Victims of the State
(3:38)

I finally received my pension! 933 Euro. After trade union deductions, Income Tax deductions, deposits, additional deductions: 933 Euro per month, and I’m going to just blow the lot!
If the truth be told, I did feel a pang of guilt. I would like to make a sort of symbolic gesture. Perhaps donate my pension in an attempt to establish committee for the victims of the State, those that die in prison, those that are murdered by the Police Force, those that we have been talking about.
The number of cases is horrendous. I’m talking about Aldrovandi, from Ferrara, killed by four policemen in the middle of the street. I’m talking about Rasman in Triest and about Bianzino – for whom we have established a fund to at least help with his education costs. Then there is also Niki Gatti, who we don’t know to this day precisely how he died. They found him strangled to death in prison. A computer technician who left his family, which still doesn’t know what happened to him.
Let’s set up a fund with which to fund the establishment of a committee to provide legal assistance when such people are arrested, people who never expected to be arrested for anything. Or perhaps after their arrest, to help with information and to help families to get themselves out of this kind of situation and, above all, to hold the members of our police forces accountable. Enough is enough, let’s stop truncheoning workers, students and entire families. We have some film clips that are truly shocking. If there are a few bad apples in the Police Forces who like to beat people with truncheons, then let’s identify them with a number on their helmets. They will only beat people once, then never again. That is what we must start doing.
This gesture of mine is justified by the fact that the statistics are truly shocking. 180 People die in prison each year, of which one third, or some 60/70 are suicides. Please note that prisons are the emblem of the status of democracy in a country. The number of suicides has increased by 10, from 60 suicides last year to 70 this year and 21 times higher than the average number of suicides outside of the prisons. There is something very repressive happening in our system. In fact, thanks to these 180 annual deaths in detention, we have effectively re-introduced the death penalty without saying anything to anyone.
No Country should be like this. When an individual is entrusted to the custody of a prison, there must be someone who takes responsibility when the individual is taken into custody. When that someone takes responsibility, he signs on the dotted line and becomes accountable for that individual. We hear recorded voices saying things such as “do we beat him up here or have you already beaten him down there?”. This must be some sort of joke! Have we really lost all sense of what we have become?
This gesture of mine is also intended to encourage our Parliamentarians to also donate their pensions, which they become entitled to after only 31 months of service, rather than after 35 years like the rest of us, to establish a committee for the victims of the State, something that should exist in any civilised Country. We must be given all the necessary information.
Therefore, I’m prepared to hand over my pension, which I have just received……with a little sadness, just a little sadness.