The story of Vincenzo T. in prison with psychiatric problems, without interviews or phone calls

I met Vincenzo T. in the Mammagialla prison in Viterbo. It was 2003, a few months before I had been returned to Italy after eleven years of exile. I had been handed over through a ruse one late August dawn to the Italian police beneath the Mont Blanc tunnel. Television had long broadcast images of my arrest surrounded by police in the courtyard of the Turin police headquarters, an event greeted with a toast at the then Prime Minister Berlusconi's home on the Costa Smeralda. After spending a few weeks under observation, I was transferred to the prison's penal section. It was getting dark, and the corridor of the ward was crowded because the cells there were opened for the afternoon social hours.

A welcome change after the long months of solitary confinement at Marino del Tronto. Everyone in the section greets me when I arrive; someone had warned me that the Red Brigades member was coming. I throw my bag in the cell assigned to me and immediately go for a walk, up and down amidst the general buzz. A wonderful feeling I had forgotten. It's then that Vincenzo T. approaches. Shaved head, sun-baked face, bulbous nose: " Paolo, I need to talk to you." He speaks to me as if he's always known me. " I have to tell you something that only you can understand. I trust you, but not the others." Vincenzo T. thus reveals to me the secret of his existence that had tormented him so much. An existential suffering he had slowly become aware of. " I have a problem with my head, I hear voices. Maybe I have a psychiatric problem, but here I can't tell anyone; I have to pretend to be normal."

In the weeks and months that followed, Vincenzo T. told me about his entire troubled life. We spent almost four years together at Mammagialla, reading books and discussing the universe because, despite his limited education, Vincenzo had an incredible appetite for reading and thought a lot—even too much. I was always by his side, like an older brother, trying to protect and help him. In that section, I met other "crazy" people, bonded deeply with them, and shared the best moments of my incarceration. The director of the institute complained about this situation: at Mammaggialla, a third of the inmates had psychiatric disorders, the other third had addictions, then migrants, and then the rest. The prison, a social dump, prevented him from pursuing projects of excellence, earning career points, or appearing on television with plays and cutting-edge projects, impossible in a prison that was a cesspit of the earth. For him, it was just a career issue.

With us was Pino, who had become a psychiatric patient due to drug abuse, and his prison guard, who talked to the trout in the shower and explained to us that the Martians had arrived in Frosinone on skateboards. Pino had managed to get his pension; I had prepared the paperwork for him. A few days before his release, he was distressed because he didn't know how to keep the five thousand euros he had in his savings account. Truth be told, he didn't even know where to go; he was panicking. On his first night out, he got lost. He couldn't find his way back to the group home where he was being housed. He spent the night on a bench. Then there was Vladimiro, the "commander," convicted for stealing bicycles and a necklace by climbing through a ground-floor window. He, too, could hear voices. "They're like Joan of Arc," he said. I remember a letter from him that arrived years later. He had ended up in a psychiatric prison, in a large cell where the only food was boiled potatoes and other inmates masturbated while watching television. But Vincenzo T.'s story was the harshest, a mass of suffering, social stigma, judicial persecution, abandonment, and ignorance. In prison, he began to receive regular notifications of convictions and complaints for violations of supervision obligations. Each time, his anger mounted, and I struggled to calm him down.

Slowly we began to understand: while under special surveillance, after his first long sentence, Vincenzo T. had frequent psychiatric crises. He was thus subjected to compulsory medical treatment. The Carabinieri in his town, unable to find him at home, instead of reporting his hospitalization, reported him for evasion. A six-month sentence each time. I had him request his medical records; we compared the dates; they perfectly matched the reports filed by that infamous station. We sent everything to the lawyer, who, for once, had an easy time debunking the charges. But this is just a taste; the rest is the story of a missed diagnosis, a lack of treatment, abandonment by a family devoid of education, and above all by society—by institutions, as they say. Alone, unprotected, Vincenzo T., gripped by his periodic psychotic outbursts, began wandering around Italy, alternating between periods of tranquility, where he worked as an excavator driver for road construction companies, and acute crises.

And with every crisis, instead of treatment, came charges and prison: contempt and violence against a public official, property damage, street fights, squatting (an old abandoned train station, used as a shelter when he had no home), and on and on. I remember when I went to visit him on day release in the Trastevere area, where he lived after finishing prison. He wasn't well; he saw demons rising from the pavement; he was upset. Even though I couldn't, I was violating the treatment program, I tried to catch him and take him to the hospital. He ran away. I knew what would happen soon. The next day he was back in Regina Coeli, locked up for contempt and violence against a public official. With his elderly mother's death, the last ties with the family that had excluded him from his inheritance were severed: a few fields and his mother's house. A further source of suffering, a sense of unbearable injustice. More charges and convictions, summary trials without a defense.

Vincenzo T. had recently put his life in order. His family had finally recognized his share of what was owed to him. With that money, he had bought a small house and, with a friend, had restored it. He worked illegally in the Etna countryside. In the evenings, I saw him on social media, dancing with distant friends, until a pile of old convictions, which he had neglected, arrived and plunged him back into the abyss of prison. For over two years, Vincenzo T. has been in detention again, in Sicily. Without money, he cannot collect his mental disability pension because his postal card is blocked. He has no conversations or phone calls. He lives in absolute poverty, and the probation judges systematically deny him alternative measures , emphasizing his social "danger." Vincenzo T. writes me long letters in which he describes his current prison situation. For the first time, I cannot find the words to respond to him.

FROM

Paul Persichetti