Why this Caesar must die

I never thought that I would write ‘prisons’ and ‘feelgood’ in the same sentence again since the seminal The Shawshank Redemption (1994) but last month two news stories about prisons qualified for this unexpected feelgood factor.

Prison embodies a deep and moving human drama- Fr Joe Borg

The Taviani brothers won the Golden Bear award for the best film at the Berlin Film Festival, their biggest triumph since Padre Padrone took the Palme d’Or at Cannes 35 years ago. In Malta, a Shakespearian drama was performed by prisoners at St James Cavalier.

Octogenarian siblings Paolo and Vittorio Taviani won the award for Caesar Must Die, a documentary about prisoners in the maximum security prison Rebibbia in Rome staging Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The film’s protagonists are inmates serving time, including life sentences, for diverse crimes including Mafia-related crimes.

Also last month a production titled When You Hear My Voice based on scenes from several Shakespearian plays was staged at St James by inmates at the Corradino Corrective Facility. A documentary, which will include the performance and pre- and post-production snippets, is in the works and will soon be available for international distribution. On a much lighter note, the prisoners wrote, acted and produced a play that was shown to a selected few within the prison precincts.

Media reports document the positive experience of these prisoners. Such positive media coverage helps society to go beyond the usual stereotypes attributed to prisoners. The negative news that we habitually read about prisons feeds our perception that the place is inhabited by monsters that are beyond redemption, and the rest of us on the outside are virtuous and righteous.

Paolo Taviani expressed the hope that when their film is released to the general public, cinemagoers will admit to themselves and even to those around them that every prisoner, even the one who is spending the rest of his life in prison for committing awful crimes, is and remains a human being.

Cardinal Maria Martini observes that prison is “the reversed mirror of a society, the space where the contradictions and sufferings of a sick society emerge”.

Prison embodies a deep and moving human drama. It personifies the profound human condition of the inmates and their relatives, the anguish of the victims of crime and their loved ones and the difficulties faced by those who earn their living in prison.

This hard reality also contains the complications encountered by the authorities for prison continuously offers fresh dilemmas to legislators who are faced with the harsh truth that most of the problems that prison should be solving in fact remain unsolved. In some cases, the problems become even worse.

In several societies, including ours, the populist attitude – ‘lock them up and throw away the key’ is on the increase. This is partly due to the heady mix of slanted and sensationalist media reports, the parties’ politicising of prisons, the justified shock of citizens in reaction to stories of abuse in prisons (for example the Bickle case), the frustration and indignation following some judgments that fly in the face of common reason, and the spirit of revenge that lurks in each one of us.

However, this populist mentality is hardly the way forward.

Rebibbia, the place where the Taviani brothers’ film was shot, was visited by Pope Benedict last December. He emphasised that prisoners should be treated with dignity in all cases, and the penal system should be designed to rehabilitate criminals and help them reintegrate in society. He continued that we should make “space for [the prisoner] in our time, in our home, in our friendships, in our laws, in our cities”.

Our attitude to prisoners and the conditions we impose on them are two of the essential indicators of a country’s state of civilisation. We either help them “to get busy living or get busy dying” as Andy Dufresne poignantly stated in The Shawshank Redemption.

• In an age of citizen journalism of unverified clips that are uploaded on Twitter and Facebook and that are sourced by an always voracious 24/7 news cycle, the old fashioned reporting of the brave war correspondent Marie Colvin, who was killed in Homs less than a fortnight ago, stood out. As she herself so eloquently said:

“You can’t get that information without going to places where people are being shot at, and others are shooting at you. The real difficulty is having enough faith in humanity to believe that people, be they government, military or the man in the street, will care when your file reaches the printed page, the website or the TV screen. We do have that faith because we believe we do make a difference.”

The situation in Homs is volatile and keeps changing every day. At the time of submitting this piece, the rebels left the besieged quarters of Baba Amr to spare the lives of 4.000 civilians who refuse to leave their homes in spite of the bombardment by Assad’s forces. This is by no means the end of the brutal crackdown on the revolution.

I still wonder what Colvin would have made of the frantic efforts to rescue the wounded Western journalists out of Homs while ordinary Syrians continued and will continue to die under the relentless rain of shells of Assad. This is surely not the difference she tirelessly worked for and died for.

In her last contribution to the UK Sunday Times, three days before she died, Colvin wrote that “[The Syrians] are waiting for a massacre”.

Let us hope that the outrage that many in the media felt for the killing of Colvin and the French photographer Rémi Ochlik who died alongside her, would last long enough to continue to exert pressure on Russia and China to be on the right side of history.

The acrimonious squabbling between Washington, Moscow and Beijing is only buying more time for Assad’s murderous regime.

• The massive vote of confidence given to Prime Minister Gonzi by the party delegates reminded me of a cartoon I had once seen in a history book. It depicted the European continent on one side and England on the other. The English Channel was cloaked in fog. An arrogant English politician declared grandly: “The Continent is isolated!”

Following this vote of confidence I wonder: will any Nationalist MP reason in similar fashion?

joseph.borg@um.edu.mt