Every prisoner, when he comes out of the prison door, takes an oath. Never come back. Almost everyone breaks that oath…
When you come back, it seems that prison has been waiting for you forever. Upon entering the prison of Nauplia I met many familiar faces from Grevena, Korydallos, transfers, detention centers. Now they looked like a natural setting for the prison. I knew their cases. They had served their sentences and had “paid” their debt to society. Principal and interest together. No one would give them a day off. I wondered why they were still inside.
“Benefits broken, probation cut, old decisions forgotten…”
The prison system is full of forgotten people. They are the permanent residents of a prison with short breaks.
The dogs of the press, behind their suits and makeup, growl for harsher penalties. They foam at the mouth, protest the length of the sentences. “Life imprisonment means life imprisonment,” they bark.
They are indifferent to the fact that Greece is the country with the highest number of life sentences because of the ease with which they are handed down by judges. They are indifferent to the absurdity of the amount of the sentences, to the 70, 80, 100 years that are burdened on a prisoner who will need two lives to serve them and who will receive parole after death!
But they pride themselves on their respect for human rights and European civilisation. At least we don’t have the death penalty here. And yet there is…
They may not roast the prisoner in the electric chair, but their sentences melt him with the acid of time, forgotten in concrete cells. The prisoner’s enduring hope after the ordeal of the courts is a permit and the long-awaited parole…
In each application, once all the requirements have been met, he takes his file, puts on his “trinkets” and with a great dose of hope goes to meet his judges.
“Rejected… You won’t make good use of the benefit. Rejected… The good behavior he shows in prison is a farce.”
The prisoner did as he was told, and now the oracle of the judges prophesies his future. Very often they don’t even see the prisoner in the appeals they file. Their criminal record is enough for them, while they claim that they do not judge their past. After all, he has already paid the price of his past.
Prisoners are not saints, but if “medicine” is more prison, it is worth remembering that an overdose of drugs poisons the “patient.” If one wants to cure the problem, one would do well to look for its causes. No one is born a delinquent. Prison is the mirror of society. When the prisoner sees that the values of the state are corruption, fraud, scandals, that is what he will emulate.
At the same time, the vague judicial decisions and the stiffening of the penalties of the new penal code fill the prisoner with hatred and cunning for survival. Socially excluded and carrying the stigma of prison, he will repeat his wickedness. The judges’ conjecture of “pretextual change” will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Their freedom has an expiration date.
At the same time, outside the prison walls stretches the great invisible prison… With the fear of actual incarceration, society locks itself in. Its bars are fear, defeatism, indifference… the belief that nothing can change. People continue to wander in their own backyard, from home to work and back again, deceiving their captivity with illusions of amusement and extravagant object markings. Growing poverty, material and spiritual, makes them bow their heads even more.
But for its own liberation, the judicial council has the strictest judge. Themselves. We ourselves must choose how to live. On the terms of a happy slave or on the terms of essential freedom and dignity…
May it go well for all…
Christos Tsakalos
Nauplia Prison
Posted on 3/13/24 in Indymedia Athens