Life in prison immortalized in “Discomfort within”, a civil state is a state capable of respecting human dignity. The comment
I’m a criminal lawyer which took its first steps in the natural conception of prison as an opaque place. The desire to “see” did not touch us: the only idea was an extravagance, like thinking of talking to a typewriter. Not that we lacked curiosity, but this was satisfied through the perception of subdued confidences (rarely); more often than signs, fleeting hints, eloquent silences. A wall divided the world inside from the world outside: it was normal like this.
The wall not only divided people, but also the world that revolves around justice. On the one hand, the process, with its courtrooms open to the public, on the other hand the execution of the sentence, a narrow place, of few and, above all, closed. The execution phase was the submerged tip of an overturned iceberg. In fact snubbed by the jurisdiction. A lot has changed since then, and very slowly.
It is not the place to retrace the stages of this evolution, but it is appropriate to identify the cultural leap that has been made: the idea that execution of the sentence is part of the decision; it is not something that the protagonists of the process of cognition – prosecutors, lawyers and judges – they can ignore. The penalty is part of the jurisdiction, and not only at the end of the trial as a substitute part, but it enters the field of vision of the operators from the earliest stages of the preliminary investigations. The penalty accompanies the process, ceasing to be its appendix destined to be forgotten by consciences.
Said so it seems simple, in reality it is a troubled and complex cultural path, made up of stages conquered with difficulty and far from completed. There Photo exhibition “Discomfort inside“ held at the Justice palace from Milan from 7 to 26 November 2022 is one of these stages and has a symbolic value important. It is not obvious that the lawyers (Order and Criminal Chamber) and the magistrates (ANM of Milan) will unite to bring the photos of the prison to court, exposing them outside the courtrooms. It is like carving Dante’s verse on the doors of those same classrooms: “For me one goes among the lost people”.
I’m ordinary prison life photos, in places not even the worst. One day, who knows, we will also be able to exhibit photos that portray fragments of equally ordinary but much more degraded life, in truly dilapidated places. Maybe that day we will also decide to face the “eternal pain” that lies in prisons. In the meantime, that’s okay. We are already satisfied to be able to certify the mixture between the world inside and the world outsidedrawing momentum for the next cultural stages.
The journey is underway. “Journey”, as the Constitutional Court defined it, visiting Italian prisons in recent years. A revolutionary initiative that brought down the judges of the laws from hyperuranium to place them in front of the people, in a synthesis, almost a short circuit, between abstraction and living flesh.
Here, if a little teaching will be able to give this show photographic is that the process is not “abstraction” but is itself “living flesh”; that the judgment on the fact must not make the person forget; that the civilization of the state consists in respecting human dignity; that the ultimate goal of jurisdiction is not revenge but the mending of social divisions and the recovery of those who have made a mistake; that, finally, this objective cannot be said to be achieved as long as the prison is, like today, a suicide incubator.
Advocacy must play its role, not just defending in the processes of cognition. The lawyers have refined their knowledge of the executive phase, also because this is growing in importance, albeit still mortified in the tools and in the staff of magistrates and auxiliaries.
A proof of the new concept of the social role of lawyers has taken place this summer, with the circular of the DAP (Department of Penitentiary Administration) n. 3695/6145 – Initiatives for a “continuous intervention” in the field of prevention of suicidal behaviors of prisoners of 8 August 2022 which provides – point 3. D – that each Institute establishes a collaboration with the territorially competent Bar Association, at in order to stimulate a direct channel of communication with the Institute where situations of risk for the detainees emerge in order to enhance the knowledge contribution of the lawyer and respect the stringent timing that such communications entail.
So, dealing with lawyers for prison workers and social workers is no longer inconvenient or worse, a taboo. It is acknowledged that the defender is able to intercept the first and least apparent signs of discomfort; therefore, it is an important source for those who have the institutional task of mitigating discomfort and preventing self-harm.
Moreover. It is not only the proof of a matured awareness of the social function carried out by lawyers (while fully respecting the defensive prerogatives); it is the admission that “looking inside” – as the photographic exhibition in court intends to do – is the precondition for overcoming the discomfort of the prison community and reaffirming the civilization of the State which has been repeatedly questioned by the European Courts.
* President of the Milan Bar Association
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