Emotions, sexuality, homosexuality and transsexualism, gender identity and LGBT-related topics remain taboo within the entire Italian prison system. Gay, lesbians and transgender people don’t have a voice behind bars: the penitentiary legislation in force doesn’t take into account their specific condition, it doesn’t provide for any kind of “business” that could make their daily life less painful, which consists mostly of incidents of discrimination and harassment. It’s down to the individual prisons to place these issues at the top of their agendas and to “open up” prisons to the rest of the world, making this subject as painful and delicate as the condition of imprisonment of gay people.
The LGBT issue, however, needs to be tackled with determination and seriousness because this situation of “denial” of homosexual identity leads to issues of great importance.
In prison, being homosexual is rejected and silenced, since gays and lesbians, who are affectionately oriented in a different direction to the majority of the heterosexual detainees, are singled out as “different”. For homosexual detainees, prison is a painful experience as their condition is not recognised as such by the rest of the prison population, but it can also become anguish and torment for this unreciprocated “love”. Sometimes it can happen that a gay prisoner falls in love with his heterosexual cell inmate, and this could then compromise his entire stay in that particular prison.
In prison, homosexual behaviours and desires are widespread and, proving to be necessary for physiological requirements, they are put forward as sexual replacement to a heterosexual relationship. Therefore, the deprivation of heterosexual relationships hinders the process of defining one’s own identity: the prisoner, deprived of his female polarity, is forced to find his own identity simply within himself; identity is however only a portion of his personality that is recognised and appreciated by men. In prison, there is a split between identity and homosexual behaviour, with serious psychological repercussions for the homosexual prisoner who is forced to come to terms with a reality that could make him, and almost always does, a sexual object but never a homosexual human being.
No official statistics exist of the number of homosexual inmates in Italian prisons. First of all, because conducting a census for the gay population is in itself very complicated – on what quantitative basis should one conduct a census for the LGBT community? What would the statistical parameters used be? – but also because it’s almost impossible that one would openly declare his homosexuality, as this would lead to serious discrimination by other inmates.
The imprisonment forces men and women to adjust, to adapt, and very often homosexuality, rather than a conscious choice, is a result of one adapting to the prison context. “Forced” homosexuality becomes one of the key means through which the prisoner, afraid of becoming impotent and driven by growing anxiety, attempts to test his manhood. The heterosexual detainee who tries to have a sporadic homosexual relationship with another inmate more often than not does so with someone who has feminine traits, because it remind him of the woman he’s missing and, therefore, being among men, he tries to look for something that resembles as closely as possible what he can’t reach. This is because he identifies in the other person almost a surrogate of a woman, not a man.
In prison, more so than in other contexts, homosexual relationships are very much hierarchical: the oldest detainee will always be in a position of superiority compared to the younger one, because his manhood, his strength, and his reputation can’t be questioned. Prison, in fact, produces roles and sexual behaviours different from the internal hierarchy, especially on the basis of balance of power and authority. The sexual role that one decides to take on has an uncontested social function, based on which controls and parallel discipline can be determined, crushing further the prisoner’s existence.
It’s quite common in prison that homosexual relationships are imposed by violence and rape, committed in the cells in complicity or indifference among those present. In most cases, rape carried out by fellow prisoners or in a cell is not reported, as being raped means essentially being humiliated, losing the image of manhood, becoming “a female” that others mock and despise.
There is not official data on incidents of rape, but according to Roberto Malini, the Italian co-president of EveryOne, an association that deals with human rights:
“Rape and sexual slavery cases in Italian prisons are estimated to be over 3000 each year, a figure that corresponds to as much as 40% of all rapes committed in Italy, also partly due to the connivance of prison guards. The cases are not reported, as there is this code of silence that affects everyone: prison guards and prisoners themselves, as well as medical facilities that are not used for the control of symptoms like rectal or anal abrasions. Specific medical visits do not take place.”
Speaking of homosexuality in prison is not very convenient for anyone, for the institutions, for the prison direction, for those who work inside the prison and for the prisoners themselves. It’s not very convenient as one is likely to question a system consolidated around denial and lack of affection that has not been able to, in all these years, find a solution. The individual prisons are trying to bridge the gap in the LGBT legislation proposing targeted solutions, dictated by the need to safeguard certain “categories” of prisoners, such as the transgender.
According to the World Health Organisation:
“Transgender is an umbrella term for people whose gender identity and expression does not conform to the norms and expectations traditionally associated with the sex assigned to them at birth”.
What differentiates a transgender person from the others is the “deep and irresistible” desire to change some features of the body and change one’s personal data, adapting them to the gender they feel they permanently belong to. Transgender inmates live in a “special” state, as they require, for example, hormonal treatments to maintain their physicality.
For transgender prisoners it’s essential to identify spaces where they can be protected:
one needs to understand in which section of the prison they should live and prevent that the other prisoners put their lives at risk. In several institutions, special wards were created for transgender people, a solution that combines emancipation and salvation. In Belluno, in 2005, the cell that held prisoner the camorra boss Raffaele Cutolo for 14 years was intended for transgender prisoners. Others were created in San Vittore, Poggioreale, Rebibbia.
At the moment, according to the latest figures from the Department for Prison Administration, dating back to 2013, there are 69 transgender prisoners in Italy, spread out across 10 different prisons. LGBT associations, however, claim that the figure is certainly higher, given that it doesn’t take into account the widespread number of transvestites or those who have already completed the sex change and have consequently been assigned to the female wards.
Between late 2008 and early 2010, there was a possibility of a prison completely dedicated to transgender prisoners: the idea was to transform the house district of Pozzale, near Empoli, from a female prison to a prison for transgender people, many of whom would have come from the special section of the Sollicciano prison in Florence. At this prison, they had planned to provide training for the staff, free hormone treatments and recreational possibilities impeded elsewhere. The works to upgrade and restructure the prison were already underway when the Ministry of Justice, at the time chaired by Angelino Alfano, after giving an initial green light to the project, changed his mind and stopped everything. Pozzale went back to detaining women, as it did in the past. And a newsletter circulated in January 2013, signed by the Department for Prison Administration, announced that in a short time the institute would be permanently closed.
The transgender detainees find themselves trapped in a very confusing legal system, that refuses, for example, hormone treatments, for which there is no legislation at the national level to ensure its administration in prisons. Being a health care matter, the jurisdiction is regional. Only Tuscany and Emilia Romagna have signed memoranda of understanding creating small individual cases of protection for transgender people. In these regions, the treatment is guaranteed also within the prison facilities and the National Health System pays for it. The precursor was the prison of Baldenich in Belluno: in 2007, the director Immacolata Mannarella allowed the transgender inmates to take their hormones for free, as long as they had already started the treatment before being arrested. In the rest of the Italian prison system, accessing hormone treatment is complicated because one can’t prescribe female hormones to patients who, according to their identity card, are men. The decision bounces back and forth between the directors and the doctors without a precise guideline. Some institutions, for example, allow hormone treatments but only if it’s the prisoner who pays for them.
In the Italian prison scene there is then the unique example of the Centre of Identification and Expulsion, designated to accommodate people without a residence permit. A large number of foreign transgender women, mostly from South America, stay in these institutions. To avoid rapes and other types of abuse, a decision was taken to create a separate ward for them at the Centre of Identification and Expulsion in Milan, but this is more of a rare case, absent in the other institutions of the Peninsula.
