Darius Rejali, in his impressive and exhaustive review of torture
methods, argues that, as the 20th century progressed, democracies notonly continued to use torture but also further defined and specified its
boundaries and refined its characteristics. Dictatorships, in fact, may
have tortured more and more indiscriminately, but it is democracies
that, often to circumvent laws and conventions in defense of human
rights, use "clean" torture techniques in an increasingly scientific,
widespread and refined way. Such techniques, such as torture with
electricity, ice, water, noise, drugs, stress positions, sensory
deprivation, humiliation, sleep deprivation, are defined as "clean" in
contrast to torture techniques that instead leave marks. Rejali states,
in fact, that most torture techniques in democracies are "clean torture"
because, although they can involve intense physical pain - and therefore
be particularly effective and destructive - they leave almost no
immediate mark on the body of the tortured.
Even Italy is not exempt from this general trend that, over the last
hundred years, has seen it gradually transform from a fascist
dictatorship that used traditional and "dirty" techniques of torture
against its citizens, into a democratic country that increasingly uses
forms of clean torture. The penitentiary system is the emblematic
institution for observing this transformation. Our penitentiary system,
in fact, especially thanks to its more severe and rigid disciplinary
institutions (the 41-bis and the more or less obstructive life
sentence), is today at the forefront with regard to the development of
the most up-to-date techniques of clean torture.
In fact, if the Italian penitentiary system has until now been
constantly crossed by forms of traditional and "dirty" torture made of
beatings and physical violence of all kinds (just to mention the most
sensational and most documented cases of the last decades, think of the
torture in the "hell" of the Pianosa prison in the early 1990s, the
torture of Bolzaneto during the G8 in Genoa, up to the torture carried
out by prison police officers during the repression of prison riots
during the Covid pandemic), since the 1970s it has specialized in
cutting-edge forms of clean torture.
The special detention regime of 41-bis, in particular, is one of the
most refined clean torture systems, based on the principles of the
so-called "contactless" torture branded by the CIA. This is a form of
torture minutely described and detailed in a series of manuals produced
by the US Agency between the 1960s and 1980s and empirically
corroborated by thousands of practical applications in various black
sites (the secret prisons run by the CIA in Thailand, Poland and
elsewhere) and, among others, in the famous prisons of Guantanamo and
Abu Ghraib (to name the most famous with reference to the scandals
caused by the use of torture on detainees). It is a clean torture as it
is "without direct" physical contact: that is, it uses a whole series of
techniques, among which stand out sensory deprivation, self-inflicted
suffering, humiliation and other practices of psychological manipulation
through the disorientation of the tortured. The final objective, as with
all military-type torture, is to obtain information and/or destroy the
enemy.
41-bis is a particularly rigorous detention regime that has its roots in
the 1975 reform of the penitentiary system. The reform, which aimed to
modernize the prison, includes a final and transitional provision
regarding "security needs". It is Article 90 that, in the general
"terrorism emergency" of those years, lays the foundations for the
establishment of the so-called special prisons, established in 1977. The
circuit of special prisons welcomes and treats prisoners considered
particularly dangerous and becomes one of the main instruments of the
"war on terrorism". The system is thus structured around the radically
applied cornerstones of isolation (which produces psychological
disorientation), treatment differentiation (which aims, through a
radical system of rewards and punishments, to promote paths of
"repentance" and "dissociation") and sensory manipulation (which focuses
on extreme practices of sensory deprivation in living spaces), thus
applying the fundamental principles of non-contact torture. With the end
of the "years of lead" and through various regulatory transformations,
we will witness the evolution of the instruments designed and structured
for the "war on terrorism", against a new emergency represented by the
new public enemy that is increasingly explicitly appearing on the scene:
the mafia criminal.
Today's 41-bis, a distant child of Article 90, is a regime of radical
isolation that reduces contact with any other human being to a minimum
(both inside and outside prison), to neutralize the particular
dangerousness of some prisoners, almost all of whom are linked to
organized crime.
If the blackmailing objective of 41-bis to obtain information - typical
of any form of torture - is not questioned and is indeed sometimes
flaunted by its authoritative supporters as a strong point, it is above
all with reference to its application that the precise and impressive
correspondence between the penitentiary device and the previous
characteristics of non-contact torture is highlighted.
The processes of daily interaction centered on disorientation techniques
(humiliation and self-inflicted suffering), the total absence of
"re-educational" treatments, the detailed rules that must be followed
daily and a whole series of practices of "infantilization" of the
prisoner, the furnishings of the cells and the internal architecture
aimed at eliminating access to some sensations, the almost total sensory
deprivation produced by such contexts, are all aspects of the daily life
of 41-bis that faithfully correspond to the principles, the relational
model and the techniques of non-contact torture. 41-bis thus highlights
how torture inside prisons is not an occasional event, but rather a
well-structured and formalized practice within a general treatment path,
which is itself a very specific and regulated form of torture.
But let's come to today and to the general prison model towards which we
are dangerously heading. In a general climate of penal populism, of
ever-increasing "hyper-incarceration" and with an ordinary penitentiary
system increasingly in collapse (overcrowding, non-existence or
impossibility of re-educational treatments, very high suicide rates
among both prisoners and prison police officers, ever-increasing rates
of recidivism), it even seems that 41-bis is being identified as a
virtuous and stable prison model to strive for. In addition to being
supported and defended across the board by almost all right-wing and
left-wing political groups in the parliamentary spectrum, it has even
become a reference model for other countries. France, one of the
countries best known for research into new forms of clean torture, has
recently shown interest in the 41-bis detention model as a tool for
fighting crime and for virtuous prison management.
And so, while physical torture continues to be practiced, mainly
focusing on social categories such as drug addicts, immigrants, the
poor, and psychiatric patients, who constitute the vast majority of the
prison population, the non-contact torture of 41-bis is no longer news,
rather it is becoming increasingly silent, clean, and firmly rooted in
the penitentiary regime. 41-bis is no longer emergency legislation, but
has become an integral and, for many, indisputable part of the penal
system. The techniques of sensory deprivation, self-inflicted suffering,
humiliation, disorientation, which had initially found a home in the
cells and treatment paths of the special prisons of the Seventies, have
now become rooted in our penitentiary system, of which it is truly
difficult, if not impossible, to find something to save.
https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten