Padua

Friends
Behind Bars
In a maximum security jail in Padua, Italy, a group of CLU students are helping the inmates enrolled at the university in their studies. A gesture of charity for those living through a dramatic situation has given birth to a true relationship, capable of going beyond books and above all of changing one’s own life

by Paola Bergamini

Saturday. Michele and Giacomo have trouble finding a parking space. It’s visiting day at Due Palazzi in Padua, a maximum security prison with some 700 inmates. They get out of the car and look about. “Andrea and Matteo are late.” “No, here they come!” “Michele, did you pass your law exam?” “I got through. Now let’s pray; it’s getting late.” They recite the Angelus. For six months, as an act of charity, six of them come every two weeks to the detention center to help the inmates study for their university exams. They join the line of relatives waiting to enter. There are the usual formalities: they present their IDs, stow their mobile phones in a locker, and clip on their badges. The first gate opens and closes behind them. Michele and Giacomo go through the yard. More gates, more checks by prison guards, more quiet hallways where their footsteps echo. They pause at the coffee machine. There’s time for a conversation that lets them air their misgivings. “Michele, I saw their tutors have already given the prisoners we’re visiting the answers they need for the exams–the study plans and so on. We have to keep to the object of charity, which is a need. But if this need has already been met, why come?” “I thought the same thing, Giacomo. Let’s try and bear this in mind while we’re with our ‘students’, as a question for me, for you, in our lives.”
They part. Michele has an appointment with Max, a Nigerian, transferred at his request from Treviso to Padua to be able to continue his university studies. To date, it hasn’t proved possible to insert him into the university section of the prison. The last two visits, they were unable to meet because Max was in health isolation. They meet in the cell block. Max is distraught: because of the isolation, he was unable to see his family and he was frightened of falling ill, afraid he would never be able to see them again. He starts crying. The question is now in Michele’s court. “What use am I? Lord, how can I answer this man?” But he tries to answer: “Max, look at the positive side of things. For instance, studying could be one way to get you out of this….” Max breaks in: “Michele, I was born long before you. Don’t come telling me there’s something positive about this place. If I’d been ill I would have infected everyone, including my family. What’s good about that?” Michele is at a loss for words, then all of a sudden he says, “If you get through, try and offer this suffering to the Lord, like Jesus offered His Cross for us. He gave you this pain because He knows you can carry it. Offer it to Him by embracing this destiny He has given you.”
He’s said the same words many times before, as a way of supporting the burden of study. But now they have a concrete relevance and Michele’s voice trembles. Max looks up and smiles: “Today you came to give me this good news. Thank you.” That’s the response. It’s the beginning of a change. Two weeks later, they meet again for two hours of practice for the oral. Max is ready. In the end, he says, “I’ve got to thank you for what you told me last time, about faith, because Jesus lives!”
The charitable work at Due Palazzi began eighteen months ago for these six university students. But, inside the prison, a group of teachers and volunteers have been offering their time to help the prisoners take their exams for some years now. The “University Pole” was opened on September 13, 2004, in a previously unused section of Due Palazzi. Here, the inmates–eight at present–enjoy a more open system. The cell doors are unlocked and there is a computer room where teachers and volunteers meet the prisoners. “Colleagues are often surprised at the results achieved by the prisoners. After all, they get thrown in at the deep end. They only see the teacher when he turns up for the examination,” explains Giorgio Ronconi. A professor of Italian Studies, he’s a true soul of the University Pole, together with the OCV (volunteer prison workers), who today coordinate all the teaching in the Pole and cell blocks.

Something extraordinary
“Andrea Basso and Nicola Boscoletto have worked in the prison through the Giotto Cooperative for years [cf. Traces, Vol. 8, No. 1 (January) 2006]. They’re friends of Professor Ronconi, who suggested this gesture of charity to us,” recounts Michele, enrolled in the School of Education. “The first time I passed through the gates, I felt crushed. Then, in my relationship with the inmates, in the questions they asked about the world outside, I realized that there’s always something unusual about life, about reality, which we sometimes take for granted. My need for happiness, goodness, and truth has been amplified. I help them, but I do it for myself.”
Concretely, the undergrads provide information about the curriculum, find text books, make contact with the professors for the exams, and help devise a method of study. “For us convicts, above all those like me in the cell blocks, concentrating is difficult,” says Salvatore, enrolled in Political Sciences. “We have endless anxieties: our families, our children, the suffering over what has happened. We’re there alone with our books. But we don’t talk just about our studies. I had been going through a critical period, and when they realized this, they spoke about it reasonably and helped me out. The remorse of the mistake you made is always there. At times, you manage to live with it, at others, it’s there and you know you’ll have to bear it inside you all your life.” Sometimes the roles are reversed. Salvatore himself persuaded Andrea to take the course in Labor Law–“Trust me, it’s very interesting.” The upshot was that they studied together. “The first time I saw him, he was studying Public Law,” comments Andrea, a law student. “About that time, the government fell. He was glued to the television, following the information programs that would help him understand what he was studying. He had a passion and a grasp on reality that put him light years ahead of me!”

Studying in the bathroom
 Giacomo, studying Political Sciences, relates: “The first thing I discovered when I looked at them is that the way they study is different. If they tell you their cellmate always has the TV on, so the only place they can study for the exam in peace and quiet is on the john, you get an idea of how much of their time is wasted. And another thing strikes me. We meet people who have committed crimes, usually a pretty serious ones, but our relationships with them cannot depend on that. In the same way, when I leave here, my defects stand out much more clearly. So it’s obvious that in all my relationships it isn’t this that determines me. From a practical point of view, it’s clear that I can’t solve all his problems in his studies because, as happened with Salvatore, perhaps various glitches comes up and he can’t keep our date. So then he has to cope with the exam alone. We’ve gone part of the way together.”
“True, but you sent me the lecture notes all the same!” Salvatore laughs.
Notes, books, study plans…. Michele is a student representative. To find the material for his friends in Due Palazzi, he writes on the Forum of the faculty: “Wanted: lecture notes on Public Law for the coming exam session.” Charity makes you creative.

Scent of freedom
 Most of the ‘university students’ in the prison are not young. Heavy sentences weigh on them. Taking up their studies again is an attempt to change their lives inside the jail–like Mario, who earned his Junior High diploma and then matriculated in various jails where he’s been held. Now he’s in his second year of DAMS [study programme for the performing arts], studying Humanities. “In these years, I’ve become the companion of the studies of my children. In our letters, we talk about the exams we’ve taken and grades. They’re my jewels, a rock for me. When these undergrads visit me, I talk to them about my family. The relationship is friendly. There are our studies, but we talk about a lot of other things. I told them once: ‘You bring a breath of fresh air, that fellow feeling which exists on the outside. It’s what we miss. You bring the scent of freedom.’”
The Church teaches that visiting prisoners is a physical work of mercy; hence, it benefits (above all) the person who performs it.
For Giacomo, Michele, Andrea, and the others, that’s the way it is already.