Journey into the Cremona prison still designed for mafiosi and terrorists
The Lombard prison
In those walls there is nothing of the progress made in the architectural field to humanize the prison.
Last May 23, in front of the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta in Cremona, I was putting my mind in order, returning from the visit of Nessuno tocchi Caino and the Penal Chamber to the District Prison. That architecture spoke to me wonderfully, through its stylistic stratifications, of the historical, cultural and artistic evolution of a society in the city, each witness of values and principles of its moment.
Even the prison I recently visited seemed to me like a book, whose concrete pages tell its story, architecturally stuck in the period of the terrorist and mafia emergency in Italy, in which it was built. Due to that emergency, it was designed to guarantee maximum security and isolation inside and outside, and this was the case for all the other prisons currently in use in Italy. Its location, near the motorway junction, on the outskirts of the city, makes it a fact foreign to the community, little connected with the socio-economic reality of the territory. Inside there is a carpentry shop run by the inmates but which has no external commissions. From its high walls the cell buildings stand out spectrally, from where, on the upper floors, you can glimpse the Torrazzo, the only visual link with the urban nucleus.
The structure is divided into an old pavilion, built in the 80s and opened in 1992 and a new structure opened in 2013. Despite minimal structural changes due to new regulatory requirements and the 2013 expansion, nothing in those walls shows the progress that had been made in the meantime in the field of prison architecture in other countries, with the aim of humanizing and giving dignity to the prison. Once the emergency period was over, the requirement of safety continued to prevail to the detriment of environmental quality and resocialization purposes. The Cremona prison, like all the others, due to the way it is built, is a place of mortification of the physiological, psychological and relational needs of its users and of forced idleness, to the detriment of a penal execution according to the Constitution and of decent working conditions for all prison workers. Added to this is the generalized degradation of the detention environments, the result of poor maintenance over time and overcrowding which, among other things, limits and penalizes treatment activities, together with the understaffing of agents, a category that has been in a "vocational crisis" for years, and of educators.
The cells, which are generally dilapidated, are equipped with a toilet with shower and hot water only in the most recent part; in many the water system is not working properly and the lockers to store clothes and personal effects are scarce and dilapidated. Washed clothes are hung out to dry in the cell. The room in each detention section, pompously called " social room" , where present, is nothing more than a bare room, poorly lit and ventilated and without functional furniture. The cellular courtyards, used for a maximum of four hours a day by the prisoners, are narrow and inhospitable places, where any view and clear view and plant element are absent. Many of the rooms, where the prisoners hold meetings with their families in total lack of privacy, have no windows on the walls but only a skylight in the ceiling, protected by heavy bars. Overall, the daily detention and work life of the users of that facility takes place indoors, in labyrinthine and artificially lit environments, without being able to easily see outside, with serious damage to everyone's visual capacity.
Over the life of the complex, the minimal improvements introduced have not substantially dented an anachronistic and contradictory material condition, albeit inhuman and degrading. In Cremona, and not only there, the prison walls continue to speak of an afflictive prison, unaware of a reformed sentence that will soon celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. Moreover, no concrete possibility of change or improvement can be seen on the horizon. On the contrary, the latest architectural measures adopted to deal with overcrowding outline even more critical scenarios, based on the idea of a penal execution entirely resolved within existing prison enclosures. The buildings planned by the new prison plan consisting of prefabricated modules with attached concrete courtyards without greenery and with furniture screwed to the floor, in prisons already collapsing, do not leave much hope. On July 25th, fifty years will have passed since the launch of the Penitentiary System Reform , which has remained at a standstill, both in its implementation and in the updating of detention facilities.
*Architect
l'Unità
