Italian prisons are notoriously lax, or so we Brits like to think, but a story reported on the ANSA website illustrates just how lax they are. It seems that eleven people have been arrested after an investigation into a drugs ring that specialised in providing drugs (and mobile phones) to those in prison.
Just how this was done had all the simplicity of sheer genius. It did not involve the use of drones or swallowing the gear, but something much easier. The visitors to the prison came with packets of crisps, babies’ nappies and fruit juice cartons to visit the incarcerated and then threw their rubbish into the bins provided, as one should. From there it was rescued, and in the old crisp packets, fruit juice cartons and nappies were the drugs and the phones. Simples.
Of course what the prison authorities should have done, and it’s incredible they did not, is search all visitors, and stop them bringing in things like babies’ nappies in the first place. Moreover, they should have made sure that the rubbish left by the visitors could not be rummaged through by the prisoners, by ensuring strict controls between areas open to visitors and the rest of the prison. Frankly, the prison, at Augusta, province of Syracuse, seems more liberal than my boarding school. Nor should it come as surprise that the two people running the drugs ring were both doing so from inside the jail.
The facts and figures published about the Italian prison system do indicate that a higher proportion of people are in jail in Sicily than elsewhere in the republic: Lombardy has 7,751 prisoners out of a population of roughly ten million, while Sicily had a prison population of 5, 755 out of a general population less than half the size of Lombardy. There is also no doubt that the very names of Sicilian jails are much associated with the Mafia. There’s Ucciardone in Palermo, a huge fortress like building in the middle of the city; there is Piazza Lanza in Catania, also a city centre jail; and on the outskirts of Catania there is Bicocca, a young offenders’ institution. All of these are places for criminals, of course, but they are also places where crime, one fears, goes unchecked. All three are places I mention in The Chemist of Catania and its sequels.
Consider the murder of Vincenzo Puccio who was beaten to death in his cell in Ucciardone on May 11, 1989, by fellow inmates Antonino and Giuseppe Marchese on the orders of Salvatore Riina. The perpetrators asserted they had been acting in self-defence, but their claim was ruined by Riina himself who deliberately had Vincenzo Puccio's brother, Pietro, killed that same day outside of prison. This meant the Marchese brothers had no chance of convincing a jury they had acted in self-defence during a spontaneous fight, when their victim's brother had been deliberately shot dead that same day.
Puccio was a Mafioso, but he incurred the wrath of the boss of bosses, which goes to show that when you are in Ucciardone, you need the boss’s protection more than ever.
While Ucciardone is clearly a grim place, built in the nineteenth century, Piazza Lanza, which is medium security and not overcrowded, seems much nicer, at least according to the government’s information. Each cell has its own ensuite bathroom with shower, and some with bidet as well, we are told. However, this short film, with Italian commentary, tells a different story. Conditions are squalid. And the one thing that a film cannot show you is, of course, the broiling heat of a Sicilian summer.
As for Bicocca, where several characters in my novels studied at the ‘university of crime’, here too the shared rooms also have their own bathrooms, and look reminiscent of sixth form accommodation in my boarding school. It does not seem too bad, at least not according to this video. One notes that the ‘boys’ in Bicocca are up to 21 years of age. Still, all prisons, one feels are grim, simply because they are prisons.
Or at least they are grim to me; but thinking about crime in a sweltering climate as I have been doing much of late, for men from the slums of Catania, life in Bicocca, or Piazza Lanza, or even Ucciardone, cannot be so very different to life outside. Or so I imagine. And if that is so, they are no deterrent.