ABSTRACT: An account of inspections carried out in prisons (Pianosa, Asinara, Secondigliano) filled any old how "in the haste of reacting to the July mafia attacks" as well as of the denunciations made by relatives of the inmates regarding the treatment and cases of "gratuitous and illegal brutality".

(1994 - IL QUOTIDIANO RADICALE, 4 November 1993)

In the haste of giving an answer to the July mafia attacks, the government is adopting rash measures. Within a night, the super-prisons of the years of terrorism have re-opened, and hundreds of inmates transferred. The choice of the prison depends on the place of birth and the fame of the name: the prisoners come from Sicily, Calabria, Apulia and Naples; their names are Greco, Madonia, Mammoliti, Vernengo. At Pianosa, at the end of August, we find the prisoners outdoors, and still wearing the pajamas they had on when they were arrested. In Rome, their families asked to speak to Marco Pannella (1) and told dreadful stories of physical abuse by way of ordinary praxis; inmates are forced to practice indiscriminate and cruel "physical" activity; the soles of their shoes are worn and they are not allowed to change them; they can shower once every fifteen days, three or four minutes at the most, and the water is often abruptly cut off. Their meals consist of thirty-four pieces of pasta, one potato, a litre of wate

r a day, no meat or fish; silence is mandatory, both during outdoor periods and in the cells. Pannella tabled an urgent interrogation, and we return to Pianosa with the justice committee. The custody magistrate sends a report to the Minister of Justice; there are "gratuitous and illegal acts of brutality".

We visit Asinara in early September. In four days' time, 140 inmates from various prisons have been transferred to Fornelli, the terrorists' section which has been closed since '86. 120 are awaiting to be tried, fifty are "under investigation" or have just been tried, only twenty are "final". They lodge in common cells, often four men at a time, with bunk beds and an Asian toilet. Running water is brown; we take a bottle with us to have it analysed. A year later the Constitutional Court rules that the application of art. 42 bis is possibly illegal.

Some relatives denounce episodes of violence and grave mortifications which the inmates of Secondigliano, near Naples, are subjected to. From Poggioreale comes a letter by Gennaro Russo: "The idea of returning to Secondigliano sends a shiver down ny spine; I suffer from hernia; as soon as I asked for help they would beat me up, humiliate and offend me and my family. I ask you to help me not to go back to there". We visit Secondigliano in a Sunday of April. More than an inspection, it is an impromptu visit. The prisoners at the sight of the agents stand at attention, hands behind their shoulders. The silence is absolute, radio and television are kept at a very low level, and it if forbidden for prisoners to speak to one another from one cell to the other. "A form of respect towards the Members of Parliament..." We tabled a parliamentary interrogation and a denunciation to the judicial authority. The investigation concerns 60 prison guards, six of which were thereafter suspended.

Translator's notes

PANNELLA MARCO. Pannella Giacinto, known as Marco. (Teramo 1930). Currently President of the Radical Party's Federal Council, which he is one of the founders of. At twenty national university representative of the Liberal Party, at twenty-two President of the UGI, the union of lay university students, at twenty-three President of the UNURI, national union of Italian university students. At twenty-four he advocates, in the context of the students' movement and of the Liberal party, the foundation of the new radical party, which arises in 1954 following the confluence of prestigious intellectuals and minor democratic political groups. He is active in the party, except for a period (1960-1963) in which he is correspondent for "Il Giorno" in Paris, where he established contacts with the Algerian resistance. Back in Italy, he commits himself to the reconstruction of the radical Party, dissolved by its leadership following the advent of the centre-left. Under his indisputable leadership, the party succeeds in prom

oting (and winning) relevant civil rights battles, working for the introduction of divorce, conscientious objection, important reforms of family law, etc, in Italy. He struggles for the abrogation of the Concordat between Church and State. Arrested in Sofia in 1968 as he is demonstrating in defence of Czechoslovakia, which has been invaded by Stalin. He opens the party to the newly-born homosexual organizations (FUORI), promotes the formation of the first environmentalist groups. The new radical party organizes difficult campaigns, proposing several referendums (about twenty throughout the years) for the moralization of the country and of politics, against public funds to the parties, against nuclear plants, etc., but in particular for a deep renewal of the administration of justice. Because of these battles, all carried out with strictly nonviolent methods according to the Gandhian model - but Pannella's Gandhi is neither a mystic nor an ideologue; rather, an intransigent and yet flexible politician - he ha

s been through trials which he has for the most part won. As of 1976, year in which he first runs for Parliament, he is always elected at the Chamber of Deputies, twice at the Senate, twice at the European Parliament. Several times candidates and local councillor in Rome, Naples, Trieste, Catania, where he carried out exemplary and demonstrative campaigns and initiatives. Whenever necessary, he has resorted to the weapon of the hunger strike, not only in Italy but also in Europe, in particular during the major campaign against world hunger, for which he mobilized one hundred Nobel laureates and preeminent personalities in the fields of science and culture in order to obtain a radical change in the management of the funds allotted to developing countries. On 30 September 1981 he obtains at the European parliament the passage of a resolution in this sense, and after it several other similar laws in the Italian and Belgian Parliament. In January 1987 he runs for President of the European Parliament, obtaining 6

1 votes. Currently, as the radical party has pledged to no longer compete with its own lists in national elections, he is striving for the creation of a "transnational" cross-party, in view of a federal development of the United States of Europe and with the objective of promoting civil rights throughout the world.