Nino, Part 6: Prison, criminal culture and the possibility of change
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- Last Updated: Monday, 01 May 2017 09:05
- Published: Tuesday, 17 April 2012 11:33
- Written by Amedeo Cottino
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Living in prison…once they’ve take away a man’s freedom, they’ve taken away everything. In prison, there are plenty of concessions they could make if they wanted to, so a person could at least live decently. But no, in prison there’s a system and everyone has to live under that system.
Through Nino’s testimony we learn that prison is a story of offences to human dignity and of lives at risk (not only those of the inmates but also those of the guards). It is a story of death, both by murder and by suicide. He provides us with data which go beyond his life experience as an inmate of “Le Nuove” prison in Turin.
In this universe of unpredictable penalties, some inmates try... to regain some scrap of the world on the other side of the prison bars. This particular struggle, clearly, is only possible for those inmates who have the will and the various resources necessary to undertake and sustain it. We will hear of the very great importance assigned to such things as special passes to leave the prison for a few days, telephone calls, meetings with family members. And then there is the search for other ways - like that of maintaining a correspondence - which make it possible for the prisoner, if only in a temporary and symbolic way, to come out of his prison cell.
After the whistle-blowing Congressional testimony of SEC attorney Darcy Flynn in the summer of 2011, it became well known that “the nation’s top financial police [had illegally] destroyed more than a decade’s worth of intelligence they had gathered on some of Wall Street’s most egregious offenders,” including insider trading and securities fraud investigations involving such Wall Street heavies as Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, AIG, Deutsche Bank, and many others.[i] All totaled there were the records of some 9,000 investigations of wrongdoing or “Matters Under Inquiry” (MUI) since 1993 that were “deep sixed.” [buried at sea, ed.] There were also a cozy number of cases involving high-profile firms that were never graduated into full-blown criminal investigations because of what has been referred to as an “obstruction of justice” by misbehaving attorneys caught up in the revolving personnel doors of regulation and Wall Street.
The American Unlawful Internet Gaming Enforcement Act 2006 (UIGEA) has been controversial since its inception, when the Bush administration hastily tacked it onto the end of the unrelated ‘SAFE’ Port Act of 2006. Now, following a US Department of Justice opinion released at the end of December [
