Translated by act for freedom now!
Due to the thousand difficulties of this period, added to those already existing for some time to understand what’s going on in the CPR of Corso Brunelleschi [Turin], we haven’t talked about administrative detention or the deportation machinery for a while. So we thank a comrade for this contribution he sent us to make a few points on CPRs in the time of Covid-19.
Every area in Europe is currently affected by the epidemic.
As has often happened throughout the course of history, an emergency of massive proportions offers huge possibilities for the exacerbating of repressive measures and the development of control technologies, for whose use the road can be decisively paved. But each emergency is different from all the others and epidemics in particular have some specific elements. In Italy, alongside a sudden judicial and military development in support of the new needs of the moment, the most significant measure for the resolution of the problem was identified in physical isolation, a suspension of face-to-face relations.
This is the central paradigm, the conceptual core around which the whole matter revolves.
Everybody at home, everybody away from one another. The tragic aspect of a moment like this, however, clashes with the obtuseness of the Italian government, which, thinking they don’t have to apply this measure to all social contexts, willingly forget two of the essential pillars of the Italian system: production and detention.
Factories as well as prisons, CPRs and OPGs [Prison Psychiatric Hospitals] constitute an actual ‘exception to the state of exception’, they must continue to perform their functions, with some adjustments and relaxations perhaps, but they must carry on anyway. In these places that represent intermingling par excellence, the pandemic seems not to exist at all.
An outstanding example is the current situation concerning administrative detention in Italy. At the moment, in the full swing of contagion, Repatriation Centres [CPRs] appear practically identical to what they were, no change has been made and there is no intervention on the horizon. A fact that even goes against the current of the European context.
In order to face the danger of contagion, countries such as Spain, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Belgium and France have actually begun to carry out mass releases from national structures, some centres were closed down and the judicial tirades concerning deportations and detentions were put aside. Measures adopted certainly not out of a sudden State magnanimity, but as a result of numerous revolts that have drawn attention to structures otherwise invisible and above all to the risk if the force of these time bombs is not extinguished. Portugal has suspended some practices concerning the migration issue by temporarily regulating asylum seekers. Many deportation centres from the other side of the Alps have been shut down and various measures of bureaucratic easing have been taken.
The tendency in Italy is inexorably different.
The only intervention made by the Ministry of the Interior was the prorogation of pending stay permits and those awaiting renewal. A decision whose intent is more that of diverting the appointed officers to other tasks, such as public order, than alleviating the legal situation of so many migrants. Since early March the migration offices in Italian police stations have been practically closed and the suspension of stay permits will fortunately give more time to asylum seekers and migrants with stay permits due to expire soon, before they become clandestine.
As concerns the detention issue, however, as we said, Italy absolutely doesn’t want to give in.
Even if renovation work has been suspended in some CPRs, the latter continue to function as undocumented migrants are being taken there. This is certain for the CPR in Turin and is also for other CPRs, if you look at local police press releases. The Government Decree of 8th March stated it clearly: migrants’ deportations are considered a priority, along with other kinds of penal procedures. The 26th March circular of the Ministry of the Interior confirms it: after a list of precautions concerning the possibility of contagion and the necessity of quarantine, isolation and individual protection devices, after extending a ban on cell phones to all [centres] (which gives a legal form to a practice already adopted in the CPR of Turin, a change which isn’t likely to be reverted), it explicitly mentions expected newcomers.
Even if some judges, for example in Potenza and Trieste, are not validating any prorogations, in many cases CPRs, the Turin one in particular, are still taking new prisoners in and local judges are approving detentions as if it were nothing. This is the first certain fact: CPRs are open and functioning all over the national territory.
A fact that could be considered banal, but the question takes an unexpected turn if we look at the deportation machine.
Air and sea movements of people from Italy are in fact blocked; clearly this didn’t happen immediately and countries such as Morocco, Tunisia, Ghana and Egypt delayed the activation of a total block, for example by receiving those deported but putting them in preventive quarantine. At the moment it seems there is also a total block of those charter flights that normally gather up people in various countries in order to deport them. There is no official information on the blocking of deportations, but the news emerging on the issue points in this direction. The latest news of an accomplished deportation can be found on the website of the Ferrara police, dating 25th March, to Islamabad (Pakistan applied a flight ban on the same day). The second important consideration, therefore, is that deportations are not happening.
So what’s the use of repatriation centres if repatriations are suspended or impossible to carry out?
At this point we think that if the situation remains the same despite institutional persons also requesting that the centres be emptied, the CPRS, as they lose the frills that justify their institutional unavoidability on paper, are finally unveiling their true face. These centres never really served to deport migrants (in the years figures have always been derisive compared to the clandestine population), but to restrain a small part of them as a warning to all the others. In other words, the old story that wants CPRs to be a collective deterrent is finally plain and obvious to everybody.
The only reason that European governments justify the centres is becoming scarce: deportation.
Repatriation centres are not repatriating anybody, however they are continuing their activities. What activities?
So how and why are CPRs functioning at the moment?
Their function of containment, exercised towards those who get out of prison and those captured during raids, keeps going on; rather than deportations, only expulsions through notorious expulsion orders will take place; a measure which will be inevitably eluded, as the persons concerned won’t be able to go anywhere. Undocumented migrants will therefore remain on the national soil and are likely to be recaptured and locked up again. So the famous “snakes and ladders” is more valid than ever.
Why doesn’t Italy want to close CPRs down?
We think that much reasoning concerning migrants’ reclusion can’t be separated from the general situation of detention; in the current emergency, it would be a mistake to talk about CPRs without reasoning on prison in general. On the prison question, the Ministry of Justice is acting obtusely and murderously, actually leading prisoners to a possible widespread contagion. This is also happening to Repatriation Centres, where liberation, the one and only real form of safety, is even simpler and more banal from a bureaucratic point of view. The Italian State seems to be more worried about losing its repressive credibility than avoiding a further tragedy and being in a safe place against possible revolts, which driven by fear could sweep all the jails away. This highlights even more how administrative detention, just like prison, is an unavoidable pillar of the Italian system. A fundamental presupposition that the Italian State absolutely doesn’t want to put in question. So it’s not only an economic question – the business of running migrants’ centres – that is preventing their temporary closure, but something that digs to the roots of State power.
And it is precisely the foundations of the system that are struck by the prisoners’ revolts, strongly demolishing the bases of detention. The fear of contagion, the certitude that this can lead to massacres, drove many to rebel: in the month of March, prisoners carried out numerous protests in the CPRs of Gradisca, Palazzo San Gervasio and Ponte Galeria in Rome. The latest one, between 29th and 30th March in the Centre in Friuli, burnt and destroyed a part of the structure.
Everything lets us think that more revolts will break out soon.