A book, at times, is used to sand down memories, bring to light moments that seemed forgotten and use them to reflect on the present. It happened yesterday in Sassari, during the conference-event titled “The prison planet. From the San Sebastiano events to today. Critical issues and prospects”, which offered a chance to ask what the prison institution was and what it represents today.
At the center of the meeting was the volume Aria mossa, presented by Elias Vacca: a work that retraces, also through personal memories, the dramatic days of San Sebastiano. Days reported with journalistic rigor by Pier Luigi Piredda in the pages of La Nuova Sardegna, in an exercise in transparency and sound information, and analyzed with a sociological and pedagogical approach by Giampaolo Cassitta, the book’s other author.
Revisiting that story was, for everyone, a moment of shared memory and collective reflection on the “prison planet”. They stressed this in their remarks Giuseppe Frigau, president of the Rotary Club Sassari Nord, and Maria Grazia Sanna, president of the “Enzo Tortora” Criminal Bar Association of Sassari. Paolo Bellotti, president of the association Intrecci Culturali, instead focused on the dramatic issue of suicides, which in recent years have deeply marked the lives of those who, in prison, experience extreme loneliness.
After the presentation, a round table was held moderated by lawyer Luigi Esposito, with the participation of lawyer Giuseppe Conti, Maria Teresa Pintus of the National Prison Observatory, supervising magistrate Giovanni Mocci, don Gaetano Galia, chaplain of the Bancali prison, together with the book’s authors Cassitta and Piredda.
During the debate there was also talk of prison overcrowding and of choices considered wrong in planning new penitentiary facilities in Sardinia: against a capacity of about 2000 places, the real need for island residents alone would be around 800. The issue of the presence of inmates subject to Article 41 bis in Sardinia was also addressed, a measure introduced by Berlusconi governments, today hard to change and at the center of a heated legal and political debate.
The contributions highlighted the critical issues of prison, understood both as a physical place and as a normative institution, where existing laws often do not find full application. It emerged strongly that prison remains a place of solitude, but no inmate should be left alone: penitentiary spaces should become laboratories for training and entry into work pathways, with restorative justice as an objective still unfinished, especially in the adult world.
Unanimous condemnation for the choice to move the remand prison from the city center to Bancali, which – as Cassitta recalled – is in all respects a neighborhood of the city and not a place separated from the community.
photo by Rossana Piredda
