Life inside prison is an alien world to those on the outside. Those large buildings, in most cases with their small windows, conceal from the eyes of the general public, a world of vindictive authority, arbitrator violence, and degradation of the individual encased within its inescapable confines. They are an anomaly to civilised living, a scar on the face of humanity, but a necessary tool to the authoritarian system that governs us all. Prisons are the threat hanging over the head of anyone who would dare to bring an end to this system of injustice, inequality and authority that protects those in power in their ivory towers of opulence. All those who find themselves entrapped within this tool of state repression, deserve our solidarity and support. No civilised society should tolerate, let alone support arbitrary violence and vindictive authority. No one is free while one prison stands.
The following is an extract from a letter from a prisoner in Italy, that doesn't mean that it isn't happening in these abominations all across the globe. It is what they are designed to do, attempt to break the human spirit.
This from Act For Freedom Now: Well: on 8/11 what I wrote at the beginning takes place; after they handcuff me and continue to mistreat me, they call a doctor and ask him if I’m fit to go to court, and he also, frightened only at looking at the situation, sees lumps and bruises (but he won’t write it down) and asks me “You want to go?” I say yes, especially as I had prepared a declaration to read in court, which I’d changed at that point, and add that they beat me up in prison before the trial; a rather bland declaration, where I wanted to stress the reason why I was asking for a transfer.To realise the full extent of the savage brutality within these establishments, please read the FULL LETTER HERE:
In court, the judge doesn’t allow me to read my declaration as he states that the place is not suitable, but I manage to let the others in court know that the screws beat me up and that I’ve been on hunger strike for 4 days. So they take me out of the court and a zealous screw, which continues to hit me, handcuffs me so tightly that my wrists go purple and I almost faint. They take me to the basement, and after a while they bring me up again, even if only we 3 defendants are left, besides lawyers, judges, cops, and I tell the other 2 that I’d like to stay to show my lawyer the signs [of the beatings] on my body and delay my return to La Spezia as long as possible, as I foresee another beating on the way back. I also try to have the obvious signs [of the beatings] included as evidence but there’s nothing about them. The two following days I try to have that piece of evidence again but “I can’t write about things that cannot be seen”. As the visit ends they put me back in cell1on the ground floor, the one I had slept in the first night here in Spezia. Strict regime, my things had already been prepared and put in the cell by guards. At least the following day they allow me to take the rest of my things and give me a disciplinary report with 15 days’ confinement.
This is what led me to push the guards and my experience in La Spezia: nothing out of the ordinary, guards who provoke you in a know-it-all way and then smash you with beatings while you are on the floor with kicks and punches to your head and back, a governor who covers the beatings thanks to doctors’ complicity (out of 4 visits to 3 different doctors, maybe one of them wrote down about the aching parts of my body the second time he saw me), and guards who threaten to report you for insult, a judge who doesn’t let you read a declaration relating to this and has you taken out of court.
Everything is normal. It’s for this reason that I can’t find myself in the normality of society, which justifies authority, abuse, harassment, and which covers them. It’s for this reason that I’ll continue the hunger strike as long as I can, and I’ll continue to demand a transfer to another prison; and if De Andrè says you can’t breathe the same air as that of a screw in the exercise yard [this is a reference to a famous song], I really will always want to avoid sharing it with the guards who beat me up here, with blind and complicit doctors, with a commander who justifies her men by saying I made it all up and with a governor who hides the rot under a carpet of falsity.
ALWAYS WITH MY HEAD HELD HIGH, PASKA
Hunger strike: initial weight 5/11: 108.4 kg; weight on11/11: 101.8
