By now we have become accustomed to the state treating prisoners and migrants alike, as non-citizens, people with no rights, sub-human beings. During this pandemic, prisons and detention centres are becoming hot beds for infection, but the state sweeps that all under the carpet and shows a complete disregard for the human suffering involved. Even before this coronavirus event, both prisons and detention centres were places of over crowding, poor hygiene, poor nutrition and almost non existent health care. With the onslaught of the pandemic conditions have become even more degraded, with little to nothing being done to protect the prisoners and migrants from infection, and at the same time trying to keep it all out of the public eye.
From the start of this pandemic most governments through ineptitude, vested interests, seeing the economy more important that human life, have bungled their approach to the problem. All this aggravated by austerity, stripping the health services and social care systems to a skeleton of what is required. They can't completely ignore the general public so there is appeasement in small doses, but prisoners and migrants can be ignored because they are locked away out of the public view. We can't allow this to continue, these political ballerinas must be held to account. The deaths are away above what should have been, and what could have been, if the powers that be had followed expert scientific advice and prepare for such an event, if they had put the welfare of the people above that of the "economy", that sacred altar of the financial Mafia, on which humanity is sacrificed, if they had thought more of the ordinary people rather than their buddies, the shareholders. But all that is wishful thinking, they are parasites and need to be cleaned out.
The following from Act For Freedom Now:
Bologna, Italy – Greetings at the Dozza prison
In the morning of 16th April, in response to a call made by prisoners’ families in Rome and those in solidarity who supported them in publicly going outside Rebibbia prison walls again, a dozen comrades gathered
The voices from inside thanked us for being there and told us about the desperate conditions. They said that many prisoners are sick and that they had not been given face masks yet. After all, we already knew that Roberto Ragazzi, the chief responsible for prison health in the Bologna’s AUSL [a local health agency], in an internal memo dated 24th February had given instructions to all health workers not to use masks when seeing prisoners in the Dozza or visiting the prison infirmary and clinic, for fear of creating anxiety and tensions inside the structure. From inside we were also told that the prisoners had not been to the exercise yard for weeks and that they couldn’t have video phone calls in place of visits, but only one ten minute call a week, which they had to pay for.
After about 15 minutes the group of comrades was confronted with a disproportionate deployment of Digos, screws, police cars and antiriot cops, who stopped everyone and dealt out fines for breaching the [anti-virus] decree (the comrades were wearing gloves and masks, the cops were decisively less mindful of “preventive care” and didn’t even keep the 1-metre safety distance). The cops’ intervention took place at a spot where the comrades could be seen from the cells and so the prisoners’ solidarity made itself heard with shouts and insults against the cops, reversing the roles we are used to seeing.
WE WON’T TIRE OF REPEATING IT AGAIN TODAY: THE ONLY SAFETY IS FREEDOM.
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