SENZA CENSURA n.10
Italy, february 2003

FROM CONTROL UNITS TO 41bis
This issue is treated from an intervention of "Friend and familiars of political prisoners" held in Milan, December 14 2002

The special prisons born, in Italy, in '77 for the need of the state to isolate the political prisoners, because, with the arrival in the jails of comrades , from '68, the situation begin always more explosive: grew revolts, the prisoners pretend best conditions and become aware of the origin of their social and political condition, they consider themselves as a part of proletariat.
Then with the birth of the fighters organizations, also the extra-legal proletariat get organized in NAP (Proletarian Armed Nucleos). The State must try to stop the situation and then the prison reform come into force in '76 .
This reform goes in two directions: from a part the concession of benefits, best conditions and permissions subordinate, from the other special treatment for the political prisoners and who exposes himself in the struggles.
At the beginning special sections are created in the normal prisons and contemporary new prisons are built, conceived already as special, with characteristics to permit the total control..
The special prisons didn't invent in Italy but in Western Germany.
Italy an Germany in those years are important countries for USA strategy.
The Germany in the second post war has tried to extirpate all kind of political and communit opposition. After the explosion of '68 the german state react passing immediately special emergency laws (two are the main guerrilla organizations; the anarchists of the June 2 and the RAF) .........
To defeat the guerrilla it effects a very strong repression. A lot of prisoners will be imprisoned for years , in super technological jails where they live in isolation in single cells sounded-proof, where comrades will be subjected to farmacological and psychological tortures, studied in USA from the '50th with the aims to annul their resistenc. German state didn't reach its aims and fold up the comrades; they resisted and fight with hunger strikes who will provoke the dead of the comrade Holger Mains in '74. And then it didn't achieve with the murder of Ulrike Meinhof in '76 in prison.
In '77 the RAF abducts the President of german industrial organization Schleyer, ex SS, and ask the liberation of 11 comrades. A Palestinian commando substains the claims of RAF, kidnapping a Boeing 737 of Lufthansa. The german special corps kills all the members of the commando, freeing the airplane in Mogadiscio. At the end the comrades A. Baader, G. Ensslin and J. Raspe will be killed in their prisons.. A lot of actions will be played against german aims in all the world.
The deutschland model will be the one exported in Italy, Ireland, Spain and now it's not a case that Turkey, that asks to enter in Europe, carries out this model with the F Type cells, that the Turkish comrades are fighting with an hunger strike that has provoked more than 100 deaths.
In Italy the situation is very strong for the presence of the fighting organizations and the struggles of imprisoned proletariat.
The political prisoners are transferred continuously to prevent the organization of struggles and the contact with the abroad, essentially with parents and familiars.
But I spite of the "specials prisons" the struggle continues with the revolt of Asinara jail in '79.
The prisoners called up for the close of the jail and the Red Brigades kidnap the director of the Italian prisons, D'Urso. At the end the Asinara jail, ruined by the revolt, is closed and D'Urso is freed. The middle class, at the end of the '70, needs to have a political and productive reorganization. It needs to use all the possible instruments to stop the struggles against this reorganization. So in that period will be imprisoned workers, intellectuals and hundreds of comrades. The state will try to isolate completely the prisoners and to stop guerrilla will be used all kind of torture and will be put into effect the Article 90, the actual 41 bis, with the complete isolation. The state will propose as a way to go out the delation, the repentance, the treason that will provoke the imprisonment of hundreds of comrades. But the willing to struggle will continue with a lot of mobilizations against the article 90 and with manifestation in friìont of special jails as Voghera and Cuneo.

Today the repression continues, a lot of anarchists and communists are now imprisoned and the comrades in prisons by tens of years, that don't accept compromises, remain isolate. And to this comrades the state wants to apply the 41 bis, the article of the isolation. But for what now?
Because the working class is now under attack. Unemployement, social state dismantled, economic crises and wars don't permit reformist possibility and the state looses its role of intermediary and assume its role of repression and control......
So the state applies a counter revolution against all:
The workers in movement against the Libro Bianco and for the Article 18;
The movement with the repression of Naples and Genoa and all the arrested, and the renewal of the fighting activity preparing the instrument as Article 41 bis. The repression, to have success, must be generalized. Every comrades has to know that he can be imprisoned.
And all this hasn't due to a right government, but the intensity of repression and social control depends from the bourgeois nature of the state, that can't permit a class struggle, that needs social control to roll up its role of imperialist state.