Dear Papillon,
this spring seems to be arriving on tiptoe. The sun still hasn’t decided whether to truly stay, and I like that hesitation. It resembles the idea I have always had of this season—something that makes itself desired. I think days like these are made for walking without a destination, for lying beneath a large tree, your back resting against the grass, a book finally open in your hands. (Yes, that book. The one that has been sitting on the bedside table for weeks.) Today the wind kisses my face with a familiarity that almost amuses me, and when I place my bare feet on the earth, still cool from the morning, I feel as though I understand things better. Or perhaps not. Perhaps I simply feel freer.
There are poppies and daisies everywhere, and I find myself wondering how it happens that one falls in love with a flower. Flowers, after all, never explain anything. And yet, looking at an old wall overtaken by wisteria, it seems to me there must be an answer.
I was told that in summer, during those dry afternoons when even the light seems to hold its breath, the wisteria pods split open with a tiny crack, almost imperceptible. TLICK! As if, at a certain point, they simply can no longer hold themselves in. The seeds leap out and travel far away. That small burst seems meant to remind us that even the quietest things, once they have ripened enough, need to break open in order to go far. Perhaps freedom always begins like this: with something tiny that refuses to surrender. A seed, a crack, a blade of grass.
I grew up among tall buildings. The sky arrived in fragments, and nature was almost always behind stern gates, like something to be protected and not touched. Perhaps that is why, when I think about it, cities seem to me like polite forms of constraint.
Almost like a prison. Not because they have actual bars. But because of the habit they create of making us forget the wind. And somehow, from here, my thoughts immediately run to those who know bars for real. I do not think about them often, I must admit. Prison is one of those words that exists only at the edges of my consciousness. Like hail. Like borders. Like winter. You know they exist, but you rarely stop to truly look at them. At least until something forces you to.
My own sense of constraint these past days began with the front pages. The faces of the two Global Sumud Flotilla activists, illegally arrested by Israel, stayed with me. I cannot quite explain what struck me. Perhaps the fact that they seemed suddenly taken away from themselves. As though detention had not merely confined their bodies, but altered the very geometry of their faces.
And so I thought, and thought, and thought, until I came to tell myself that it would be far too simple to believe the problem is only that prison, and that certain distortions always belong to some distant elsewhere.
But what is a prison, really?
A place of isolation?
Of justice?
Of punishment?
Or the place where a society deposits what it does not know how to transform?
I keep returning to the same simple question. How do we return people to society? More humiliated? More alone? Angrier? Less capable of living outside? Or better?
Because that is what torments me, in the end. Because everything seems to stop one step too soon. Something terrible happens, and the immediate reflex is always the same: lock them up. As though imprisoning someone had become synonymous with justice, the only viable solution. Because otherwise, what alternative would there be? We would have to understand, but understanding is infinitely harder than punishing. To understand means asking why certain lives end up there. It means looking poverty in the face, forgotten neighborhoods, absolute loneliness, mental health left without care.
Coincidentally, in these same days, I listened to an interview with Luigi Pagano, former director of San Vittore prison, among other things. He said something I cannot get out of my head: that many people could access alternatives to prison, but remain detained because they have no home, no job, no one waiting for them outside. Not because they are socially dangerous, but because they are socially destitute. And I find it extraordinary how little is said about the life that exists inside prisons. Almost as though crime were born in a vacuum. As though there were no people raised in forgotten neighborhoods, abandoned schools, broken families, mental health left to rot for years.
And so one begins to ask: what exactly is being punished? The crime? Or marginalization? Because looked at this way, prison seems very much like the place where a society tries to hide its own failures.
And let me be clear, dear Papillon: I am not speaking of absolving those who commit crimes. I am not saying that the pain inflicted on victims is secondary. Quite the opposite. I believe that taking that pain seriously should lead us to demand something more intelligent than punishment. With the certainty that only this can truly prevent it from happening again. Because if a system continues to produce violence, despair, and cruelty, then I would say it is not working.
Perhaps we should begin to think that safety is not born from fear, but from concrete possibility, from the certainty that another way exists, another world.
And that possibility is not built by stripping people of their humanity. It is built by restoring it.
And perhaps spring tries to tell us this every year, with its stubbornness: that life always tends toward the light. Even after the cold. Even beneath the earth. Even inside what seemed lost.
Come to think of it, meadows do not shout, and yet they shine in the sun.
And flowers make no sound as they bloom.
But a blade of grass, however small, continues patiently to split the concrete.
And perhaps the future looks exactly like that.
Ilaria Serpi
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