The degree of civilisation of a country is measured by the treatment reserved for prisoners. The testimony of a victim of the Piazza della Loggia massacre: “Let us not leave inmates isolated,” but accompany them on a path of restorative justice.
"The person who is convicted is seen exclusively through the eyes of the law. They are regarded solely as the one who committed the crime. But who is this person? Why did they commit violence, of whatever kind, against someone and against the community? We need to answer these questions too. We must never forget that the offender is a person, not a monster." These are the words of Manlio Milani, a man who still carries in his heart the sudden laceration of the Piazza della Loggia massacre in Brescia — the loss, on that bloody 28 May 1974, of his wife Livia at the hands of terrorists.
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That day, at 10:00, in Piazza della Loggia in Brescia, a demonstration against neo-fascist terrorism had been called by the trade unions and the Antifascist Committee, with the presence of Cisl trade unionist Franco Castrezzati, Member of Parliament Adelio Terraroli of the Italian Communist Party, and Gianni Pannella, secretary of the Brescia Chamber of Labour. Hundreds, thousands of people were in the square demonstrating. At 10:12, a bomb containing at least one kilogram of explosive, hidden in a litter bin, exploded, hitting a great many people: three of them died on the spot. One of them was Livia. A further 102 people were left with minor injuries.
In the case of the Piazza della Loggia massacre, many things are known. On 20 June 2017, the Court of Cassation upheld the appeal ruling that in 2015 had sentenced Carlo Maria Maggi — the leader of the neo-fascist group Ordine nuovo, an extra-parliamentary far-right political group, in the Triveneto — and Maurizio Tramonte, a Padua-based Ordine nuovo militant and at the same time an informant for the secret services, to life imprisonment. It was he who was the "source" that had inspired a crucial report by the Padua centre of the Sid (the military secret service), dated 6 July 1974. That report stated that in 1974 there had been several meetings at which Ordine nuovo, dissolved the previous year, had decided to covertly resume its activities. One of these meetings had taken place in Abano Terme on 25 May — three days before the massacre in Brescia's piazza.
The Piazza della Loggia massacre therefore has its perpetrators. Maggi and Tramonte are the material culprits of the massacre.
The masterminds, however, and many other nuances of that terrible affair, have remained in the shadows — both in the trials and in collective memory. Keeping memory alive and making it active, a memory belonging to the State and above all to citizens: this is why the Associazione casa della memoria di Brescia was founded in 2000, of which Manlio Milani is president.
The choice was made to look inside prison, guided by Milani's voice and gaze. His eyes and his words open a breach in the bars that separate those inside from those outside penal institutions, placing at the centre the humanity shared by victims, offenders and society — a humanity that must not act as a rupture, but as a trait-d'union. "The inmate is a person who speaks to all of us, because violence tears open a wound not only in the heart of the victim, but" — Milani continues in a deep voice — "it raises questions about the laceration that has occurred within the whole of the society that suffered that crime."
Prison therefore takes the form of part of the answer to the question that every crime poses to civil society. A crime is a mirror of some form of distress within society.
"Inmates must be given back their trust, so that they can acknowledge the harm they have done, including through direct dialogue with the victim. The victim too" — Milani concludes — "when they understand that the offender has become aware of the harm, of the laceration, realises that they are not dealing with a monster but with a person."
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"When you are a criminal you place no value on your own life, and how can you see the value of another person, of a human being, of life, or even of the victim? You don't care, because you know your first priority is to survive, to try to stay alive, and if you don't have the conditions or the capacity you can never see a victim, or even a human being, in the person you are robbing." These, in turn, are the words of inmate Carmelo in the documentary film Lo strappo. Quattro chiacchiere sul crimine.
This documentary film grows out of the experience and reflections of four witnesses to the challenge of criminal choices, the product of more than 20 years of professional work: Angelo Aparo, psychologist in Milan's prisons; Francesco Cajani, magistrate; Carlo Casoli, journalist; Walter Vannini, criminologist.
The aim of Lo strappo is, first and foremost, to show each party's point of view on the other parties involved — the victim, the offender, the media and justice — demonstrating how each party is connected to the others by many threads: in the same way that each of us is, a stranger to the events yet part of the same narrative and the same social fabric, whether we are aware of it or not.
Secondly, Lo strappo aims to restore a vision of crime that adheres as closely as possible to the reality of things that can happen to any one of us, captured in their natural sequence: the cradle, the stage, the rubble, the difficulty and the tools needed to rebuild the men and women who played a part in them in various ways.
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The result is a documentary journey in which the members of the scientific committee, though they did in fact physically conduct the interviews with all the protagonists of this story, deliberately remain without a face or a voice — asking everyone the same questions, after having themselves been questioned, over the course of their professional careers, by their own.
The aim of this reportage on prison is not to describe the statistics of Italian prisons, but to prompt some reflections — to capture in a concise and as comprehensive a way as possible the complexity of the "crime" event in all its many implications: psychological, sociological, emotional. Implications that concern all the individuals involved both before, during and after the criminal act.
Who ends up in prison, and why? "The people who end up in penitentiaries are those who carry a deep anger, a great resentment inside them. Prison is where, above all, those people end up who turn their anger towards society into an act of retaliation against others and against the world." These are the words of psychologist Angelo Aparo, one of the creators of Lo strappo, who in 1997 founded the Gruppo della trasgressione in Milan's prisons — a group for discussion and dialogue within penal institutions, both among inmates themselves and with civil society, which enters prison to make those inside feel part of what lies outside.
When you spend time among this group, you can see firsthand what Dr Aparo describes. The Gruppo della trasgressione works on the self-perception of those who commit crimes, and on the emotional substrate that, even in ordinary people, can lead to small acts of violence against others and against oneself.
The group today comprises a closely linked association and cooperative, both made up of inmates, former inmates, entrepreneurs, professionals, university students and recent graduates.
The principles and objectives that have always characterised this activity are the exchange between inside and outside, participation in community life, work on oneself, education in legality, and the prevention of bullying and drug addiction.
In prison, the first priority is to foster in the inmate that reflection which was absent at the time of the offence — to recover an awareness of the kinship between offender and victim, and of their belonging to the same community.
One way of fostering this recognition of a shared underlying humanity that runs through both victims and offenders is through restorative justice pathways.
In the collective imagination, and owing to a lack of information, there is no awareness of the fact that prison can also involve a rehabilitation process — that such a process should take place. That this is what punishment is. That it is no accident that punishment must tend towards the re-education of the convicted person.
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The aim of restorative justice is to respond to the need to restore attention to the personal and social dimension that crime entails — without which punishment would be nothing more than an affliction.
Restorative justice was first theorised in the late 1980s in North America (restorative justice) and emerged as an experimental model proposing a kind of equation whereby "crime is a violation of people and of interpersonal relationships; violations create obligations; the primary obligation is to make amends for the wrongs committed".
This is in fact a Copernican revolution, a paradigm shift. Punishment must no longer be retributive — where the criminal sanction is meant to punish the guilty for the harm caused — but restorative. People — victims and offenders, with their experiences, their lives, their needs and their relationships — no longer remain entirely marginal as in the previous paradigm, but become central.
Restorative justice pathways are aimed at all parties involved — victim, offender, civil society — and the direction that should be taken to restore a suffering humanity that fills our prisons is indicated by Milani: "not to leave inmates isolated, so that they can on the one hand seek to rebuild themselves towards a new life, and on the other find the possibility of bearing to the very end, even while living with that guilt, the weight of their actions. Which in this way is not an expiation — it is simply acknowledging responsibility for what they have caused."
The effort, the task that Manlio invites us to undertake, is therefore to guide those who suffer the strappo — the pain of the crime — towards the need for something to be born from that pain. And this effort must be directed along a path that cannot be one of hatred, because over time, as he has told us from his experience as a victim, one comes to understand that the prison of hatred consumes the life of a person and of a community. Without giving anything back.