DOCUMENTARY 13TH AMENDMENT

When I talked about Angela Davis we also mentioned the 13th Amendment (you can find it on
Netflix).
The 13th Amendment is added in the Constitution in the moment when the slavery was abolished,
chronologically slavery was from the beginning of the 1800. The 13th Amendment added something
more, it abolishes slavery but it allows it as a punishment for a crime (criminalization of black
americans), which is the point of the documentary and this is the connection between slavery and
prisons.

This is basically what the 13th Amendment says:

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the
party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their
jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
ITALIANO:
Sezione 1: La schiavitù o altra forma di costrizione personale non potranno essere ammesse negli
Stati Uniti, o in luogo alcuno soggetto alla loro giurisdizione, se non come punizione di un reato per
il quale l'imputato sia stato dichiarato colpevole con la dovuta procedura.
Sezione 2: II Congresso ha facoltà di porre in essere la legislazione opportuna per dare esecuzione a
questo Articolo.»

- 1863-1877: Reconstruction Period, a significant chapter in the history of the American civil
rights.
- 1900-1960s: there were the so-called Jim Crow Laws: they were state and local laws that
enforced racial segregation in the Southern United Stated.
- 1954-1968: there was the Civil Rights Movement, the huge moment in which black people
started to rebel, in order to end legalized racial discrimination and racial segregation.

There were seen from slave to criminals, after the 13th Amendment. It is unofficial form of slavery.
In the 1950s-70s there was an intense world of drugs in the US, so people were prostituted for drugs,
for drug addiction.
This came from ghettos, the poorest part of the society. Public advertising tried to force cops and
the police to chain people as criminalized for drugs. Drug Addiction was a public excuse to put in
prison black people. They forced black people to work for the State.
Prison Uniforms:
- Black and the green for black people;
- Blue one is for white people.

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These pages can be seen as a comment of some issues we are talking about, they are especially
relevant to the issue of trauma.
This is something that came up last week and it is a criminal situation where a man who entered
prison in 1979 for killing three policemen near Milano and he was given a life sentence.
There are two types of life sentence:
- Ergastolo ostativo: it doesn t allow you ever to go out on permission;
- Ergastolo: it allows you to go out on permission after several years has passed and after the
prison has completed the report where they mention how you performed.

This man (Antonio Cianci was incarcerated in and he received already three permissions to go
out for few hours to see the family, and last week when he was out he went to an hospital, he stole
the uniform of a nurse, he dressed up as a nurse and went to an old man and asked him to give him
all his money.
This man only had less than 10 euros and gave them to him, but the criminal got really upset and told
him it wasn t enough and tried to cut his throat.
He left the hospital, but he was recognized and taken back to jail.
The issue is very difficult to understand if not in general public opinion. Jail should have a
rehabilitative function, so you might ask yourself what happened during these years if they didn t
manage to change anything about him. Because this person went out and just reconfirmed: he is a
criminal (this is different for the ones who have mental issues).

This is a simple report taken from one of the many articles that came up in internet. The only thing
the criminal told the judge is if there were cameras where he committed the crime because if there
weren t it was very difficult to tell that he was the criminal: this is a very aggressive attitude.
If you go out on permission and you commit another crime you will be given another sentence even
if you are already in jail.
The judge looks at the problem from a criminology point of view and sees the crime as a narcissistic
need to show how bad and strong he is.
He says that the criminal acted for the pleasure of knowing how to commit a crime.
Here comes out the myth of Narcissus (= nel mito appare incredibilmente crudele, in quanto disdegna
ogni persona che lo ama. A seguito di una punizione divina, si innamora della sua stessa immagine
riflessa in uno specchio d'acqua e muore cadendo nel lago in cui si specchiava).
If you commit the perfect crime, you want everybody to know you are perfect: this person is willing
to pay the price for the affirmation of his narcissistic ego. So, when he asks if there were surveillance
cameras he is asking was I seen? Because if I was not seen that is the perfect crime .
He is not confessing but still he s asking about the possibility of the crime having been recorded and
documented by a camera. This is IL GUSTO DI SAPER DELINQUERE.
The complexity of the action is what makes it perfect to the eyes of a narcissistic personality. The
purpose was not to make money, it was to be able to control somebody else s life and to decide is
worth living or not. If he wanted to make more money, he could have gone somewhere else, you
don t go to a hospital.
There is only an idea to produce a complex crime, so there is no object. It is a self-referential crime,
an attempt to prove his own capacity of committing crimes under any circumstances and even after

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40 years of jail. It is the attempt to prove he is a criminal because this is what he has been told for 40
years by the judges and the court. He is making an effort to look worse that what they think he looks
like.
He wants to underline he can commit specific violent crimes and that being in jail for years didn t
make any difference. He is stronger than the sentence given to him.

This is exactly what all the rehabilitation programs try to do in jail: to show people who are
incarcerated that they are not the equivalent of the crime they committed. One thing is the crime,
another thing is the person.
There are rehabilitation programs that take for granted that after 40 years possibly that person has
changed, it s impossible to think that a person will stay the same for years. And if this person stays
the same for years it s because there have been no programs in the prison where he was that
worked on the assumption that his profession of criminal is not what defines himself as a human
being.
They considered me as a crime with legs : it is against this idea, which marks somebody who has
been in prison, that rehabilitation works.

The next paragraph says that he had the permission to stay out for 12 hours, half a day, and it is a
permission you are given after 10 years of incarceration if the psychologist and the prison police
produce a document where they certified you haven t done anything wrong in jail.
Situations like this give very bad publicity to all the organizations, and there are people who are trying
to change inmates with long sentences because they are used by public opinion as a demonstration
that if you have been in jail even for 30 or 40 years, you will never change.
The last paragraph proves less than 0,7% of people being condemned and who have taken advantage
of this permission, have committed new crimes. It is a very low percentage. You cannot expect that
all the people who are given a permission to go out of jail will not commit a crime. This is such a small
percentage that makes it worth to continue the process. This statement was made by the association
of lawyers of the court in Milan.
In the 0,7%, we find people who committed crimes such as stealing a can of coca cola as well, but
only 0.005% have committed capital crimes, like killing somebody.
You are more likely to die by crossing the street than by running into a crazy life sentencer. It makes
a very strong impression on the public opinion and it obviously gives a very bad publicity to the prison
psychologists, because they say why didn t they recognized that he wasn t ready to go out of jail? ,
but the question is a little different: why didn t they recognized that years of jail didn t do
anything to change his narcissistic attitude?
So, the question doesn t really have to do with social safety, it has to do with the failure of prison as
a form of rehabilitation.

ACHILLE SALETTI s comment: a lawyer, criminologist, and also the president of an association which
takes care of people who have been undergoing substance abuse, drugs.
He has a lot to do with people who end up in prison because people who use drugs, most of the time
also sell drugs in order to finance their need and urge to use drugs.

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So, he has to go to court, try to convince the court that these people should not go to prison but
should be taken to organizations like the one where they can be rehabilitated. His comment is quite
interesting.
If you are in jail, incarcerated, then you will go through a process of institutionalization
(prigionizzazione), the process through which you make the necessary changes in your personality
and in your expectations about daily life up to the point when you start recognizing that some rules
in your life have changed you can t just go out and go to a bar and drink a cappuccino because there
is no cappuccino in jail, or call your boyfriend girlfriend, or take a shower whenever you want .

What happens to people who have been institutionalized? For decades they are living inside the
reality of jail, what happens to them when they are suddenly let out?
They need to readjust to the new kind of reality. This is why at the beginning these permits are very
short, they let the person have a hint of how reality works now.
You end up building yourself an identity as a deviant, a criminal, who stays in prison because he has
done something wrong.
Therefore, when you re totally institutionalized, whatever is outside the prison becomes out illogical,
strange, out of order. It is not like that for everybody, and possibly it has to do to the psychology of
each individual, but it happens quite a lot.
For somebody who has no rules, being contained implies interiorizing some rules, and in prison
whether you like it or not you have to interiorize some rules. It is quite normal in child psychology to
say that if you have a child you do not necessarily allow your child to do whatever he/she wants,
because otherwise it will end up having a very abstract idea of reality where anything can be done,
where there are no rules.
For somebody who has no rules, this is the beginning of traumatic life.
Another example is a violent family context: if at home you always have to defend yourself, when you
go out you feel like it is normal to attack, because this is what you have learned. Children or people
in general always interiorize what the family tells them and copy what the family does.

The anxiety producing element is not living in jail after 40 years, it is the idea itself of freedom.
What do you do if you re let out of prison for short permission and you find that within the context
of being outside there are no rules? You are not locked up every night when you go to bed, you can
buy an ice-cream, etcetera
This, of course in a person who has undergone a long period of incarceration, is a basis for a strong
element of anxiety because that person has been told by the prison to think of himself as a criminal.
When this system is not there anymore, it produces the loss of your identity, because if you consider
yourself a criminal, then you re putted in a position where it is no longer necessary to be a criminal,
the question you ask yourself is who am I?, what do I do in order to reinforce the idea that I exist?
= I do something illegal, I commit a crime, because that brings back to me the personality that I have
been living with for all those years in jail.
It is a necessity to reconfirm you are a criminal because that is the only way you can support the idea
you have some kind of identity.
Before going to jail a person possibly has a job, maybe even is a bank robber; you go to prison, you
cannot rob a bank so that part of yourself which defines your professional identity is lost and the
identity which the prison imposes upon you is you are a criminal who cannot practice being a criminal

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because here you are subjected to some rules which will not allow you to be a criminal, and if you do
anything wrong you will be immediately punished.
So, when that person goes out, unless he has undergone a process of recovery and rehabilitation, he
will immediately look for his own identity. The society outside doesn t tell you who you are so the
only thing you can do is something the society recognizes you for.
So, if you killed in 1979 three people and you were given a 40 years sentence, you have to do
something similar when you go out because that s the only identity that you are left with.
But that is the case that proves that prison didn t work for you, didn t do anything to change you. The
criminal does not think that the attitude as a criminal is the result of external factors (family, society,
people around, economic situation . He thinks that it is something that he had from the day he was
born, like a physical handicap: the handicap of the criminal is that he thinks that he was born as a
criminal, therefore there s nothing he can do but being a criminal.

CARMELO MUSUMECI s comment: he is a man who was given a life sentence and he managed to
study. He got three university degrees in jail and he read many books, in fact the first paragraph is
taken from his book Nato colpevole where he talks about his childhood, adolescence and all the
traumas he had to go through which caused him to end up in jail.
He comments about Antonio Cianci and asks himself: What was Cianci still do in jail after 40 years
for a crime he had committed when he was y o? .
We should think about the fact, in relation to him and to all the people who end up in jail, that the
prison doesn t work and that of the inmates who go out of jail end up going back in.
Prison, the way it is now, is not a medicine. It is the illness itself. Prison is the place where you become
a prisoner, not where you grow up and become a full citizen.

Carmelo Musmeci is out now, he still has a life sentence, but he s been given to a religion institution
where he works as a volunteer and he keeps writing books and gives talks around Italy about prisons
and the problems of life sentences.
He says that in most of the cases, a prison which is bad and it is an outlaw by itself, it s a sentence
which never ends and will bring out the worst from the people who are incarcerated.
Antonio Cianci s head was not right but he knew how to behave. He had learned the lesson that the
system doesn t really care if you become good, they want you to act as if you were good also because,
if you really become good, you create problems to the institution, in fact a good person will not be
able to tolerate the injustices that he has to go through in jail.
Before the inmate, the prison should be reeducated. Everybody knows that the prison system is
illegal: prisons are overpopulated, very old, it is difficult to live there, sanitary conditions are third
world type, there are suicides, suspected deaths and so on. To bring jail to legality we must reeducate
our politicians to respect the law. We must denounce the prison.
It is not enough to denounce it with words, we must denounce it with facts: it is a cruel place created
by man, badly managed and a place which make prisoners worse than they were when they went in.

To conclude: the point is not to avoid completely any idea of punishment, the point is that there is no
awareness in our western society of how the prisons work and of the effect of the prisons on human
mind, on people who are already subjected to some kind of trauma.

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We must think that awareness of the prison system is the basis for a safer society.
No matter how good the psychologists and the people who work in jail are, there will always be some
cases where they give permission to somebody and that person will go out and commit a crime, it is
impossible to avoid that.
And it is also impossible to put all criminals to jail: the assumption that having more people in jail
make society safer, it s part of the political propaganda. It is not a social program to make society
better.

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