alks

The following are excerpts from this article.

According to reports by the Italian Coalition for Civil Liberties and Rights (Cild), the possibility that someone can make huge profits on the deprivation of personal liberty is one of the most controversial aspects of this form of detention without a crime and marks a further character of exceptionalism, as denounced by Cild in a report with the eloquent title “The CPR [Centri di Permanenza per i Rimpatri, or Centers of Detention for Repatriation] Affair. Profit on the skin of migrant people.” The Coalition's dossier describes the transition from public to private management of the centers and reconstructs in detail the activities of the multinationals Gepsa and Ors, the company Engel s.r.l. and the Cooperatives Edeco-Ekene and Badia Grande that have contributed in recent years to making the history of administrative detention in Italy. A history marked by continuous violations of the rights of detained persons and economic interests that also worry Ilaria Cucchi, and have also triggered a conflict of powers between the Catania judiciary, which has rejected 10 approvals for detentions of migrants, and the Ministry of the Interior, with the side dish of controversy that has affected the judge Iolanda Apostolico. “There are people speculating on the skin of these people and not just any people. We are talking about lobbies represented in Parliament. All this is happening in general indifference and under the eyes of the various governments of the left and right, which have come and gone over the years,” says Senator Cucchi. The reference is to the Ors Ag Group, headquartered in Zurich and active for more than 30 years throughout Europe. On the repressive methods adopted in some Swiss and Austrian centers under the responsibility of the multinational (which currently runs the Ponte Galeria Cpr, photo below), there are journalistic investigations and reports by Amnesty International and Doctors Without Borders. The agreement between the Swiss multinational and Telos dates back to a 2020 document signed by Lutz Hahn, director of communications at Ors Ag Management, in which the lobby is delegated to organize meetings with institutional representatives. Nothing illegal, but it is interesting to note that Ors is the only one among the cooperatives and companies that have managed or run a CPR to have consultants representing it in the House of Representatives. “This is a situation that no one is talking about because obviously the political responsibilities lie with everyone,” says the senator. “The concept is very simple: the more migrants there are, the more money is made on them. This is the real business, and now it is happening under the eyes of the unconstitutional Melonian right wing, which has made it the subject of its perpetual election campaign. The management of these centers is far from transparent.” And according to Ilaria Cucchi, the thread that links events like her brother to those of people imprisoned in the CPRs is “state violence against those who cannot defend themselves.”

But despite the fact that the system has proven not to work, concentration camps for migrants are increasingly being foraged. To increase business and reduce costs, larger and larger private actors have taken over. From 1998 to the present, we have seen the strengthening of administrative detention and an evolution in management, which has become private because it is less expensive (low bidding and precarious services). The idea comes from the fascist and other authoritarian regimes, whereby a person can be deprived of personal freedom, the most important good after life, for administrative and logistical reasons. With the shift to private entities (first cooperatives, then corporations and now multinationals), the critical issues within CPRs have increased, bringing with it the risks of (nonprofit) for-profit management of de facto detention facilities. Bids are awarded by public entities through calls that include among the selection criteria “the most economically downward – advantageous bid,” as required by the 2016 Procurement Code.

Many former employees denounce the massive use of psychotropic drugs to stun and tranquilize people. The progressive minimization of costs has not only contributed to increasingly degrading treatment for detained migrants, but has also created fertile ground for the landing of multinationals in the administrative detention sector, which began in 2014 with the French company Gepsa, which had come to manage 3 CPRs. Today this trend is represented by the Swiss company Ors, former manager of the center in Macomer, Sardinia, and today of those in Rome and Turin until its closure. Since 2022, Ors has been owned by an even larger giant, Serco, which has made detention one of its most flourishing businesses. The British company has ended up at the center of a number of investigations, such as the one into the alleged sexual abuse of migrant women at Yarl's Wood or the violence that took place at the Christmas Island center in Australia, where it has a monopoly on migrant detention facilities. In the same country it is also in charge of a number of prisons, where Serco has been criticized in the past for both security management and the living conditions of detainees. The study on the feasibility of privatizing prisons in Italy began as early as 2013, when some executives from the Department of Prison Administration traveled to France to learn more about the public-private partnership system.

All governments, self-styled liberators, promised to dismantle the fortresses erected by tyranny to keep the people in awe; but, once they took office, far from dismantling them, they fortified them even better, in order to continue to use them against the people. Carlo Cafiero

Solidarity with all anarchists/who are unjustly arrested for their dreams of Freedom and Social Justice.

Grassroots against the powerful

ricercatori senza padroni (Anarchist Individualities)