10.13125/CH/6039
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2533-1825
6039
2, special
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urn:nbn:it:unica-29800
Roberta Pandolfino
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Critical Hermeneutics
Editors' Introduction
Text.Serial.Journal
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7
Articles
2024-01-10
2024-01-10
2024-01-11
2024-01-11
I-VI
1
Roberta Pandolfino
2023
10.13125/CH/6039
I
2533-1825
2, special
VI
urn:nbn:it:unica-29800
Editors' Introduction
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/ecch/article/download/6039/5793
7
Critical Hermeneutics, 7(2), special, 2023
Biannual International Journal of Philosophy
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ISSN 2533-1825 (on line); DOI 10.13125/CH/6039




                            Editors’ Introduction




In the last century, Goffman defined prisons as places of residence
and work for groups of people who share a common predicament,
spending part of their lives under a closed regime, whose all-
embracing nature is manifested in the blocking of social exchange
and any relations with the outside world (Goffman 1961: 11). Com-
prehensive, all-encompassing institutions where, from a Foucauldian
perspective, a strong bureaucratic organisation manages mass groups
of individuals, exerting strict control over them to the point of shap-
ing their actions, relationships and very identity; a disciplinary and
punitive regime, structured to produce a specific kind of citizen (Fou-
cault 1975: 135). This is a clear but far too rigid an analysis to reflect
what is today the submerged, we might say hidden, reality of Italian
and international prisons. In order to understand the experience of
imprisonment today, it is more helpful to refer to places of confine-
ment (Pandolfino 2022), where it is necessary to look not only at in-
stitutions or places, but also at the relations between sites, practices,
social relations and subjective states of mind (Jefferson 2014: 49).
      Any discussion of prisons calls for caution, operational flexibility
and an interdisciplinary approach capable of broaching an analysis of
the overall dynamics of this multifaceted topic. The challenge be-
comes more complex still when, in addition to the reality of impris-
onment, it is also necessary to look at the relationship between prison
and health, paying particular attention to mental health. The fatal
symbiosis of which Wacquant (2001) spoke, by extension, applies
Editors’ Introduction




even more to a prisoner affected by a disability (physical or mental,
temporary or permanent) as an emblem of the prison continuum, un-
derstood as a constant experience of discomfort and of being the vic-
tim of a disadvantage which is unintentional, but still omnipresent,
because interpenetrated with the prisoner's very body: a fragile body,
but one needing to be domesticated, a body uneducated and for this
very reason to be (still further) confined. But, looking beyond the
past of criminal asylums and indeed some stale rhetoric of the pre-
sent, today we are aiming at an approach that seeks to re-educate,
heal and cure (Mortari 2021).
      This very subject of 'prison and health' was given ample cover-
age at the conference Crossings/AttraversaMenti: From Criminal Asy-
lum to Penitentiary, held on 6 December last year on the premises of
the Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto Prison in Messina. On this occasion,
several participants spoke for the Criminal Asylum and Penitentiary,
recounting its past glories (the institution opened its doors in 1925,
so it has almost a century of history) and the problems of moving
from one legal regime to another while still constantly dealing with
present and future challenges.
      With the aim of shedding new light on a world that is often for-
gotten, a series of parallel projects (academic research, psychology,
psychiatry, pedagogical and film workshops) that focused on the Bar-
cellona institution and/or the inmates, emerged from this conference.
The coming together of these works and the contributors, not forget-
ting the unfailing support of the management and all the prison staff,
gave rise to this opportunity to share experiences and future projects,
illuminating what has already been achieved in prisons and what yet
remains to be done, to make the institution not only a place of securi-
ty but also one of education and growth, where confinement is not an
end in itself and does not just aim to return its subjects to society re-
structured according to specific principles (Foucault 1975). On the



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                                             Critical Hermeneutics, 7(2), special, (2023)




contrary, the aspiration is to give them the possibility of self-
determination through instruments suited to the needs (Sen 2000) of
those who commit crimes out of necessity, ignorance or at the urging
of 'fits of rage' (Pandolfino 2020, Sortino 2019).
     Following an intense day of exchanges of opinions and stories
about the past, present and future of the activities and methods of
confinement and care within the Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto Prison (but
not only those1), the need arose to map in-depth focuses, leading to
the report of the proceedings included in this special issue of Critical
Hermeneutics.
     The event received good local media coverage, capped by the
success achieved by the film After This Exile2, screened for the first
time during AttraversaMenti, when it won the Grand Prix of the 11th
Olszyn International Film Festival, in the 'Prison Movie' section.
     Exactly one year later, we celebrate the work done and the pro-
jects still to come into play with the publication of AttraversaMenti:
An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Experience of the Former Crimi-
nal Asylum of Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto, which, not by chance, will be
screened within the walls of the Vittorio Madia Prison itself, during the
second stage of the Literary Space curated by the cultural column Si-
cilia Mater.
     This volume contains articles from the fields of psychology, ped-
agogy, history and anthropology and philosophy. The aim of the edi-
tors was precisely to bring to the reader what was experienced at the
conference and, therefore, that feeling of partnership and working in

1
   Conference participants came from various parts of Italy, speaking on their educa-
tional and research experience at other prisons, see E. Zizioli on the "Germana
Stefanini" Women’s Prison or G. Del Gobbo and C. Benelli on the Sollicciano and
Gozzini prisons in Florence.
2
   The documentary is the result of the Cinema forma dell'anima project. A teaching
project of visual education carried out between 2017 and 2018 inside the Casa
Circondariale di Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto (Me) by the Centro Provinciale per
l'Istruzione degli Adulti (Cpia) with the involvement of a group of about 40 Italian
and foreign inmates, the lead characters of the work.



                                                                                      III
Editors’ Introduction




concert that is far from easy to achieve, especially in the case of
closed institutions such as prisons (Vianello and Sbraccia 2016,
Casale 2019, Pandolfino 2021). For this reason, readers will find small
contributions from those who were active participants in the work
but, without specific academic expertise, shared important aspects of
their experience. Two examples are the criminologist psychiatrist and
ex-governor of the former Criminal Asylum, Nunziante Rosania, and
the current prison governor, Dr Romina Taiani.
      With these intentions in mind, I will now quote part of the mov-
ing opening of the conference proceedings during which Father
Giuseppe Insana, known to all as ‘Father Pippo’ (a former chaplain of
the asylum and a leading volunteer at Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto),
shared a poem with those attending, written by a former inmate and
recounting the pain of imprisonment, the cry for help and the need
both to see oneself and be seen by others.


Amphora...
Who can ever read my soul.
Who will ever know of my pain and
imprisonment on the floor of an ocean.
I am but an amphora at the bottom of the sea,
built by a craftsman of his time.
My colours have long faded,
marble and clay, splendours of yesteryear, worn away!
I am only a memory of old, healthy hands, prodigal in ingenuity;
only a memory, lost in a time that is far away, now...
A past splendour, but yet I have memories: of everything from
when I was born, of smiles, praise, good wishes!
But the cruel waters plunged me to the darkest remoteness from the sun.
I was abandoned in the sea like a useless amphora and there I lay
aware of what I once was.
I would like to emerge from the mud, but no one now has any recollection



IV
                                           Critical Hermeneutics, 7(2), special, (2023)




of who I once was.
Memory becomes short, the sun disappears behind dark clouds,
everything is born to perish: so, little by little, does my hope.
Once I was a beautiful amphora at the hands of that good
craftsman!
If only the depths would dissolve, vanish,
perhaps someone would recognise me and could, perhaps with caution,
still quench their thirst with the smiles of the past,
now lost in a fathomless Void!


     A starting point, as a state to be surpassed and overcome in a
future that will make those words ever further removed from what is
actually experienced within these walls.
                                                                 Caterina Benelli
                                                             Giovanna Costanzo
                                                             Roberta Pandolfino




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Editors’ Introduction




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