Bologna, Italy - Some words from Stefania from the 'Dozza' prison

informa-azione/barbstef

19/05/2011 - Before she was transferred to Vigevano, Stefania wrote what follows from the ‘Dozza’ prison:

I realize that my attention is now strongly centred on ‘life’ inside prison. My interest towards what happens outside these walls is alive and vigilant but my tension is centred on participation in this perverted world into which I have been thrown. My analysis and considerations on the repressive operation that hit us will emerge from this piece of writing (if it ever manages to go out). Outside you can draw a more articulated definition; and two of the comrades imprisoned with me, Martino and Robert, have already done this in an excellent way, according to their different tensions. What could I add? That power represses, represses and can’t do anything else?
We live in a time when those who decide the rules of the game are taking possession of everything without leaving anything at all to their subjects, not even in exchange for the latter’s submission.
They grab with anxious greed what is left of a fleeced world, and try to suffocate with all means, in blood or jail, the frightening threat of seeing their safes attacked by ‘barbaric hordes’. The internal enemy is to be crushed down and swept away in the dustbin of history. Perhaps never before as in this case, I mean Bologna and Florence, the intention has been so cleary to hit in order to eliminate thoughts and practices that worry the rulers of the capitalist system. A [anarchist] place was seized and closed [Fuoriluogo]. This is a step beyond arrests and judicial restrictions. It is serious, so serious that it should have produced an alarmed and widespread shake up. But, according to what I read in your letters, this didn’t really happen. Solidarity is strong but it is coming from the same comrades who have been close to us for a long time. I shouldn’t even say solidarity but rather direct involvement in an attack that is taking space away from Fuoriluogo now, but which is giving a dangerous signal to anyone who is still intentioned to struggle against constituted order. In fact, not even a month later, the second part of this repressive operation was inflicted on the comrades from Florence.
In prison the same measures are applied, even if in their extreme and more specific forms, which are adopted to crush and submit those who, outside, must obey and work without complaining, or die of starvation in obsequious silence.
Here rigid prison rules are in force, outside a regime (which expands and changes every day according to the winds) is in force, which decides the behaviour that is socially acceptable.
Here there is the sadism of the guards, outside the ruthlessness of bosses and of the servants who protect their market of profit.
Here you are threatened by punitive squads, outside, militarised cities suffocate those who live in them.
Here freedom is imprisoned by material bars, outside it is incarcerated in the open air.
Here the rich don’t enter, outside they rule.
Here ‘guilty’ and dispossessed proletarians are kidnapped by the State, outside the State bombard, occupy and colonize territories to be looted and ruled.
Solidarity to the comrades hit by repression in Florence.
The female wing of the ‘Dozza’ prison is rigidly controlled according to a scheme that doesn’t leave space to any exception. We are so few (69 prisoners) that they can put us under strict and obsessive surveillance. Nothing of what we do can escape control, and any little movement depends on their responding to our requests. We are permanently locked up and get out exclusively during daily ‘rituals’. My co-prisoners tell me this situation can’t be found in other prisons and that being sent to the ‘Dozza’ is considered a further punitive measure.

Stefania Carolei
c/o Casa Circondariale di Vigevano
via Gravellona 240,
27029 Vigevano (PV)

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