A-Infos (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria #470 - PRISON LITERATURE. "AS3" by Valerio Callieri (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Science fiction writers, especially North American ones, have devoted 
themselves to mapping the future of the West and the world, even 
building behavioral models of mechanical devices, most notably Isaac 
Asimov and his positronic robots. Finally, we're there: Asimov's 
centralized Multivac has transformed into Artificial Intelligence 
algorithms, and these are already moving toward merging into a single 
digital mind. And there's not much to be happy about... The advent of 
Artificial Intelligence, in fact, represents not a simple technical 
innovation, but a profound restructuring of productive forces and modes 
of social control, as well as, obviously, the way we investigate and 
learn. Computational potential and cognitive automation could, in a 
society free from exploitation and violence, relieve humanity of the 
burden of labor and expand the boundaries of shared knowledge. 
Unfortunately, within the capitalist trap, this technology is morphing 
into its opposite: a powerful device for the centralization of power, 
mass surveillance, and existential precarity. The real danger is not the 
science fiction dystopia of a rebel machine, like Skynet in the 
Terminator films, but the everyday reality of algorithms produced and 
used by Silicon Valley monopolies and state apparatuses to regulate 
work, shape consensus, and automate material and cognitive warfare.
It is within this scenario of radical transformation that Leo XIV's 
encyclical Magnifica Humanitas fits. Leo XIV, himself a mathematician 
but also with field experience in Latin America, demonstrates, within 
the limits of his beliefs, surprising clarity in denouncing 
technological hypocrisy, demystifying the idea that AI is a neutral 
tool. The Pope, it must be acknowledged, deserves credit for 
highlighting how technology incorporates precise power relations and 
economic interests from its very design, forcefully denouncing the 
danger of "digital slavery," launching the call to "disarm" AI, freeing 
it from monopolies to make it "habitable," proposing a global 
"educational alliance" to curb social isolation and prevent automated 
systems from reducing individuals to mere profit data, loudly demanding 
that human judgments remain supreme-all clearly in keeping with his 
worldview: the traditional family, home and church! However, the 
encyclical falls into the usual dead end of moralism and delegation: the 
belief that the technological monster can be tamed through ethical 
appeals to governments and severe state or supranational regulations. 
The papal vision remains clinging to the utopia of a capitalism with a 
human face and a state understood as a benevolent guardian. For us 
libertarians, this is dangerously naive: the state is not a neutral 
arbiter capable of imposing the common good, but rather capital's main 
business committee, hungry for those same algorithms to refine police 
control, border management, and the rationalization of domination.
Asking the state to regulate the algorithm is asking the jailer to make 
the cell more comfortable; and imposed regulation is never a shield for 
the citizen, but rather the legal enclosure within which power 
institutionalizes its surveillance practices.
The glaring proof of this institutional hypocrisy is the recent Italian 
law on AI, complemented by the package of implementing decrees recently 
approved by the Council of Ministers. Behind the usual smokescreen of 
"human protection" and formal alignment with the European Union's AI 
Act, it effectively opens the door to state biometric control. Under the 
guise of "exceptions for national security and public order," police 
forces are given the green light to use real-time and a posteriori 
facial recognition. This is a dangerous move that bypasses the already 
lax European Union guidelines and draws heavy criticism for the risk of 
transforming public spaces into a perpetual digital panopticon. The 
bureaucratic guarantees promised by the government, such as the police 
commissioner's request or judicial authorization, are merely an 
anesthetic: the reality is the legalization of a digital apparatus 
capable of tracking and cataloging the bodies and identities of 
dissidents, marginalized individuals, and anyone who dares disturb the 
peace of capital. Indeed, for those who haven't noticed, the requirement 
for digital identity cards is completing the process of centralizing the 
population's sensitive data in private hands, including mandatory POS 
terminals for every transaction and even the ability to withdraw taxes 
directly from bank accounts, as is already the case with state employees 
and pensioners.
Furthermore, this algorithmic authoritarianism isn't limited to what 
happens on the streets, but aims to colonize the imagination and 
education of new generations through control of social media and direct 
involvement in schools.
Italian law, in fact, mandates the widespread introduction of AI into 
teaching, starting in elementary and high schools, touting it as 
modernization and "digital well-being." However, under the guise of 
personalized learning and technological literacy, it conceals a profound 
domestication project. The use of automatic systems to assess student 
performance or guide their educational paths introduces predictive 
classification from childhood, branding individuals based on behavioral 
standards established by private software companies, downgrading schools 
from places of social interaction, conflict, and critical growth to 
training laboratories, where teachers become mere platform operators and 
students become involuntary providers of complex data. Written in the 
context of a writing workshop at Rebibbia prison and published by 
Fandango Libri last January, AS3 is Valerio Callieri's latest novel. The 
title of the work unequivocally places the narrative events in the High 
Security 3 section, that is, the prison sub-circuit to which inmates 
accused or convicted of mafia association or drug trafficking are 
confined, provided they have not held senior positions there (otherwise, 
the detention regime is that of 41-bis, at best downgraded to AS1). It 
is precisely in AS3 that the majority of the 9,264 high-security inmates 
are held (data from the National Guarantor, updated to April 7, 2026), 
that is, that significant portion of the prison population who, compared 
to ordinary detention, find themselves facing a state of further 
isolation, culminating in the legalized torture of 41-bis.
Furthermore, when inequality of treatment intersects with gender, that 
is, when women prisoners are relegated to the high-security circuit, the 
marginalized condition imposed on them appears even more degrading.
In Callieri's novel, the AS3 section of the Rebibbia women's prison has 
sixteen inmates in semi-open prison. Among them are the story's 
protagonists-Anna, Monica, and Virginia-who find themselves 
participating in a writing competition together and sharing afternoon 
hours in a social cell.
It is from this writing opportunity that the narrative of the three 
women's purely prison experiences gives way to flashbacks to their 
previous free lives, as well as some reflective voice-over inserts, 
provided by the narrator. What emerges is a polyphonic novel in which 
the stories from outside are interrupted and overlapped, transcending, 
with the sheer force of colliding memories, those narrow horizons of 
stars barely discernible from the reflections in the windows of a 
building across the street from the prison. In the exercise of this 
reciprocal narration, the three women thus find a way to resist the 
daily meaninglessness of detention, through an act of sharing capable of 
creating an "us" around which they can mutually recognize one another, 
building a barrier to the humiliation and impotence induced by 
isolation. In this sense, as one of the protagonists states, "I don't 
know if it happens to you too, but I'm happy because being here with you 
helps me. Saying 'us' helps me. Don't look at me like I'm crazy. I feel 
less alone." It is therefore the effort to go beyond "words without 
glue" (and therefore incapable of adhering to reality) that measures the 
possibility of breaking through the harshness of prison life, opening 
glimmers of light in which reality and imagination merge to the point of 
taking on a disconcerting consistency in the narrow environment in which 
both burst forth. Through the very exercise of shared storytelling, 
something takes shape that transcends words themselves, something that 
smolders in the voids of the unsaid and fuels a new awareness whereby "I 
know we have become 'something.' Because we are bonding with things that 
are not told."
AS3's multiple perspectives on prison life are further amplified by the 
roles of two pairs of characters, all female: on the one hand, 
references to the famous characters of Antigone (Sophocles) and Anna 
Karenina (Tolstoy) allow us to explore the delicate relationships 
between disobedience and authority, custom and social infraction; on the 
other hand, the stories of the three inmates intertwine with the ghosts 
of their anonymous educator and the rebellion of Veronica, the teenage 
daughter of one of the protagonists. The resulting interweaving of 
voices and gazes thus contributes to the challenging representation of 
prison life, through the at times disorienting adoption of combinatorial 
techniques as well as the insertion of "other" textual typologies, such 
as the inmates' educational summary reports and Anna's letters-torn or 
sent-to her daughter. Although it is difficult to distinguish the 
material that emerged during the writing workshop at Rebibbia prison 
from that inspired by the novel's author's creative freedom, it is clear 
that the narrative of literary events is insistently replaced by an 
extradiegetic voice that at times betrays the successful mimetic 
adherence to which the rest of the work tends, ultimately diverting its 
narrative effectiveness towards a series of reflective inserts by an 
external narrator, coinciding with the author, who interposes himself 
between the reader and the story from the book's introduction.
Emblematic, in this sense, is the repeated reference to Giovanni 
Falcone, the latter, albeit stripped of the aura of a martyr of the 
State and instead valued for his ability to understand with profound 
acumen and declared respect the mafia dynamics explored in the context 
of his investigations: the same investigations and related trials that 
have contributed to the institutionalization and gradual harshening of 
the 41-bis detention regime, which on 7 April 2026 counted 741 inmates 
(data reported in the latest "Antigone" report) and which in recent 
months has been the subject of a radical reorganization - the so-called 
"Kairos" plan - which envisages the concentration of these inmates in 
just seven institutions, mainly in Sardinia: Uta (Cagliari), Bancali 
(Sassari), Badu 'e Carros (Nuoro), Opera (Milan), Spoleto, Sulmona and 
Parma. The writer's thoughts of anger and pain go to these lives buried 
in the concrete: like the sun that rarely touches the confined bodies, 
the hope arises today that, just like Callieri's AS3, new stories 
continue to illuminate the daily drama of those who live in prisons.

Salvatore Laneri

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