CLAUDIO MENNA

In.side chapter #1
Pozzuoli (Campania)

The female home district of Pozzuoli is hosted inside an ancient fifteenth century convent fonded by friars minor. Over the centuries the old building was restored by Don Pedro of Toledo, after the earthquake of 1538 and it had different uses: it was brotherhood of sailors and fishermen, a cemetery area and summer residence of the diocesan seminary. In the convent lived his last months a great musician, Giambattista Pergolesi ( he died very young in the 1736). Only after the Unity the convent was finally intended as penitentiary. History, ancient melodies, humanity: this is the air who it’s still possible breathing inside its walls.

In Italy the number of female detainees in prisons it’s about the 5% of the total. They live restricted in 1 of the 5 female institute (Trani, Pozzuoli, Roma Rebibbia, Empoli and Venezia Giudecca) or in one of the 52 departments present inside male prisons. Their stories are often poorly understood and for a large part of them, sons are the most painful chapter. Today are more than a hundred the child who live behind bars with their mothers. “When i entered in jail my son had 11 months” tells Gabriella, “inside the prison he quickly learned to be inmate, from the tone -“Please officer could you open me? – “Mom , when we have the interview with the lawyer?”- to the search -“He opened alone his harms and legs beside the officer”.
The prison also means detachment from own social reality, and the women are affected more roughly than men. Despite a lot of psychological and physical pressures due to the everyday life inside a prison (from a forced cohabitation inside cells often too small, to the moments of loneliness, anger, sadness and dispair) woman than man can preserve her status, keeping those habits, gestures and that everyday life which albeit played in a different reality, can assure and calm and maybe also deceive them that all that they are feeling and living it’s just a little brief which divides them to the home coming.
Type of crimes committed by women is a clear expression of a marginality’s path which often marks their lives, bringing them in jail for short and repeated stays: drugs shop and property crimes are indeed the main reason of sentence condemnation for the overwhelming majority of female inmates. Basically the female prison population is convicted to not very long sentences, excluding of course convictions for murder often realized by all those woman who lived years of domestic violence.
In “Asylum” Goffman writes:
“It is very widespread the feeling between inmates that time spent behind the bars is wasted, useless and stolen from his own life; it deals of a time that has to be deleted: it’s about something that has to be past or marked, or quicked or delayed”.

From an interview to Mario Barone |Lawyer and President of “Associazione Antigone in Campania”:

“The reform which led to the closure of O.P.G. ( giudiciary and psychiatric Hospital) determined a new redistribution of the population, a time interned there, in other containers:
o.p.g. still open, r.e.m.s. and psychiatric department inside the prisons, intended to host inmates with insanity arised during the detention or submitting to observation. The female prison of Pozzuoli has been identified as institute intended to host Campanian inmates bearers of mental discomfort.
As it is usually in all the psychiatric departments chemical containment (drugs) acts as a master”

From an anonymous letter send from an inmates of Pozzuoli Female Prison:
[...]
“ I’m an inmate here in Pozzuoli and i’m writing even by all the other inmates of this prison, but none of us can sign this letter cause we could be punished and closed in insulation inside a small cell, alone, with nobody, and where you can only do your needs. First of all i want to say the most of our letters we send
you are trashed by police officers scared of what’s inside like the description of our life conditions...
We live a real hell here, we only move on with the fear of disciplinary reports, even for a cigarette, the last thing left to us...in this hell so easy to get in and so hard to go out. We want to inform you we’re living inside a cell ten of us, with a lot of humidity...in the morning we must raise up the mattress cause full of water, and when in the prison there’re visits and inspections they show them only the third floor/division, the most admissible. We’re in ten inside one single cell, and every morning we have to queue for the bathroom and to make a shower, before the hot water end...
[...]
Here we must pay everything and the prices are more than high; this is another exemple of power abuse of this institute. There’re inmates don’t conduct interviews with their parents, they have no money and it’s impossible for them buy anything. Here everything has a price, even the toilet paper. We pay every need with the money on our booklet, and often we see reported on it some expenses never realized, but nobody talks for fear of impacts. [...] We need help, here the ealth system is lacking: if you’re suffering for something in the night, you have to wait the next morning cause the nurse doesn’t want to be annoyed in the night. The medications we have on the cart is full of psychiatric drugs...
few years ago (it was easter), we all were in bed without energy. Some of us thought it was only flu, other instead were thinking it was the effect of something else...

Text and photos by Claudio Menna.