Written February 5th 5, 2023
We receive and publish the leaflet distributed on Friday 3 February during the gathering, then demonstration, that moved from the Regional Penitentiary Administration Department to the juvenile prison.
In late afternoon of Friday 3 February in Bologna, a protest was held outside the headquarters of the Regional Penitentiary Administration Office, with noise, speakers and banners in solidarity with Alfredo against life imprisonment without appeal and 41 bis. Surrounded by a barrage of cops and journalists, a hundred or so comrades then moved along Via del Pratello where a large writing read ‘No 41 bis. Like Iran and Egypt, Italy also tortures and condemns to death’. The demonstration ended outside the juvenile prison where there were repeated riots in December. Alongside Alfredo! Let’s keep coming out into the streets!
From a cell of 41 bis an anarchist is making a State tremble!
Alfredo Cospito, along with 749 other prisoners, is buried deep in the dungeons of the 41bis regime. And it is precisely from the most hidden place in which the State’s vengeance against its most bitter enemies is carried out that he began his struggle: since 20 October 2022, he has been on an unremitting hunger strike against the 41bis regime and life imprisonment without appeal, i.e. the hard prison regime and life imprisonment without access to alternative sentences.
These two prison institutions are the clearest and most straightforward expression of what the State is: power ruled by institutionalised violence and vengeance.
The 41bis regime was formally created to prevent all forms of communication between mafia bosses and their external entourage. Following the massacres of Capaci and Via d’Amelio it was taken up by the State as a leading force in the fight against the mafia. But over the years, the application of this regime has been extended to include 750 prisoners, 2/3 of whom are not even definitively sentenced. It means that, until proven otherwise, their guilt or innocence has not been established in court. Moreover, it should be remembered that the 41bis, although flaunted as an anti-mafia banner, has its origins in Article 90 which, in the light of the season of prison breakouts, protests and prison revolts at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s (which had led to a welding between political prisoners and rebels) had established the power on the part of the Ministry of Justice to suspend normal prison regime and apply special regimes characterised by solitary confinement, the impossibility of receiving packages from outside, censorship, and severe restrictions on visits. In short, all the provisions later normalised and implemented with Art. 41 bis.
Alfredo is the first anarchist to be put under 41 bis, and we know he is not there for the charges against him, but because of the dangerousness of his ideas and his links with anarchists who continue to struggle outside. What is being punished is his anarchist identity, not a specific fact contested against him.
Therefore, even among the most ‘sincere democrats’, Alfredo’s struggle has triggered an awareness of this reality, stirring the spirits of certain politicians who have judged that it was not possible for the State to go down in history, in 2023, as an avenging executioner. They are therefore crying out from a certain left-wing “Alfredo Cospito’s life must be saved! The 41 bis revised in its application!” Let these gentlemen, sitting in comfortable armchairs and on lavish salaries, come to terms with their consciences.
Let’s go further: in these months solidarity with Alfredo’s struggle has expressed itself unabashedly and uncompromisingly, in the streets and the squares, day and night, in every corner of the peninsula and the globe. The rift opened up by Alfredo from within the 41 bis regime has been widened and reinforced through irrecuperable acts of solidarity, because they are active and concrete.
Over the past few days the media have been abandoning themselves to the worst analyses, blaming those who have carried out active solidarity for the Meloni government’s hard line concerning the 41 bis regime for Alfredo Cospito and, in the second place, by alluding to a synergy between anarchists and mafiosi against the harsh prison regime (script already tried and failed miserably following the prison riots in March 2020). And the prime minister Meloni, whose government has been cornered by an anarchist in 41bis, hastens to say that the government will not deal with those who carry out violent actions. Now, since the beginning of time, anarchists do not negotiate with the State. They reject the logic of power, exploitation, injustice, violence and fight it. Nor do they deal with the mafia, which is the other side of the coin of power. If anything, and the history of this country bears direct witness to this, it is the State that has dealt and deals with the mafia.
And this is not an inference, it is reality.
We will not take a single step backwards in the struggle against 41 bis and life imprisonment without appeal and against the whole prison.
We will not be scared off by the threats of a State that trembles in the face of the lucidity and determination of an anarchist supported by the sincere and active solidarity of his comrades, and an ever-widening circle of solidarity.
THE STATE IS ONLY ONE. WE ARE MANY AND UNPREDICTABLE.
ALONGSIDE ALFREDO, ALONGSIDE THOSE WHO STRUGGLE.
Anarchists