La parola in carcere

Words in prison suffer from context perhaps more than in other situations. Particularly in the encounter between inmates and social workers, words are burdened with expectations and tensions given by the compression of space, the mortification of the body and the dilation of time, often referred to as "suspended" time, which never passes. They are usually rarefied words, due to the difficulty of linguistic comprehension (many inmates are foreigners), the impossibility of preparing and curating meetings with adequate time and space, and the absence of privacy with which to accommodate the most painful words. This rarefaction sometimes produces closure, superficiality, sometimes brings out the essential, creates spaces for the authentic. Even when so-called "treatment activities," with (re)educational value, leverage words - such as autobiographical storytelling workshops - there is then a lack of opportunities for verification, especially in the long term, that is, there is a lack of opportunities to detect how the relationship with self and others changes, how the ability to shape experience changes.This is another reason that depotentiates words in prison. And yet it is only from the thought become word that a new consideration of self begins, in that space where positive versions of one's identity can emerge alongside those that imprisonment cements and stigmatizes. The contribution aims to present qualitative research carried out with social workers (competent volunteers) in the S. Vittore prison, from which a reflection on the value of words in such a conditioned context, where education seems to be hostage to constraints and limits, rather than animated by workers committed to re- educational paths, has emerged. From here it is perhaps possible to build on this to hatch paths of critical reinterpretation and change.