Vaccination from prison

Let's imagine a prisoner who, having served part of his sentence, receives limited freedom for exemplary behavior. Every morning he leaves prison and goes to work, and in the evening at a certain time he returns to his cell. His day is clearly scheduled, and the forces of order can check where he is at any time. and what their ward does. It would seem that what more could a person in his position desire (especially if he has a job and a home, which is not often the case), who still has to sit and sit. Meanwhile, the difficulties he encounters “in the wild” are so serious that he is often unable to cope with them on his own.

We, a group of volunteers, wondered how we could help such a prisoner. As a result of long discussions, the project “Prison comes to school. School comes to prison."

We set ourselves two tasks. The first is to help ensure that the environment outside the prison walls is as hostile as possible to the prisoner, so that society gets rid of a number of prejudices towards prison. The second is to show schoolchildren using living examples that it is not only monsters who break laws.

Just waiting to meet the prisoners is a bit of a challenge for the guys. And so we enter. In the first minutes, the faces of the schoolchildren express nothing but confusion, since they never expected to see completely normal people in front of them. There is no “seal of vice” - one looks like a teacher, the other like a social worker. Already the first meeting changes their ideas, forces them to part with the delusion that those in prison are those who are destined to go to jail, about whom it could be said in advance that sooner or later he will be imprisoned. And when prisoners begin to tell their stories, all prejudice finally dissipates.

The question “Why were you imprisoned?” it inevitably arises at such meetings. Often guys ask it, unconsciously wanting to be “calmed down”: to be told about something that could never happen to them. But, as a rule, what they get is completely different. Of course, the story of Francesco N., a robber who did anything for money, involuntarily suggests that this man is not built like everyone else. But when he begins to talk about his childhood: the working-class district of Turin, an immigrant family, the pipe dream of a moped that many of his comrades had, the first theft, the gradual entry into the criminal world - there is no doubt that it was destined for him to become a criminal. and a trace.

At first, the schoolchildren's interest in the criminal past of prisoners caused us concern. After all, we come to school to first of all talk about prison, about punishment, and not about crime, especially since this topic is very personal and difficult - not all prisoners are ready to discuss it. However, over time, we became convinced that talking about crime is extremely important. It’s hard, very hard, but this is how schoolchildren come to understand that they themselves sometimes come too close to the dangerous line separating a law-abiding citizen from a criminal, and that a prisoner is also a person, and not a “walking crime.”

The most interesting thing is that both sides benefit from such life stories, even the most terrible ones: not only the listeners, but also the narrator. For him, this is an opportunity to look at his actions through the eyes of others, in this case through the eyes of children, and to rethink them.

Everything was going great for Mario J.: his favorite job, his wife, his son, and suddenly everything goes to hell. There is trouble at work, there is discord in the family, the wife is turning the child against the father. The last thing that makes life worth living is taken away - his son, and he decides to kill. The sentence is thirty years in prison. Talking about himself, Mario does not try to justify himself: he painfully searches for words to explain to children what it is like when you feel so bad that you can no longer control yourself. How to deal with this? Mario doesn't have a ready answer. More precisely, his answers - and he is well aware of this - are banal: control yourself and do not hesitate to ask people for help.

Here is the story of the real criminal. Stefan K. was his own man in the Milanese criminal community and was not behind bars for the first time. He was wary, not to say hostile, towards us volunteers. We tried to get him to work on the prison magazine Limited Horizons, which will be discussed below, but nothing came of this venture either. A couple of years ago, Stefan gained the right to leave the prison walls, and somehow we managed to drag him to school. For the first half hour he just listened, and suddenly it seemed to burst through him: Stefan began to talk about himself with disarming honesty and sobriety. He said that in life he was interested in one thing - money. And this is what he came to: no family, no friends, no one needs him or is interested in him - no education, no interests, no hobbies.

It is important to understand that this project is a real laboratory. Its participants: schoolchildren, teachers, parents - are faced with something completely new for themselves. After all, in our society it is not customary to discuss the problems of prison, and the majority have the vaguest ideas about it.

A teacher who takes upon himself the courage to tackle such a difficult topic with his students must see the prison with his own eyes, talk with the prisoners, and part with some prejudices himself. Therefore, we begin by arranging for such enthusiasts to visit the prison.

Then we ask schoolchildren to write an essay about prison - how they imagine it and its inhabitants. Typically, such works are replete with various cliches, gleaned mainly from television programs: most criminals go unpunished, foreigners are responsible for the deterioration of the criminal situation, those who are destined for it, those who have special DNA, go to prison.

The very first meeting with prisoners greatly changes the schoolchildren’s ideas about prison. It is amazing that prisoners almost never tell their children fables or try to embellish themselves and their actions. At the same time, they behave extremely tactfully: they omit some details, understanding what kind of audience they have in front of them. Apparently, intuition tells these adults that only the truth can make schoolchildren see people in hardened criminals.

The most exciting and difficult moment for the guys is when they cross the threshold of a prison. This should in no way resemble a trip to a zoo where people sit behind bars instead of animals - meetings with a prisoner* we organize in the editorial office of the already mentioned magazine “Limited Horizons” . Sometimes we invite other guests. Recently, the widows of a famous lawyer who was killed by the Red Brigades came to visit us. Her story shocked everyone. One prisoner, who received a sentence for murder, admitted that only now he realized what the mother and wife of his victim had to go through.

When the project comes to an end, the teacher asks the students to write the essay again. Comparing them with those that the children wrote before meeting the prison, we almost always find that the attitude towards prisoners has become completely different - much more tolerant. But this is not the main thing: reflecting on the fate of prisoners, schoolchildren begin to look at themselves in a new way. An understanding comes that for the youthful desire to be different from everyone else, for ostentatiously ignoring generally accepted norms and rules, for balancing on the edge of an abyss, sometimes you have to pay very dearly.

Prisoners also gain a lot from such meetings. Although it is difficult to talk about their criminal past, these people suddenly begin to realize that their example can be useful to someone. In addition, communication with children makes them take a fresh look at their lives. In such an audience you cannot simply say: “I served many years in prison and paid my debt to society.” Schoolchildren will not understand such arithmetic, since it is important for them that good defeats evil, and in this case evil is not defeated, but only punished.

But let's return to the prisoner who, having served part of his sentence, received limited freedom for exemplary behavior. Now, thanks to our program, the attitude towards him and others like him outside the prison walls - on the bus, in a cafe, in the workplace - will be a little less hostile than before. These changes may be almost invisible, but you have to start somewhere.

Write to change

The school project was not born out of nowhere - it grew out of our other prison project - the magazine “Limited Horizons”. With the help of volunteers, it has been published for several years by prisoners of the House of Detention in Padua and the Women's Correctional Institution of Venice - Giudecca.

The magazine has two main goals: the first is to disseminate information inside the prison, because information helps to be conscious about one’s imprisonment and prevents the destruction of one’s personality. The second is to maintain communication between those “inside” and those “outside”; after all, sooner or later prisoners will be released, and it is extremely important for them to get into an environment that will not be hostile to them.

In recent years, the media, in pursuit of sensations, have begun to pay unreasonably great attention to the problem of crime. As a result, citizens have a growing sense of insecurity and they demand decisive action from politicians. They react in the most primitive way: they tighten both the punishments themselves and the system of their execution. Italian prisons today are overcrowded, living conditions are steadily deteriorating, and society has become much more intolerant of prisoners.

Another problem is the lack of communication, the dulling effect on prisoners of the television in front of which they spend many hours. This especially destroys the personality of those who are in solitary confinement.

The journal helps to cope with these and many other problems. Firstly, working on it means communication, and a very active and creative one. Secondly, with the help of the magazine, prisoners have the opportunity to tell people about prison, share with them their thoughts and experiences, make them doubt that behind bars there are only monsters, deprived of human dignity and not entitled to human participation.

In particular, therefore, we consider it fundamentally important that our magazine is of interest not only to those who are directly connected with the prison: prisoners, guards, teachers, investigators, judges, volunteers, but also to ordinary citizens, especially young people. Hence the rule that we tirelessly repeat to our authors from among the prisoners: do not write about yourself as an innocent victim - this will cause nothing but irritation in the reader. In addition, the position of the victim does not allow a person to look at himself through the eyes of another (for example, the one you robbed, robbed or maimed), to understand his true self, and therefore to change.

Of course, it can be very difficult for a prisoner to rise above prison performances and television cliches. But this can be learned. By putting their story on paper and reading and discussing the stories of others, our authors gradually get rid of the habit of blaming everyone but themselves for their misfortunes. Scripture ceases to be a way for them to make claims to the world and becomes a way of understanding it.

The magazine, among other things, changes the lives of prisoners: they have no time to idle, sit in a cell, staring at the TV. They work on issues, come up with topics, discuss articles, and write themselves. “Working in the editorial office has made me a different person,” this is a quote from an article by one of our employees. — Discussions, debates in which I constantly participate, made me think about questions that I had previously driven away from myself. Here I learned to think."

It's funny, at first almost all prisoners try to write in a high style, and the highest style they know is that of lawyers and judges. The result is usually monstrous. Once I told a judge I knew about this, and he remembered that he let his wife read his first verdict. She couldn't get past the first page and returned the document with the words: "This is some kind of nonsense." We have to patiently explain to authors that communicating with people, which is the purpose of writing, requires normal human language. And we also teach prisoners that words have a very big meaning: you cannot, for example, write “I did something stupid” if that “stupidity” was murder.

We understand perfectly well that literary creativity cannot turn all our authors into different people. But scripture is a school of empathy; it teaches you to feel the pain of others and respect the dignity of every person. And for those who have gone through such a school, it will be a little easier to return to normal life.

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1 Translation from Italian by Anna Yampolskaya.