a
declaration of my own desistence.â I have always considered this to be a
legitimate position, because nobody can be obliged to carry on if they
donât feel up to it. But desistence is no longer legitimate if , in
order to justify it, I come out with the statement, âI canât carry on
because the war is overâ. No, I no longer agree, because where does that
lead us? To all the others both inside and outside prison for whom it
isnât true that the war is over, or for whom this concept is dubious,
but end up believing it because everybody is saying so. And, desisting
or not desisting, they end up reaching the same conclusion. It would be
quite indecorous for me to push others to desist in order for me to
justify my own personal decision to give up the struggle.
Now, conditions are radically different today, not in the sense that
this indecorousness no longer exists, but in the sense that it is out of
date as other attitudes prevail. They no longer say âThe war is overâ,
which moreover would be unfounded as they should really say âThe war
never began; our war wasnât really a social war at allâ. But most of
them prefer to dedicate themselves to astrology or, sometimes, to
assisting prisoners. Yet, if you like, some of them might say, âPerhaps
we were wrong about some things, perhaps other ideas should have been
accepted in some of the debates that took place around the beginning of
the seventies.â That would be a fine critical approach. Iâm thinking of
one meeting at Porto Marghera where, among other things, the killing of
Calabresi [supercop responsible for the death of anarchist Giuseppe
Pinelli in1969 when he was; âsuicidedâ from the 4^(th) floor window of
Milan central police station] was under discussion. This was a very
important debate, which nobody talks about because hardly anybody knows
anything about it. Here, for the first time in Italy, two positions
appeared concerning this action....But perhaps not everybody is
interested in these questions... Well, between astrology and
assistentialism, another hypothesis has appeared, âItâs necessary to
start the war again, but with different weapons, not with the critique
of arms, but with the arms of critique.â They are ready to take on the
world again, with words. As far as I know, this chatter concerns the
management of daily life. So, centres for the elaboration of chatter are
appearing everywhere: centres for the elaboration of information, radio
stations (very important, where between some strange music and a
pseudo-cultural discussion, concepts of taking over the territory are
pushed through), squats verging on legalisation or verging on survival,
closed up in themselves in the miserable ghetto. In this way dreams of
controlling the territory are reawakened. Through revarnished old
concepts, the same old centralised, more or less militant party (but you
canât say that any more) management is getting into gear, and a new
pattern is emerging. This is all chatter for the time being: if they are
roses they will blossom. I think thatâs what is happening, we donât need
to give precise indications, we all know what Iâm talking about. This
chatter has some interesting aspects: the recycling of old cariatids in
disuse... Of course, me too Iâm an old cariatid, for goodness sake...
But I still have some ideas that seem to me to be interesting, ...thatâs
just my opinion, I might be wrong.
There is still a nucleus of comrades in prison who are not prepared to
bargain with the State. Our solidarity can go to these comrades, but
thatâs not enough. It canât be enough for someone with centuries of
prison on their backs. Detailed proposals are necessary, indications
setting out the concrete destruction of prisons. At the present time, at
least so it seems to me, there is no sign of any project based on the
destruction of prisons. It is necessary to start all over again. If you
insist on a kind of cohabitation with power, you increase desistence
from the struggle. And it is not just a question of a model of
intervention that I disagree with but which I might take into
consideration while doing other things, if I could. Unfortunately, this
whole mechanism is starting up again and could give certain results,
results that are not acceptable to us, but which in themselves are quite
legitimate. That is why the situation is different today. On the other
hand, you wonât get far with demonstrations of solidarity, such as, for
example, one hundred thousand postcards addressed to the President of
the Republic. These things are usually a waste of time, they have never
meant much. Yes, letters, telegrams, might help comrades to feel they
havenât been abandoned, because itâs nice for someone in prison to get
letters of solidarity, etc. Then, within certain limits, that can make
an impression on the prison authorities and on the individual screw, who
when he passes to control you at night might not keep the light on for
three seconds, but only one, because heâs scared and says to himself,
âThis one got twenty telegrams today, maybe one of his friends will be
waiting for me outside and split my head openâ, very important things,
for goodnessâ sake, Iâm not denying it. Itâs a question of doing
something, applying pressure, even minimal, in order to create a more
important deterrent perhaps, but looking at things realistically Iâm
afraid these comrades still have many years ahead of them.
The debate on amnesty was not a simple theoretical exercise, however. It
soon became an instrument for realizing certain practical actions and
suggesting a way of intervening on the question of prison. It was, and
continues to be, important in trying to pose the problem of prison from
a revolutionary point of view. The acceptance of the struggle for
amnesty was a macroscopic mistake, in my opinion. It was also proposed
inconsiderately and ignorantly by more than a few anarchists who, not
knowing what to do, and not being aware of the risks implicit in such a
choice, decided to support it. It was a serious political and
revolutionary mistake which, I have to say in all honesty, I didnât
make.
For example, the position regarding the Gozzini law* changed in relation
to the justification of the struggle for amnesty. Such choices had
consequences for the supporters of revolutionary authority. Clearly if
somebody says that prison changes deterministically according to the
changes in society, any attempt by the enemy to adjust my behaviour to
the historical evolution of reality, for example the Gozzini law, is all
right by me. So I accept it, in view of the struggle moving into other
sectors. The same goes for trade union bargaining. So I donât see why it
should be any different for prison. What seems like innocent
sociological theory becomes a precise political choice involving the
lives and future of thousands of comrades in prison. We have always
maintained that we are against amnesty, or rather a struggle for amnesty
(which are two different things, when they give us an amnesty of their
own accord weâll take it, and how).
Now letâs come back to the contradictions inherent in the concept of the
sentence and the various ways in which it is applied. The theoretical
debate on prison still contains the basic contradictions seen above,
which are really unsolvable.
In fact, these contradictions have become more acute in recent times.
Not that they didnât exist before. But the function of the sentence, the
structure meting it out and prison itselfâletâs say around or up until
1500âwas to hold people until given sanctions were applied. Or they
functioned purely as separation, to keep certain people away from their
social context. âI Piombiâ, in the seventeeth century, as you can read
in Casanovaâs Memoires, was a prison in Venice that was self-managed by
the inmates. There were no custodians inside the prison walls, only
outside, and that was one of the worst prisons of the era. But already
with the âPiombiâ we are later than 1500, we are fully into the
seventeenth century.
So the old prison had a different function. The aim of the modern prison
is to ârecuperateââwe are talking about the theory behind itâto bring
the individual back to a condition of normality. So prison has had two
functions, the old one where it was simply a place in which the
individual was parked while awaiting his or her fate (the death penalty,
mutilation, exclusion from the social context, a journey to the Holy
Land, which was equivalent to the death penalty given the difficulties
of such a journey in 1200â1300) and the modern one. Between these there
was the introduction of the so-called workhouses at the beginning of the
seventeen hundreds, with the aim of getting prisoners to work.
At a purely cultural level there was a theoretical debate that we donât
need to go into here. Suffice it to say that prison structures such as
Benthamâs Panopticon, where a single custodian could control all the
wings at onceâand bear in mind that similar structures still exist in
many prisons todayâsaw the light at the same time as the industrial
revolution. Some see a historical parallel between these two
developments, the figure of the modern prisoner emerging alongside that
of the worker in the early industrial plants. The industrial condition
develops and transforms, and has been the object of much criticism,
whereas the concept of naturalism in law remains, and giusnaturalism is
still at the root of the sacrality of the norm.
It doesnât really make any difference whether the sacrality of the norm
originates from the positivist doctrine, from God, from a law intrinsic
to the development of animated beings, or is intrinsic to the
development of the History of man and the vicissitudes of human reason
(historical finalism). Anybody supporting any one of these theses is
always looking for a foundation upon which to erect their own
behavioural construction, their own castle of rules. Once the latter is
built, anyone who finds themselves outside the fortified circle becomes
a legitimate candidate for prison, segregation, exclusion or death, as
the case may be.
Now, the thesis that interests us most, because it is still an object of
debate and study today, is that concerning natural law, i.e. a law that
is natural to reason as it develops throughout history. This concept is
important because it allows for some interesting modifications, that is
to say it has not been crystallised once and for all in the will of God,
but changes according to events in history. It developed fully with the
Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, has all the limitations of the
philosophical interpretation of the time, and contains two essential
elements: first history, then reason. History is seen to be progressive,
moving from a situation of chaos, animality or danger towards one that
is safer and more humane. Bovio said, âHistory is moving towards
anarchyâ, and many anarchists, at least of my generation, have repeated
that. I have never believed it possible to draw such a straight line on
this question. I am not at all convinced that history is moving towards
anarchy. There is another shadow in this beautiful enlightened, then
positivist, then idealist, then historicist discourse, that runs
parallel to it. All of these theories were elaborated in the academia of
power, in universities where philosophy and history are studied, places
where the suppliers of the State prisons are hard at work. And what is
this other shadow? It is the Shadow of Reason. Why is Reason always
right? I donât know. It is always right to sentence someone. People are
sentenced to the electric chair with reason, nobody is sentenced to
death without reason, there are a thousand reasons for sentencing people
to death. A sentence without reason doesnât exist. I have been in prison
many times, with reason, their reason.
It has been said that Nazism, realized in Germany in the thirties and
forties, was an explosion of irrationality, that is, of a lack of
reason. Well, I have never believed such a thing. Nazism was the extreme
consequence of the application of reason, i.e. the Hegelian reason of
the objective spirit that realizes itself in History, taken to its
natural conclusion. The most logical discourse in this sense was made by
an Italian philosopher, Gentile, at a conference in Palermo where he
made reference to the moral force of the truncheon. By striking in the
name of reason, the truncheon is always right, and State violence is
always ethical because the State is ethical.
All this might sound stupid, but it isnât because it constitutes the
foundation of so-called modern progressivism. We have seen this in the
Communist Party, the workersâ party, in marxist so-called revolutionary
movements, and also on the Right, in right-wing movements. Whereas the
Right, for its own reasons of identity, wrapped itself up in
conventional irrationalism (flags, symbols, discourses on destiny,
blood, race, etc.), the former packaged themselves in another variety:
progress, history, the future, the proletariat that was to defeat the
bourgeoisie, the State that was to extinguish itself. And, I might add,
more than a few anarchists tagged on to this discourse, going along with
this enormous metaphysical and ideological swindle. They simply pointed
out that history was not moving towards the extinction of the State but
towards anarchy and that it was necessary to extinguish the State right
away in order to reach anarchy more quickly. This ideological subtlety
did not move the content of this journey an inch from the marxist one.
And it never entered anyoneâs head that it was the discourse of reason,
and that it might be a swindle and serve as a basis and an alibi for
building a wall around the different.
That is why it is necessary to look at the optimism of the
anarchistsâfor example Kropotkinâsâmore deeply and critically, in order
to see the limitations of this way of thinking. It is important to see
the equivocation of Kropotkinâs âseed under the snowâ, as well as those
of other comrades of the anarchist positivist tendency. Everything that
Iâm saying here might seem far from the question of prisonâon the
contrary, this is exactly the theoretical and philosophical territory in
which prison finds its justification.
We should also look at Malatestaâs voluntarism, which seems to be the
opposite but fails to come up with any solutions unless it is inserted
within the âobjectiveâ deterministic development of history in the
direction of anarchy. I might have limitations, my personal capacity
might be circumscribed, but history is moving towards anarchy anyway, so
if it doesnât come about now it will do some time in the future. We
should also take a look at the limitations of Stirnerâs individualism,
something we tried to do at the recent meeting in Florence. We need to
see if such limitations really exist and if so, what they are, obviously
being very different from those of Malatesta and Kropotkin.
So, what what conclusions can we draw at this point? Prison is not an
abuse of power, it is not an exception, it is normal. The State builds
prisons so that it can put us in them. In so doing it is not doing
anything strange, it is simply doing its job. The State is not a prison
State, it is the State, thatâs all. In the same way that it expresses
itself through economic and cultural activity, political management and
the management of free time, it deals with the management of prison.
These elements are not separate, it is impossible to talk about prison
on its own, it wouldnât make sense because it would be taking one
element out of context. On the other hand, if this element is put into
its proper context, and that is exactly what the specialist cannot do,
the discourse changes. That is why we started off with the problem of
specialisation, because the specialist is only able to talk about his
own subject. âGiven that I know something about prison, I donât see why
I should talk about anything elseâ.
I believe that collective experiences, if this concept still means
anything, are composed of so many individual moments. Woe betide if we
were to obliterate these individual moments in the name of a superior
one, that which the marxists defined subsumption. Subsumption of
society, never! These terroristic processes must be absolutely
condemned. The individual has a moment that is his or hers and the
prisoner has his or her moment, which is not the same as that of another
prisoner. I absolutely disagree with those who say that I, who have been
in prison, must struggle more effectively than someone who has not. No,
because I struggle differently from someone who has never been in prison
and just as differently from one who has done more time than me, and so
on. And, viceversa, I could meet a comrade who is capable of making
suggestions to me, of making me understand, feel, imagine, or dream a
different kind of struggle, even if he has never been in prison. No
specialisation. Remember the first things that were said this evening:
no professionality, no talk of professors, even less professors of
prison matters. Fortunately, there is no specialisation here, we are not
at university.
We are all individuals who seek each other, who meet, go away, come
together again, moving on the basis of affinity, also transitory, which
can disappear or intensify. We are like a multitude of atoms in
movement, which have a very strong capacity for reciprocal penetration.
It is not a question, as Leibnez said, of monads without windows. We are
not isolated, we have our individual value, all individuals do. Only by
keeping this ineliminable moment constantly present is it possible to
talk of society, or the capacity to act, move and live together,
otherwise any society at all would be a prison. If I must sacrifice even
a tiny part of my individuality in the name of the Aufbehungâovercoming
in the Hegelian sense of the termâin the name of an abstract
principle... even anarchy, even freedom, then I donât agree. Prison is
certainly an extreme condition and so, like all total conditions, total
institutions, it shows oneâs true fabric clearly. It is like pulling a
piece of cloth as far as it can go, and just before it tears apart the
weave begins to appear. There, the individual who submits to the most
violent conditions reveals the cloth of which he or she is made. Maybe
he or she will discover things about themselves that they would never
have imagined in other situations. But this starting point is important
and fundamental: no element, idea, dream or utopia can take away this
individual moment, nor can the latter be sacrificed to any of the
former.
But letâs come back to our argument. Prison is the normality of the
State, and we, who live under the State with our daily lives regulated
by its pace and times, are living in a prison. In my opinion this has
been incorrectly but interestingly defined as an immaterial prison. That
is to say, it is not visible as such. It does not enclose us in such a
direct, shocking way as the walls of a prison do. It is nevertheless a
real prison, in that we are forced to submit to and adopt models of
behaviour that we didnât decide upon ourselves, but have been imposed
from outside, about which we can do very little.
But prison is also a construction. It is a place, an ideology, a
culture, a social phenomenon. That is, it has a specific identity, so if
on the one hand we bring it out of this specificity, we cannot at the
same time dilute it into society, and simply say, âWe are all in prison,
my situation was no different when I passed through that wretched door
and found myself in an empty cell with a loud radio blaring.â I felt a
trauma at the moment I walked through that cell door and heard someone
lock it behind me. This trauma exists, itâs not purely psychological, it
also consists of a fellow with a bunch of keys that jangle continuously,
the noise of which you carry with you for the rest of your life. You
never forget it, itâs something that rings in your ears, even at night
when youâre asleep, that noise of the keys, someone locking the door on
you. This fact of closing the door is, I believe, one of the most
horrifying things that one human being can do to another. For me someone
who holds a key in his hand and locks a human being behind a door, no
matter what the latter might have done, for me anyone who closes that
door is an absolutely contemptible person, one about whom it is
impossible to talk about in terms of human fraternity, human features
and so on. Yet there are moments when you need this individual, when a
psychological mechanism connected to solitude lets loose. When you are
alone, in your hole... Youâve been alone for a month, a month and a
half, two months. The days pass and you donât see anyone, sometimes you
hear incredible noises, at others nothing, and you hear a footstep there
outside. You know it is his footstep. You are absolutely convinced that
this is the worst, most contemptible person on earth. Yet at a certain
point you stand behind the door and wait for him like a lover because
when that despicable person passes he throws you a glance that reminds
you that you are a human being. Because he too has two legs, two arms
and two eyes. At a certain point you see him differently. You no longer
see the uniform, and you say to yourself, âHumanity still exists after
allâ.
That is what that hole, that little cell, leads to, so you now have
something specific that can no longer be seen as the dilution of prison
into daily life. That is why prison is not immaterial. That is why
prison is both a specific, architectonic structure, and is at the same
time diffused. We are all in prison, but prison is also something
different. But we must not only see it as something different because if
we did we would cease to understand it.
I understand that all this might seem contradictory at first. But that
is just an impression. If you think about it, it is no more
contradictory than anything else.
The sentence, we said, is the mechanism that the so-called important
philosophers... think of what Kant said about the sentence... this great
philosopher said something horrendous... He said, âOn an island there is
a community, and this community dissolves itself and everybody goes
away, only one man remains, a murderer, the last to kill a man. Now the
community has broken up, there is absolutely nothing to safeguard, there
is no longer a common good, there is nothing left to revive, well, that
man must still do his sentence.â This is what Kant said, the philosopher
who opened up the perspective of modern historicism. Bah!...
Anyway... So, the sentence, what does it do? According to theoreticians
of every hue, it restores the equilibrium that has been upset, it
redresses a balance. But what does the sentence really do? It does
something else. First of all it precipitates the individual into a
condition of uncertainty. That is, anyone facing such a construction,
such an efficient mechanism, finds himself before something bigger than
himself. This mechanism is composed of lawyers, judges, carabinieri,
police, house searches, pushing and pulling, curses, being stripped
naked, flexionsâonce there used to be anal inspections, which anyone who
hasnât been subjected to canât imagineâthe conditions of detention in
the prison... That is the sentence. You are still at the beginning, you
still havenât been accused of anything yet, just a few words on a piece
of paper bearing an article of the penal code that you donât even
understand, but already the sentence enters your blood and becomes part
of you. And how does it become part of you? By putting you in a
condition of uncertainty. You donât know whatâs going to happen to you.
You can be the most hardened criminal and find yourself in that state of
uncertainty, and I know that because I have spoken to people who are
apparently in control, people who, when they come into prison, greet the
officer in charge, greet this one and that one, but when they go to bed
and put their head on the pillow, start to cry. Because the situation is
like that, when you come to find yourself in these conditions itâs not
easy to see how itâs all going to end. Iâve also spoken to many
comrades, we have joked together about the situation in prison, but we
couldnât deny that we had been placed in a situation of uncertainty
where you donât know what to expect the next day... And this condition
of uncertainty is perhaps the essential element, the one at the root of
all the syndromes, all the specific illnesses, everything that emerges
from time in prison. You will be in a condition of uncertainty all the
time you are inside. In fact, up until three minutes before you go
through the last gateâbear in mind that there are about twenty between
your cell door and the outside oneâyou donât know whether, exactly two
metres away from the last gate, a revolt will break out inside, youâll
get involved in it and youâre lost; you can start talking again twenty
years on. So, this uncertainty is practically inside you, you know itâs
inside you, and you canât say, âOK, after all Iâm a revolutionary, all
this doesnât affect me: prison, death, twenty years, two months...â,
comrades, thatâs bullshit. Itâs bullshit that Iâve said, me too, to give
myself courage, and also to give courage to others, the family, my
mother, my father, who were old and were broken-hearted by the visits.
When I went to prison the first time they cried, poor things. These are
difficult situations, and you project uncertainty towards the outside,
you project it on to those who love you, your children, on a whole
situation that doesnât disappear with chatter. I remember when,
precisely finding myself in isolation for the first time, twenty-five
years ago, I started to sing anarchist songs... and I hate anarchist
songs. How did I manage to sing these songs in there? I was singing to
give myself courage, like a child that starts to whistle or tell fairy
stories so as not to be scared in the dark.
The other element, which I experienced palpably, was the deformation of
communication. You canât make it to communicate. In order to be able to
say something, letâs say to change your lawyer, a whole bureaucratic
procedure must be gone through: in the evening you have to stick a piece
of paper on the armoured door of your cell saying that you want to go to
the registry office next day. The next day they call you, and you set
off to the office. Calculating, letâs say, that itâs about seventy-five
metres away, you think youâll only be a few minutes, but no! It can take
from ten minutes to an hour and a half to cross these seventy-five
metres, and, like an idiot, you wait behind each door for some angel in
uniform to come and open it for you, trac-trac, and you pass the first,
second, third, fourth obstacle and everything else. This changes your
world completely. What does it change? It changes your whole conception
of time and space. It sounds easy, because we cope with this concept
like we do with money, like coins that we use every day. But itâs not so
simple, because time is not what is marked by the clock: that is
absolute time, Newtonâs time, that has been determined once and for all.
Alongside this time there is that of a French philosopher, and this is
known as the real duration, thatâs to say, there is time in the sense
indicated by Saint Augustine, time as consciousness, as the duration of
our consciousness. That is waiting. We measure waiting by the beat of
our sensations, and its duration is not at all equal to the absolute
time of the clock.
Once clocks were forbidden in prison, now, since the prison reform in
1974, they are allowed. And itâs worse, in my opinion. Once you never
knew what time it was, you guessed it with the sun, or with the prison
routine, which constituted a ânaturalâ clock, an institutional clock,
hence you knew that at half past seven the armoured door would be opened
and the day would begin. The noise they make in opening that door has
its historically recognizable function, which has developed in various
ways throughout time. While doing some research on the Inquisition, I
found instructions in a manual of 1600 on how to open the door in cases
where the Confratelli della Compagnia dei Bianchi, the ones with the
white hoods that is, had to take a condemned prisoner to the scaffold.
The Spanish Inquisition also existed in Sicily, so they were well
organised. Those belonging to this Compagnia dei Bianchi had the job of
assisting condemned prisoners during the three days preceding execution.
One of their tasks was to ensure that they were ready to be brought to
justice, and how did they do that? By inventing a particular technique:
they acted as though they were about to take the prisoner to the
scaffold. They woke him up early, made a lot of noise, marched in groups
with all those entrusted with this operation, the halberdiers, etc.. But
it wasnât true, it was merely an atrocious staging, simply to see how
the poor devil would react. If they reacted properly, i.e. didnât go
crazy, they were considered ready for the final operation. So, opening
an armoured door isnât like opening just any door. These well-built
young men, instructed in Parma, had received particular dispositions:
the armoured door is to be opened with extremely violent blows, the
sleeping prisoner must jump up in the air. From that moment he must
think, âThere, the world of dreams is over, now the institution begins,
now they are telling me what to do...â Half past seven, you donât go
out, you go out at half past eight, in other words, you do everything
according to the prison routine, which is obviously what they want.
For example, I donât know, something important... the passage of time is
also marked by other things: the milk arrives in the morning (I have
thought a lot about these little things, anyway thereâs nothing else to
do in prison so what do you do? You think.), then they bring you an egg
or two at ten, then at half past ten or eleven the fruit, then at twelve
oâclock lunch, then at two they bring you something else, I donât know,
some jam, why? Because that way the time passes, they regulate it for
you. The arrival of the food is an event, you frame it within this
segregative context and that is what your life boils down to.
All this seems piffle, but in my opinion it is science, real prison
science. What do the so-called prison operators who think they know
everything, know about all this? First of all, the university professor
has never been in prison. Normally those who take an interest in prison
donât have the faintest idea of what it really is. Letâs leave aside law
professors, who donât even know what they are talking about, poor
things. We are talking about prison workers who, the closer they seem to
get to the inside of prison the less they possibly understand about it.
Lawyers and judges yes, they have been inside prisons, but where? In the
external part, in the visitorâs rooms. Apart from exceptional cases
where a superintendent from the court comes into the wing (but he only
comes into the wing, not the cells), lawyers and judges donât normally
know what a prison is. Iâll go further, even the prison workers, the
psychologists, social workers, every species of cop, donât know what
prison is. In fact, what is their job? They go into rooms that are
reserved for them, call the prisoner, have a fine discussion, then go
home and eat their dinner. And, moreover, even the screws donât know
what prison is, and can I tell you that from personal experience. For
example, when I was in Bergamo prison and the other prisoners and I ,
within the limits of our possibilities, organisedâwe didnât call it a
revolt, but a kind of protestâbecause they were taking out the plugs we
used to block the holes that the screws had made in the toilets to
control us even there. All prisoners block these holes as best they can,
with anything they can lay their hands on: paper, pieces of wood,
hanging towels and a hundred other things. Usually these defences are
left alone, but sometimes the governor in Bergamo gave the order to get
rid of them, so the screws pushed them out with a pencil. In answer to
our protest the governor replied, âWhy are you making such a fuss about
nothing, after all we are all menâ. What, we are all men? âYou are the
governor and I am the prisoner and I donât want the guard looking at me
when Iâm in the toilet.â So the governor thought that the problem was
something trivial. But this barracks camaraderie showed that, although
he was the governor of a prison, he had no idea what prison is. Because
I do not go to the toilet along with my cell mate, a prisoner like
myself, a companion of mine whom you certainly canât, in terms of
humanity, friendship and personal relationship, compare to a prison
governor, thatâs obvious. And when the toilet was in the cell, one
invented a thousand expedients to find the way to use it alone. The
toilet used to be right inside the cell. When I was in prison for the
first time, in Catania nearly a quarter of a century ago, I got work
registering the prisonersâ accounts, and I noticed that many prisoners
consumed a huge amount of S. Pellegrino magnesium. When I asked why,
they explained that by taking this purgative every week their shit
didnât smell, or at least it did less. What does that show us? That the
governor and the screws have no idea about what prison is. Because to
understand prison, you must be on the other side of the door when the
guard locks it. There is the question of the key, without the key itâs
all theory.
So, to get back to the point. Of course, prison is composed of the
walls, the cop with the machine gun patrolling them, the exercise yard,
the mist that descends on the yard and you donât know where you are,
what planet youâre on, whether youâre in exile, on the moon, etc. But,
basically, prison is the cell. And you can be alone in that cell or with
others, and these are two separate conditions and two different kinds of
suffering. Because yes, we are strong, etc., but I have done prison
alone, and itâs no joke. The last time I did almost two years alone, and
it was heavy. Perhaps with others it is even heavier, or at least it is
heavy in a different way because the animal man behaves strangely in
reclusion and so... This is a rough outline of the problems to do with
prison, told lightly, and I wonât go into certain other questions.
I had made a note of some other problems but they are not very
important. I just want to mention a couple of things, first the smell.
Prison has a particular smell that you never forget. You smell it in the
morning. I remember, itâs a smell that you find in three other places:
bars when they open in the morning, billiard rooms and brothels. In
places where the human animal finds itself in particular conditions of
suffering there is a particular odour, and prison has this smell and you
never forget it, you notice it most in the morning when they open the
armoured doors, donât ask me why. The other problem is noise, the noise
is really something terrible, thereâs no way you can get used to it.
Itâs not just the music, the Neapolitan songs that torture you. You
canât describe it, itâs something horrendous. Whereas a problem of
secondary importance, at least as far as I could see, and not only from
my own personal experience, was the problem of sexual desire; this is
not such a problem as it might seem from outside. I saw the prisonersâ
response to a questionnaire sent round by the ministry about fifteen
years ago concerning the eventuality of setting up a system of so-called
love hours, letâs say, with oneâs legitimate partner, and it was almost
completely negative.
Now letâs look at the final part of the question, if you are not too
dazed. What can the perspective of prison be? That is, in what way is
power trying to restructure prison conditions which, obviously, are
never static? Prison is uncertain by definition, so you never know
whatâs going to happen. This uncertainty is also ambivalent as far as
the rules are concerned. There is a law that says that the prisoner must
be given a copy of the prison rules when he or she arrives, in order to
read and respect them, if they want. In some prisons, like the Dozza in
Bologna, for example, they give a three page extract, but the actual
rules are a beast of 150 pages. So incredible things happen. If someone
gets hold of all the rules and reads them carefully they can end up
creating problems for the institution.
I said prison is something that is constantly undergoing profound
transformation and, in my opinion (this is my personal idea), is moving
towards an opening, that is, it is tending to open up and have people
participate. In the seventies it took you about an hour to make a fried
egg or a coffee in your cell, because you had to make a kind of
construction with empty match boxes covered in silver paper from
cigarette packets, then put solid gas under it, the so-called âmelaâ,
then light this thing, always messing about with this alchemy near the
toilet because there were no tables or chairs. You had to fold up the
bed in the morning so there was a kind of platform to sit on. There is a
considerable difference between these primordial conditions and those of
today where there are even structures where you can cook in the judicial
prisons as well as the penal institutions (the latter are even better
equipped and more âopenâ).
The reform has been approved. This reform has certainly improved prison
conditions to some extent, of course. It has created a few extra moments
of sociality, made other things worse, and led to greater disparity
between prisoners. The Dozza, for example, is a model prison. Built as a
special high security prison, it is now being used as a normal one and
it is infinitely worse than the old San Giovanni. I have been in both
and can honestly say that the Dozza is worse. But whereas there were
bars over the windows at San Giovanni, then the metal grid behind the
bars, then the ventilation grid, in the Dozza there are only vertical
bars and so you seem to be more free but with all that conditions on the
whole are worse, they are more inhuman. Whereas at San Giovanni you
couldnât leave your cell and walk about in the wing, in the Dozza you
are free to do so (always in the hours fixed by the direction) so, there
are differences... But these are, you might say, pulsations within the
prison system. Itâs sufficient for something to go wrong and the wider
berth immediately restricts itself. If instead of one prisoner hanging
himself every 15 days there is one a week, things immediately start to
change. At the end of 1987, precisely at the Dozza,there was a simple
protest which the prison authorities responded to with an armed attack
against the infirmary, led by the nazi-style military commander of the
prison. In such situations prison changes in a flash.
But these pulsations inside particular prisons are related to the
pulsation of development and transformation in the prison system as a
whole, which is moving towards an opening. Why is this? Because it
corresponds to the development of the prison system, the extension of
its peripheral structures and the structures of the State as a whole.
That is to say, there is more participation. This concept deserves to be
looked at more closely. Bear in mind, on the basis of what we were
saying before about contradictions, that the concept of participation is
not at all separate from the concept of separateness. I participate and
in an initial phase of this participation I feel closer to the others
who participate along with me. As this increases, however, the very
process of participation isolates me and makes me different from the
others, because each one follows his own road in this participation.
Letâs try to illustrate this concept better, because it is not very
simple. You can see participation everywhere, in schools, in the
factory, in the various functions of the unions, in school and factory
councils, basically in the whole world of production. Participation
comes about in different ways according to the situation. In the ghetto
areas of cities, for example. Take the St Cristoforo area in Catania
[Sicily], for example. It is one of the biggest ghettoes in the town,
with a high concentration of social problems, but things are changing,
there are the family consultancies, whereas once the police couldnât
even circulate there. How has this greater participation changed the
area? Has is brought it closer to or taken it further away from the rest
of Catania? That is the question. In my opinion, it has isolated it from
the other areas even more, by making it even more specific. In my
opinion, the aim of participation is to divide.
Prison is opening up to participation, there are structures for an
inside-outside dialogue, such as âPrison-territoryâ, letâs say, composed
of a bunch of swindlers, third-rate ideologues, representatives of town
councils, unions and schools, and delegations from the Bishopric. All
this mob do is to get authorisations to go inside the prison based on
article 17, and contact the prisoner, thereby establishing a contact
between inside and outside. Any prisoner has one hundred, one thousand
problems, he or she is like a patient. If you go into a hospital and
talk to a patient, they have all the illnesses in the book. If you go
into prison and talk to a prisoner you will find that he or she has a
thousand problems. Above all, they are always innocent, didnât do
anything wrong and their family is always needy. Well, the things
prisoners always talk about. On the other hand, they each look after
their own interests and, in any case, itâs not appreciated in prison for
someone to come out with, âPrison doesnât do anything to me, itâs
bullshit, rubbish...â, no, that wouldnât go down well.
Participation causes further separation, a greater division inside the
prison, because the few people of a consciously illegal disposition,
that is to say the ones who really are âoutlawsâ, stand out. In a prison
population of, letâs say, one hundred prisoners, you can already
distinguish them in the yard. There you can see who the serious people
are and who are not, and you can see that in many ways, from the many
signals they give out. A whole discourse develops inside, based on the
way they walk, the choices they make, the words they use. I know, many
of these things can be taken the wrong way. I am not praising
stereotypical behaviour, what Iâm saying is that thereâs a specificity
inside prison. There is the prisoner who is aware of his job of being a
prisoner, his qualification as a prisoner, and there is the prisoner who
finds himself locked up by mistake, who might very well have been a bank
manager, or simply a poor idiot. There is even the prisoner who finds a
transitory systemization in prison, who sees prison as a passing
accident (as short as possible) or a form of social assistance. I have
seen people get themselves arrested just before Christmas because at
Christmas they give Christmas dinner (you think thatâs nothing?), or to
get properly cleaned up, or to be cured, because for many of them there
is no other way to get treatmentâand there is not one but hundreds of
such cases.
But there is another prison population, those who pride themselves in
being âoutlawsâ, in being able to attack determined structures of the
State their own way. This population is obviously not prepared to play
the game of participation, so will stand out and be subjected to very
precise separation. That is why participatory prison is a prison of
division, because it separates. Not all are able to participate at the
same level, not everybody accepts a dialogue with power. And the greater
the participation, the greater the number of signals that come from it,
the more the sectorialisation of the prison world becomes visible.
Much remains to be said concerning the question of accepting a
relationship with the prison institution. I am not going into all that
today, having done it many times in the past. But letâs take the
question of parole. This is not something that can be summed up as a
direct relationship between prison and prisoner. Before parole is
granted there is a whole procedure called âtreatmentâ (the choice of the
word is no coincidence, in that the prisoner is seen as a patient). The
treatment is a series of decisions that he or she must make one after
the other. It begins with a meeting with the psychiatrist, then there is
taking a job inside the prison and that depends on your not having had
any problems inside, so itâs something that goes on for two or three
years. Thatâs it, you have to choose the road of bargaining with power
well in advance. A legitimate choice, for goodness sake, but always in
the optic of that desistence for which one says, âI donât feel like
carrying on. Iâm not damaging anyone and Iâm going to take this roadâ...
Well, if the guard behaves in a certain way I pretend to look at the
wall that seems to have got very interesting all of a sudden; if thereâs
a problem, Iâm not saying a revolt, but a simple problem, I stay in the
cell and donât go out into the yard. All this involves a choice, there
is no clear alternative between detention and parole, thatâs pure
theory, in practice itâs not like that. Basically this problem exists
for prisoners who have a coherence as revolutionaries. But prisoners in
general, who find themselves inside for their own reasons and have never
claimed any âpoliticalâ identity no matter how rarified this concept has
become, see things in terms of the practicability of a choice and do not
pose themselves such problems even remotely. They have their own
personal history and the way it fits in with what the law offers them.
This itinerary takes two or three years, itâs not something that happens
in a day.
Of course, the prison of the future, which I believe will be far more
open than the present one, will receive more attention so will be far
more repressive and more closed, totally closed, towards the minority
that does not accept bargaining, does not want to participate and
refuses to even discuss anything. That is why I have spoken of the
relationship between participation and division, a relationship that is
anything but obvious at first sight. Things that seemed so far apart
turn out to be close together: participation creates division.
So, what to do? We have often asked ourselves this question as far as
prison is concerned. Iâve just read a little pamphlet. I hardly ever
read anything about prison on principle, because it disgusts me to read
these texts that go on and on about it. But, as I had been asked by some
comrades, I accepted a âfamilyâ discussion, letâs say. So, I was saying,
I read this pamphlet. It was published by the comrades of Nautilus
publications and contained an abolitionist text on prison, then an
article by Riccardo dâEste*. It was interesting, even though I didnât
understand exactly what he wanted to say, I mean, whether he was making
a critique of abolitionism or not, or whether he couldnât manage to do
so completely, given that he was presenting this pamphlet. But thereâs
something I donât like in this text and that is what I want to say, and
when I see Riccardo Iâll tell him. He condemned, absolutely and without
appeal, those who have theorised or carried out attacks against prisons
in the past. This judgement seems wrong to me. He says this... bear in
mind that Riccardo is a very good comrade whom you perhaps got to know
at one of his conferences here in Bologna... he says, âThese attacks
were nothing, they were senseless, in fact they have built the prisons
anyway.â But come on, dear man! You who are against efficientism in
everything else, you say something that is eminently efficientist. What
does âthey built the prisons anywayâ mean? Perhaps anything we do, when
it doesnât produce the desired result, or doesnât reach the desired
goal, isnât worth a damn? Sorry if I put this so simplistically, but the
question of the attack on prisons is of particular interest to me. But
no! Prisons must be attacked. That doesnât mean to say that once it has
been decided to attack them they will all disappear. Or that because we
have attacked them once we can say we are happy and will do nothing else
to destroy them. I remember the attempt to destroy the prison of
Sollicciano when it was being built. The attempt was made, but the
prisons of Sollicciano were built all the same. But what does that mean,
that the attack was pointless? I donât think so. Because if we were to
come to the conclusion that Riccardo did, perhaps by a slip of the pen,
as Iâd like to think, we must condemn everything we do. Because nothing
that revolutionary and anarchist comrades do is guaranteed to obtain the
desired result and reach its goal in absolute. If that were the case we
would really all be at peace.
Concerning Riccardo dâEsteâs text, it should be said that I donât just
know his ideas from reading the pamphlet on prison, but also through
having spoken to him. Riccardo is a fascinating person, but when you
listen to him, or read him, you do well to separate what he writes from
what he says, the wheat from the chaff, to see how much is valid and how
much is the fascinating way he says it.
In my opinion, a separation of the kind he makes on the question of a
possible interaction between reform and extremism doesnât exist. In
reality there are not struggles that are reformist and others that are
revolutionary. It is the way that you carry out a struggle that counts.
As we said earlier, the way you behave with others counts a great deal:
if I behave with my companion in a certain way, am I a reformist or a
revolutionary? No, these are not the alternatives, it is more a question
of seeing whether I am a bastard or not. And if I make a distinction
between my way of being and my way of acting, my way of being in the
intimacy of my relations with those close to me and my âpoliticalâ way
of appearing, then the distinction about reformism becomes valid. It is
absurd to talk about these concepts in abstract.
The individual must make up his or her mind as to what their basic
choices are in everything they do. If not, if they are continually
copping out, they will clearly be revolutionaries in word alone, or they
might conquer the world, but in order to do what? To enact a new theatre
of Greek tragedy. The above distinction only exists in the world of the
politician, that of the spectacle, representation (in Schopenhauerâs
sense of the term). If we reduce the world to this representation (donât
letâs forget that Schopenhauer lent his binoculars to a Prussian officer
in order for him to take better aim and shoot the insurgents; this is
the man who talks to us of the âworld as representationâ, not the one
that some anarchist readers have dreamed of from his book) then, yes, it
is possible to make a distinction between reform and revolution, but
again this is chatter. These abstract ideas donât exist in reality.
There is the individual, with everything he or she relates to, and
through this relating contributes to transforming reality, so you canât
make precise distinctions about the things they do. All the theoretical
distinction between reform and revolution is not as significant as was
thought in the past.
...Now a few words on the question of efficientism.
This is a question that people work out for themselves. I come from a
culture and a way of thinking that could be defined efficientist, I was
born in an efficientist atmosphere, I come from the school of
efficientism. Then I convinced myself that this gets you nowhere. I
convinced myself... theoretically, maybe in practice I am still the
same, but at least in theory I can see the difference, that not all the
actions one carries out necessarily obtain instant results. That is
fundamental. It is important to understand this for many reasons, first
of all because there is a tendency, especially among revolutionaries, to
present the bill, and letâs not forget that revolutionaries are greedy,
they are exacting creditors... They are very quick to rig up the
ghigliottine, they donât wait for anyone, this is something terrible. In
fact, what is the ghigliotine of the revolutionary? It is the
consequence of efficientism, because it reaches a certain point then
begins to... I read something recently concerning the stupor caused by
of Leninâs writings. Many are shocked because Lenin ordered the peasant
proprietors to be killed. That didnât surprise me at all. The killing of
peasant proprietors is quite normal when done in the name of
revolutionary efficientism. Either one is surprised at everything to do
with efficientism, or one doesnât wonder at reading something of the
sort because it is quite normal, a logical consequence of the choices
made previously. If one wants to reach given objectives, there are
certain costs, that is the concept of efficientism.
The question of efficientism concerns how to set out a struggle
correctly, for example the struggle against the prison institutions that
hang over each and every one of us to a certain extent. My grandfather
used to say, âWe all own a brick of the prisonâ. âWe have a brick eachâ,
he used to say. Not that he understood much about prison, but it was a
well-known Sicilian proverb at the time. So, letâs make prison become
part of our whole intervention in reality, in intermediary struggles.
The latter are the struggles that we carry out without expecting any
great results because they will probably be recuperated, or because they
are circumscribed. If these struggles are set out correctly, however,
they always give some kind of result in a way that is different to
efficientism. I mean, if social struggles are properly set out they
reproduce themselves. And how can they be set out properly? First of all
by getting away from the question of the delegate and the expectation of
any outside support; in other words, by self-managing them. Then, they
obviously shouldnât be carried out in accordance with the precise
deadlines that are fixed in the laboratories of power, so they must
start off from a different way of seeing things, from a logic of
permanent conflictuality. These two concepts, self-management and
permanent conflictuality, are then combined with a third: the absence of
the need for immediate visibility. The effectiveness of a struggle does
not come from a utopian vision of reality, but from the real possibility
of setting it out in a way that eliminates any possibility of its being
transformed into quantity and getting quantitative results.
This is possible. In fact, if we think about it, it is always possible.
We often make the mistake of wanting to circumscribe the struggle in
order to be better understood. By intervening in something specific such
as the factory for example it is easy to see the characteristics: the
struggle for wage increases, holding on to jobs, fighting pollution at
work, and so many other things, and we donât see how prison can fit in
to that, because we think that people wouldnât understand us as well if
we were to widen the argument.
In itself the struggle, letâs say in a factory, is always an
intermediate one. How might such a struggle end up? At best one would
reach the original objective, the workers would save their jobs, then
everything would be recuperated. The struggle is recuperated, the bosses
find an alternative to redundancy money, they find an alternative to
dangerous work, they find further investment to improve conditions, etc.
This kind of situation satisfies us, and in fact it is all right from a
revolutionary point of view if the initial conditions of timing,
permanent conflictuality, self-management of the struggle and everything
else, were maintained throughout. But it is no longer satisfying if, in
the name of efficiency, we prevent ourselves from including prison in
it. Because for me the question of prison must be present in all the
struggles we carry out like any other aspect of the revolutionary
discourse. And if we think about it, it is possible to do something of
the kind. When we donât, it is only in the name of efficiency, because
we think that we wonât be understood or that we might seem dangerous, so
we prefer to avoid the question of prison.
A few words now on the abolitionist position. Bear in mind that I am not
all that well prepared on the subject, first of all because I donât
agree with the abolitionist position as I understand it, so I might miss
something out. If what I say turns out to be lacking, well, correct me.
I was saying, donât agree with the abolitionist position, not because I
want prisons, of course, but because I donât agree with a position that
wants to abolish part of a whole that cannot be dissected. In other
words, I donât think that itâs possible to talk about abolition as
opposed to attack. In other words, I donât think that itâs possible to
propose a platform to abolish one aspect of a context that is
organically inseparable. I donât agree with proposals to abolish the
judiciary, because for me such proposals donât make sense; or to abolish
the police for that matter. That doesnât mean that Iâm in favour of the
judiciary or the police. In the same way, I donât agree with the
abolition of the State, only its destruction. And not only do I agree to
that but I am ready to act now towards such an end, whenever that is,
even if it is extremely improbable in the short term. I mean, I am ready
to do something, and can discuss what to do in terms of attack against
this or that specific aspect of the State, and so also against prison.
In other words, as I see it the problem needs to be upturned. It is not
a question of abolishing a part of the State, such as prison for
example, but of destroying the State, obviously not completely and all
at once, otherwise we would put it off to infinity. It would be like
following that famous direction in history that is moving towards
anarchy in any case, so we would end up doing nothing, waiting for this
anarchy to come about by itself. On the contrary, I am prepared to do
something today, right away, even against a part of the total
institution âStateâ, so also against prison, the police, the judiciary,
or any other of the essential components of the State. This is the
concept that I wanted to make clear.
What do these ideas actually correspond to? Letâs spend another couple
of minutes, donât get restless, I swear I wonât bore you much longer. If
you think about it carefully, the idea of the abolition of prison comes
from quite a precise theoretical context, which frankly I donât know,
but something I do know a bit more about was born alongside it. In
America at the present time a number of universities are working on the
question of the transformation of democracy within general philosophical
ideas, but also in sociological theory. There are various American
thinkers, the most famous of whom is Nozik, who have examined the
concept of a communitarian life without sanctions, without sentences and
without any instruments of repression. Why are they taking up this
problem? Obviously because these enlightened people realise that the
democratic structure as we know it cannot go on for long and they will
have to find another solution. They need to look and see how communities
could emerge without certain elements that are natural to the existence
of the State such as prison, the police, State control, etc.. This
debate is not something marginal, it is at the centre of political and
philosophical ideas in American universities. And in my opinion
abolitionism, correct me if Iâm wrong, could be taken up by this
movement. But this is a question that needs to be gone into by someone
who knows more about it than me, I donât want to say any more on the
subject.
Letâs say that this kind of problem, especially in theorists like
Nozikâthere are also others but their names escape me at the momentâis
an indication of some of the practical needs of the management of power.
Evidently the historical model of democracy, for example Tocquevilleâs
book, is no longer acceptable. That is not the democracy weâre talking
about. Other structures are required today. Take a country like China.
How will the future democracy of China be able to base itself on a model
such as Tocquevilleâs? How could a parliament with twenty-six thousand
members function, for example? Impossible. They must find another way.
And they are working in that direction. We can also see a few signals
here in Italy, in a different sense. Institutional transformations, as
they say, that are the expression of the generalised malaise of
democracy. But also men of letters who seem far from democratic
cover-ups such as Foucault have given their contribution to the
perfectionment of prison and a rationalisation of the institutional
structure.
Concerning Foucault, we could say that, at least as far as I know given
that I know his work on the history of madness best, two basic lines of
thought run through his work: one relates to overcoming and the other to
maintaining a process in act. The result is that this theoretician
always leaves something ill-defined. In all his proposals, even that
concerning homosexuality, seen as both diversity and normality, it is
never clear what he actually opts for. Ambivalence is characteristic of
this thinker, and not only him but all those who are trying to keep
themselves on an even keel. Basically, for him the prison question
concerns an instrument whose use he is unsure about, he would like to do
away with it but does not have anything else to suggest other than
putting it in parenthesis. In fact, at a certain point, he gives the
example of the nave des folles, which was a prison, asylum, orphanage
and rest home for old prostitutes, all at once. He writes that the nave
aux folles was realised in a few days, that it takes very little time to
realise it. At a time when society was expelling individuals who are
different from certain cities (Iâm not talking about homosexuals) it put
them outside the walls. And these individuals, not knowing what to do,
migrated from town to town, so at a given moment they were taken and put
on a ship, the ship of mad people. This ship started to sail from port
to port because nobody wanted it. A ship perpetually in movement. At
that moment prison was created, as well as the asylum, the orphanage and
rest homes for old prostitutes, because at that time society could no
longer tolerate their presence. Certain social functions had
disappeared: that of the madman, who in medieval society was seen as one
touched by God, and that of the beggar, who in Catholic countries was
the object of charity, the basis of Catholic christianity, donât forget.
With the development of Protestantism, the beggar becomes an object of
capture, so had to be held separate. When society can no longer use him,
the figure of the beggar becomes superfluous. He disappears as the
receiver of charity to become a prisoner. Today, this society no longer
needs prison, the âthingâ prisoner must disappear. How do you do that?
By taking a ship and putting all the prisoners on it? But âthe thingâ
prisoner does not disappear when the ship becomes a prison, in the way
that the French did with those from the Paris Comune who were deported:
they put them into pontoons, boats moored at Le Havre, and people stayed
in them for 5 or 6 years, prisoners in a floating prison. Now society no
longer needs prisons, as some enlightened social theorists are saying,
so letâs transfer the prisoners to another social institution. That
would be the project seen from the abolitionist point of view. And here
Foucaultâs discourse turns to perfection.
Thatâs what I wanted to say. Now letâs come back to the question of
attack for a moment. I am always for the specific attack. The specific
attack is important, not only for the results that it produces, not only
for the effects it produces, that we can see before our eyes... None of
us can claim to be functionalist, because if we were to fall into that
contradiction we wouldnât do anything at all. So, first prisons need to
be understood, because we canât do anything if we donât understand the
reality we want to fight. Then they have to be made comprehensible to
others. Then they need to be attacked. Thereâs no other solution. They
must be attacked as such. These attacks contain nothing of the great
military operations that some imagine. I have always thought of these
attacks as a day out in the country. One says to oneself, â I feel
hemmed in today, in this anarchist place, (frankly I find them a bit
depressing), and I want to go for a walk. Letâs not stay shut up in this
place, letâs go out for a walkâ. By that, I donât mean a student-like
attitude, because thatâs stupid, but letâs just say without too much
drama; itâs always possible to go for a walk in the country, and itâs
not bad for your health.. And without spending too much time discussing
things and transforming a day in the country into a kind of crusade
against all oppressors past, present and future. No, something
pleasurable, a day in the country is an activity that must also give us
joy, but it is also something specific.
But prisons should also be attacked in the context of the struggle in
general, that is, in the course of any struggle that we manage to
undertake. And this is something that we have been saying for about ten
years. No matter what we are doing, or what we are talking about, we
must make prison a part of it, because prison is essential to any
discourse. When we are talking about living areas, health, etc., we must
find a way, and there is one, to include prison in what we are saying,
denouncing all attempts to muffle itâs potential to disturb social
peace.
Bear in mind that prison is an element in movement, as we have seen, it
is not something static and finite. For the enemy, prison is an element
of disturbance. They are all always thinking about what they can do to
solve the problem of prison. Now, their problem of prison must become
our problem and we must think about it during the struggles we carry
out, if we carry them out.
All this, of course, while awaiting the next insurrection. Because in
the case of insurrection it will be enough to open up the prisons and
destroy them for ever. Thank you.