Description
Prison director Luigi Pagano once said that to clear the San Vittore prison is like “emptying the sea with a bucket”. The problem of prison overcrowding is one of the recurrent themes in Adriano Sofri’s critical prison writings and lies at the origin of the related topics of life imprisonment, amnesty and suicide on which he continuously reflects as a journalist and a writer, during and after his 22 years of captivity in Pisa’s Don Bosco Prison.The unresolved emergency of overcrowded prisons in Italy recently became world news with the Coronavirus outbreak which sparked prison riots in early March 2020 all over the country. In his column “Piccola posta” (Il Foglio) Sofri commented on the events pointing out that the Covid-19 pandemic has been the spark that inflamed the “Caporetto” of Italy’s agonizing penitentiary system. Starting from these recent public statements, it is possible to consider Sofri’s prison writing as a way of continuously re-contextualising his own prison experience in relation to the “prisons of the others” (cf. his Le prigioni degli altri, 1993). This contribution aims to show how Sofri’s opinions of the prison riots in March 2020 can be read backwards, in light of his previous statements on imprisonment and the living conditions of inmates in Italy.
| Period | 26 Feb 2021 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Captivity and Social Justice in Modern Italian Culture |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Rochester, United StatesShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |
Keywords
- captivity studies
- prison writing
- italian studies
- Adriano Sofri