Covid’s business

Publieshed on NoCpr Torino on 2022/02/09

Two years have now passed since the start of the emergency linked to the spread of the COVID-19 virus, and the measures adopted in the management of the pandemic, in Italy as elsewhere, have shown that the only objectives of the State have always been the safeguarding of the global economy and an increasingly pervasive control.

Some of the dynamics of society, in relation to the pandemic crisis, have been exacerbated, making the brutality of the production mechanisms functional to the capitalist system even more evident. Certain bodies are expendable for the purposes of production. On the one hand, the workers sent to slaughter in the factories, which never closed despite the cessation of any kind of freedom other than that of production, as happened in the first months of the pandemic. On the other hand, the migrants caged in the detention cells, uncomfortable in freedom, are themselves merchandise and source of profit to feed a racist system, a business of detention and expulsion that does not want to be stopped.

It is the very body of a detainee in the CPR (admninistrative detention center) that is a source of profit, since the companies that profit from the management of these centres need the presence of a minimum number of people to declare themselves productive and feed their profits. It is not a coincidence that since March 2020, when some borders were closed, the detention system has never been deactivated, clearly demonstrating the failure of the rhetoric of its functionality for expulsion purposes only. Throughout the pandemic, people without European documents have been taken to centres despite the impossibility of repatriation. For some, imprisonment was prolonged, for others, when the legal terms of detention expired, expulsion orders were issued.

At the same time, forced repatriations validate the investments made in agreements between states for border security. For example, the Italy-Tunisia agreement of summer 2020 foresees the allocation by Italy of 11 million euros for coastal control and the repatriation of 80 people per week. This view of imprisoned bodies as bargaining chips within international economic flows became even more evident during the pandemic. In fact, during the various waves, there was a total and deliberate disregard for the health of detained persons and prevention of contagion. Diagnostic tools, which were not used to contain the epidemic, were only used in a compulsory manner for the purpose of repatriation, guaranteeing the minimum number of expulsions necessary to feed the business between states.

In the labyrinth of decrees and rules with which the lives of all of us have been put in check, the punitive management of the pandemic has dictated the rules, deciding who is entitled to basic freedoms such as movement and treatment. Outside the walls, vaccine discipline is the yardstick by which access to social and working life, and access to certain means of transport, is measured. While people imprisoned inside the CPR cannot choose whether or not to access the vaccine, as it is not provided to them. This is because the productivity of an imprisoned body, within the racist and colonial system, is only as a commodity and therefore there is no economic utility to vaccinate.

The already horrible living conditions in the CPR are only getting worse with the usual absence of treatment and prevention of Covid-19 infection. From the Lorusso and Cutugno prisons in Turin, we also receive news about the increase in contagions, the absence of individual protection tools for prisoners and the lack of care for the sick. In both centres, as in others, the dynamic is always the same. The evident neglect and negligence with which the pandemic issue, as well as the more general health of the inmates, is addressed is not a simple coincidence. Rather, it is one of the material forms that the punitive violence of the detention system takes. While on the outside someone is getting rich on people’s skin, the living conditions inside are, as always, appalling. In fact, to date, all the inmates inside the CPR of Corso Brunelleschi are in quarantine in the only three accessible areas and the regional guarantor of persons deprived of their liberty Bruno Mellano took three years to realize the total lack of a valid health care inside the centre, under GEPSA management until February.

It is recent news that several companies are competing for the management of the CPR in Corso Brunelleschi. It will not be a change in management or a greater focus on health care that will make such a place more humane. But only the destruction of the administrative detention centres and the breaking down of all borders.

ALL FREƎ