On and off the air: radio-listening experiences in the San Vittore prison

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On and off the air: radio-listeningexperiences in the San Vittore prison

Tiziano BoniniUNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI SIENA

Marta PerrottaUNIVERSITÀ IULM MILANO

One man’s imagined community is another man’s political prison. (Appadurai,1990: 295)

The development of modern societies has involved a complex reorganization ofthe spheres of experience. With the emergence of specialized knowledge sys-tems and institutions, some forms of experience have gradually moved awayfrom everyday life and have been relegated to particular institutional environ-ments. For example, the experience of chronic illness (either physical or men-tal) or the death of a loved one is more and more often regulated by a numberof institutions specialized in the care of the ill and the assistance to the dying.These and other forms of experience get separated from the practical contextsof everyday life and assigned to institutions, access to which is often limited orvariously controlled.

The most painful instance of this ‘sequestration of experience’ (Thompson,1995) is perhaps the establishment of prisons and mental hospitals at thebeginning of the 19th century (Foucault, 1975). Other equally painful exam-ples are, nowadays, the temporary detention centres for illegal immigrants or,in a different way, gathering centres and camps for refugees. These institutionsisolate certain categories of people from the rest of the population, enclosingthem within physically and socially insuperable boundaries.

Nevertheless, the institutional sequestration of experience, the removal ofaspects of it from the public sphere, has been accompanied by an impressivegrowth of mediated forms of experience. Thanks to the mass media, some of

Media, Culture & Society © 2007 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks andNew Delhi), Vol. 29(2): 179–193[ISSN: 0163-4437 DOI: 10.1177/0163443706068715]

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what was removed from the normal flow of everyday life becomes once againaccessible, perhaps even amplified.

We have a mediated perception of the prison experience as well. First of all,it is hardly accessible to those who are outside, due to the number of visibleand invisible thresholds. The reality of prison is, for most of us, unimaginable,except through the stereotypical images provided by media narrations.

Cinema, above anything else, gives an awareness of prison life that’s totallydisjointed from reality, full of errors and approximations, commonplaces, dis-tortions that serve only the purpose of being compatible with the require-ments of fiction. Even when the movie is based on a true story, its narrationtends to portray the tough sides of prison as milder than they are, and makethe more ordinary aspects of prison life sound harsher.

Television, radio and newspapers, for their part, will mention prison onlyin newscasts, thus ignoring the complexity of its everyday life.

As stated so far, once the experience of prison discipline is sequestered andinstitutionalized, every citizen receives the opportunity to have a mediated ideaof it. Likewise, if inmates are deprived of civil liberty, they are offered thepossibility of experience it in a mediated form. A set of moral values can beinscribed in both representations (the staging of free life and that of prison life):a preventive value for those who are outside (prisons are commonly imagined asbrutal places inhabited by brutal people), or a pedagogic value for those who areinside (TV, radio and newspapers socialize people into the rules and rhythms ofcivil society). Moreover, within the prisons themselves, radio and TV also serveas sedatives (they keep the inmates’ attention and energies occupied).

Yet we strongly believe that both representations do not exhaust themselvesin their systemic dimensions, but also make room for the audience’s tacticalappropriation. As de Certeau said, ‘It’s always good to remember that peopleneed not be considered idiotic’ (2001: 248). In particular, with this researchwe would like to explore that complex bricolage of practices associated toradio listening, with the purpose of eluding the limitations and constraintsthat prison imposes. Our attention is focused on radio because, due to its clas-sic functions of connection, identification and participation (Menduni, 2001),it plays a fundamental role in the everyday life of inmates and in their ‘resist-ance’ and ‘survival’ practices, reinventing and superimposing these functionson one another, making them even more complex.

The context of the research: the District Penitentiary of San Vittore

No figures are ever precise when speaking of prisons, except if they concernone single day. The nature of the total institution is one of transition, and,either because of the end of sentences or transfer, the number of prisonerschanges continuously. Overcrowding remains one of the most urgent issues tobe dealt with in total institutions.

180 Media, Culture & Society 29(1)


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The District Penitentiary of San Vittore housed, as of 15 October 2004, 1481detainees, of whom 1347 were men, 136 women and four children.1 TheMilanese prison is located in a very central area of the city, in a building whoseoriginal plan dates back to 1867, and whose construction was completed in1879. The complex’s external structure outlines the shape of a pentagon overa surface of about 50,000 square metres. Its internal structure consists of threebuildings. The cells are located in the star-shaped building, with six wings thataccommodate the inmates. The first building contains, along with the offices,the penal section and the ‘special’ wing, which houses those detainees subjectto article 41 bis (high-security prison regime); the second wing, named ‘Coc’,houses detainees with drug-addiction problems; the third one, on the fourthfloor, is the location of ‘the ship’, the new drug-addict-recovery section. Therest of the building, along with the fourth and fifth wings, houses ‘common’detainees, while the sixth is assigned to different uses: on its first floor, theinfirmary and the confinement section (where confinement can be judiciary,that is ordered by a judge for internal-security reasons, or resulting from theconfined inmate’s behaviour). On the second floor are ‘protected’ detainees,that is those who are escorted whenever they are out of their cells, endangeredby the fact that the crimes they are charged with are considered infamous bythe other prisoners; these are informers, transsexuals and those indicted or con-demned for sexual abuse. The third and fourth floors house ‘working’ inmates,who have various volunteering or paid jobs inside the prison.

Unlike in the other sections, where prisoners are locked in their cells 24 hoursa day, except for two free hours, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, theworking inmates’ cells are open from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. The same privilege appliesto the inmates of the penal section, where cells are closed at 9 p.m.

The cells measure 4 metres by 2, and should theoretically be occupied bytwo people; in San Vittore they are occupied by up to six or seven people.

A human density that allows for quite a bit of discomfort: as a result, it’s impossi-ble to stand all at once, and it becomes necessary to take turns…. A wall separatesthe room from the restroom (4 metres by 1.1), which also has window bars and aTurkish toilet next to a sink…. On every floor of each prison section there are alsoa few bigger cells, measuring 4 metres by 5, with a restroom of the same size.These are proportionally as crowded as the smaller cells, with 12 to 14 people each.Solitude within a mess.2

Il Due Notizie is a magazine edited by volunteering inmates, who distribute itevery other week to the whole prison. It was born as a three-monthly magazinein 1996 on the initiative of the journalist Emilia Patruno, and took its name(which can be translated as ‘News of Number Two’) from San Vittore’s streetaddress, located at Piazza Filangeri 2. In the year 2000 it exists also in digitalform: the website www.ildue.it stores information on the prison world, and itsupdating employs inmates coordinated by a group of external volunteers. The cellthat serves as the editorial office is located on the fourth floor of the first wing.

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The project

Our media allow us to frame, represent and see the other and his or her world. Theydo not, by and large, in their distancing, invite us to engage with the other, nor toaccept the challenge of the other. In effect they provide a sanctuary for everyday life,a bounded space of safety and identity, both within and around it. But sanctuariesinsulate and isolate as well as protect. (Silverstone, 2002: 780)

Our research project was born in February 2003, with the aim of discoveringwhat use is made of radio in prison.

The Italian prison system, since the reform of 1975 up to the most recentupdating of 2000, establishes that ‘detainees and inmates are allowed to use apersonal radio device’ and also that ‘internal regulations will fix the modalitiesof use of radio devices, also with the purpose of avoiding disturbances to others’.

Before 1975, on the contrary, access to mass media in prison was mostoften denied, and in any case censored: crime news and articles concerningongoing trials were systematically cut out of newspapers. Television, on theother hand, was able to enter prisons a few years before the reform, first inrecreation halls, then in all cells, while a special authorization was needed forlistening to the radio, which was usually denied.

Inmates are now allowed personal radios. Although we know how and towhat purposes it was allowed into prison cells, what we still don’t know is theactual use that’s being made of it. A study that’s both qualitative and quanti-tative makes it possible to thoroughly analyse each prison’s reality, in orderto draw general conclusions about the matter.

Our choice fell upon the District Penitentiary of San Vittore, the prison ofthe municipality of Milan, Italy, where we live. Although not devoid of prob-lems common to other Italian prisons (overcrowding, disrespect of universalrights, lack of funds), for many years San Vittore has represented an exampleof cultural vitality and has shown an open attitude towards getting the inmatesinvolved and employed. This is confirmed by the constant activity of the mag-azine Il Due, as well as by the promotion of the first distance-job project fromwithin a prison, which now employs 30 detainees in answering TelecomItalia’s Info 412, the directory-search service. Other examples are theatrelabs, and charity and media-oriented events.

Mr Luigi Pagano,3 who directed San Vittore for 15 years, began to drawattention to communication issues, directed to both the outside and the insideof the prison. He tried to come up with new solutions to isolation and neglect,keeping the prisoners in touch with the outside world in order to promotereintegration, but above all for the sake of society itself.

Methodology

Entering San Vittore is not easy. Obtaining an entrance permit and renewingit took quite a long time, because of the appointment of a new director in



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place of Mr Pagano and because of the overall slowness of the Ministry ofJustice. Once inside, however, we were able to conduct our research from aprivileged point of view: the newsroom of the magazine, where all prelimi-nary meetings with the editors took place, in order for us to explain the pur-pose of our study and get people involved in its development. Our research isbased on both quantitative and qualitative methods.

(1) A semi-structured questionnaire, with multiple-choice, multiple-answerquestions. It was distributed to a substantial sample of the prison’s population(150 out of 1500 detainees, that is 25 from each wing, representing 10% of theinmates). The data it surveyed concerned listening preferences (stations andprogrammes), modalities (time of the day, place, possible use of headphones),concurrent activities (work, study, relaxation, physical exercise) and the samevariables during the time before entering prison. The survey was distributed bythe editors of Il Due, attached to a copy of the magazine itself in every wingof the prison. Turn-in times were very long. The last questionnaires werepicked up by the editors one month after the initial assignment. Out of 150,67 were returned, eight of which were not considered valid because incom-plete. In the end, we had 59 valid questionnaires, equalling 39.3 percent of theselected sample.

(2) Twelve in-depth interviews, aimed at analysing habits, styles and motiva-tions of radio use. The choice of possible interviewees was made with the helpof the magazine’s editors, who appreciated our project. Some of them madethemselves available for the interviews; they gave us names of morepeople to get in touch with, involved and motivated them, sought them out intheir wings and brought them to Il Due’s office, where all interviews took place.

The 12 interviewees are all 24- to 65-year-old men. Two of them are notItalian (one Chilean and one Puerto Rican), but they speak good Italian afterliving in the country for many years before entering San Vittore. Eight of themen were in the first wing, penal section, two in the second and two in thefourth and fifth wings.

All interviews were recorded on digital media.

Quantitative results

A first picture of radio listening in prison, that served as a premise to the inter-pretation of the in-depth interviews, can be taken from answers given in thequestionnaires.

The most homogeneous data concern in-cell-listening modalities: 90 per-cent of the sample own a transistor radio located next to the bed, on a shelf ora nightstand, to which they listen through a set of headphones. This detail,along with the many interviews that explicitly refer to radio listening ashaving an individual character, highlights the weight of the private dimensionusually accorded to radio in life outside prisons. In a place where privacy isconstantly denied, radio becomes a vital tool for building and maintaining



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one’s private self. The communication bubble (Flichy, 1991) created by aheadset (some inmates even say ‘I headphone myself’) allows for the separa-tion oneself from the context, getting isolated, belonging for a moment or anhour ‘only to oneself and one’s own feelings’. Radio, in this context, marksthe inmates’ rite of passage to a liminal dimension, separated from both theprison community and the civil one.

What is surprising is the data concerning time devoted to radio listening: 70percent of the sample state that, before entering San Vittore, they listened to theradio for more than two hours a day (the remaining 30% is divided as follows:15% up to one hour per day, 15% up to 30 minutes), as opposed to a diminishedamount of time devoted to the radio now that they are in prison. Although theyare still heavy radio consumers, 60 percent listen to it for at least one hour a day,30 percent for at least 30 minutes, and 10 percent for more than two hours.

The decrease in the average daily listening time can be explained by thedecreased freedom of choice concerning one’s own free time: there are nomore car trips, no more control over one’s own time and space. What seemsmore interesting is that the majority of individuals, highly accustomed to radiowhen outside, are able to adapt the role of the medium within such a differentcontext of difficulty and limitations, and still maintain high listening levels.

It must also be noticed that radio-listening time increases for those whoused not to be heavy listeners, settling at levels similar to those of the heavylisteners. Factors such as age, education level and length of incarceration donot seem to have a significant influence over the amount of time dedicated toradio: varying these factors, the average time stays the same, that is at leastone hour per day. Most of this time is concentrated in the morning (80% turnon the radio in the morning), and gradually decreases during the rest of theday (45% tune in the afternoon, 37% in the evening, 10% even at night). Thechoice of stations and programmes relates mostly to personal taste and mood,rather than the time of the day, although news is a most frequent choice in themorning and music is at night.

Music programmes are listened to by 60 percent, and Radio Italia SoloMusica Italiana (‘only Italian music’) is the preferred station of 50 percent ofthe sample. Almost half (47%) of the subjects declare themselves also inter-ested in newscasts, while at least 30 percent listen to other news and discus-sion programmes. This interest in news explains Radio Radicale’s good levelsof audience, which make it the second favourite station. This is the nationwidestation of the Radical Party, which broadcasts news, live casts from the parlia-ment, reports, and has always had a special interest in justice issues. Otherfavourite stations are Radio Deejay and Radio 105, two Milan-based commer-cial channels, and Radio Rai Due, the second station of the public service.

Radio also accompanies some everyday activities such as work (45%)or workout (40%), or, more marginally, sets a background for reading (20%)or writing (5%), but it’s mostly connected with relaxation and recreation.More than half the sample (60%) considers radio listening as an activity



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per se, subordinate to nothing else. Radio and headset on, one just lies downlistening, ‘wandering with the mind’.

Dimensions of radio listening in prison

Listening habits so far described serve the purpose of setting a referenceframe, within which it’s possible to place the corpus of interviews and startgiving it a shape. The corpus has highlighted many similarities among theinterviewees: radio seemed to take different though recurring meanings,depending on the moment of the day, on the mood and on the spaceconditions of the listeners. Cross-reading these testimonies, we mappedthe macro-dimensions of radio listening in prison. These dimensions –connection, isolation and dailiness – must not be considered as separate, butas tangent spheres, sometimes intersecting or even coinciding with oneanother. In particular, we noticed how connection and isolation emphasizethe space of the listening detainees, affecting their perception and symbolicmanipulation, while dailiness emphasizes their time. The three dimensions,operating on space and time as perceived by the detainees, permit the pris-oners, as we will see in our conclusions, to resist and survive – in a word, toinhabit the prison.

Connection: inside/outside dynamics

Listening to the radio is a chance to experience the world outside one’s cell,to escape from prison and re-enter society, to feel part of it and its everydayrituals, by being audience to the same broadcasts that are directed to peopleoutside. As quoted in Scannell: ‘In such an atmosphere life becomes rusty andapathetic. Into this monotony comes a good radio set and my little world istransformed. It worlds for me. Radio worlds for this and countless other listen-ers’ (1996: 161), bringing the listener’s world from the cell back into the contextof the ‘public’ world, the public sphere, made up of events, debates, novelty.

Newscasts, weather and traffic reports; music tunes and the latest hits (‘tokeep up to date with recent music’); phone-in radio shows (where manywould like to express their own opinions); talk radio, where the speaker readsout dedications, greetings, birthday wishes, are different kinds of contentsthat fulfil different needs of connecting with reality (reality in general or someparticular one).

There are programmes where they can send you dedications, you can listen to morededications, you may hear voices of friends, who maybe aren’t calling for you butfor someone else, but you know the person, maybe you hear a voice of someoneyou know that says hello. There are also birthday wishes … (Claudio)



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Such programmes, radio’s basic ingredients, are perceived as elements ofcloseness to people and things outside, events that take place and those thatrepeat themselves every day (‘jam on the A4 freeway’), the world that goeson and somehow calls out to inmates to take part in its continuous process.

Life. Dailiness. This is what it is to me: repetitive noises, gates, same smells, samecolours. Everyday life, beyond the wall, you hear it this way, traffic, traffic news. Ilaugh a lot about the A4 ’cause there’s always a jam. I laugh at that, then I thinkback to when I was there in Agrate at the toll booth, there. I laugh … time, the daili-ness you can’t taste. (Marcello)

It’s a world that broadens its boundaries and enters the prison, but also theinmates who make their ways between the bars, voicing their wishes toexpress opinions, give testimonies, be there.

I’d like to phone and go in, because sometimes they talk about such bullshit, outsidepeople – they don’t realize how important certain small things are. I do realize it.When you reach a certain maturity inside the prison you notice how important smallthings are. (Miguel)

Beside this participation wish, many of the analysed listening experiencesgive testimony as to how radio is able to create connections among cellmates.Preferences about programmes, music genres or radio hosts can orientchoices and practices concerning the medium inside the cell, even to the pointof affecting the microcosm of relationships and links among people sharingthe same space.

Sometimes, indeed, radio is listened to in groups, as more often happenswith television. It can be simple music, or a music programme that everyoneknows and likes; or, on Sundays when nobody works, it’s radio commentarieson soccer games, or it can even be group dancing during cell-cleaning time;rarely, it’s a talk programme that starts a discussion.

Radio, then, functions as a connective tissue during the rare moments ofintegration among inmates in the same cell, or becomes a background (almostalways made of music) to moments of the life of a forced community (mealpreparation and consumption, cleaning). Radio is a symptom, and sometimesalso a cause, of true moments of integration.

Then, on Sunday morning, since we work less, we have less duties, we use the timeto do those small things like washing the floor. Here nobody comes and cleans, sothat becomes a moment of sociality, you tidy up your cell, this and that … and youlisten to music. (Claudio)

Sometimes, if the day’s fine, almost everyone listens to the radio. We can amplify aWalkman – we did a smart thing, to connect it to the TV set to have it louder. It’s apartying moment, maybe ’cause there’s some music that everyone likes, until nine,when someone then goes out in the air or to the showers, then that’s it. (Marcello)

If there were no television or radio, the prison would be like in South America …they’re always fighting, they have murders, dead people … (Francisco)



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The possibility of integrating talk and music flows on the radio increasesalso outside the narrow space of the cells, especially during the warm seasons.In the summer, out in the air, someone brings a radio and everyone else listensto it, and the radio (with the complicity of the warm weather) helps create a‘beach time’.

The hour in the air.… I don’t work out … that’s another moment for listening, butthere it becomes more of a common use. I mean, in the air you can go out.… I’m talk-ing about the summer, because in the winter it gets harder, maybe you’d usually puton your headphones, because in the air in wintertime you walk and that’s it, while inthe summer it becomes like a ‘poor people’s Palm Beach’, so everyone goes out witha towel, and I assure you there’s always at least one with a radio, and he ends up set-ting it loud in the corner and everybody listens. It happens practically every day in thewarm season, when you’re in the air, there’s always a radio going … (Francesco)

Last, there is a form of connection with the outside world that’s not collec-tively experienced, and that is radio’s answer to the inmates’ personal need ofestablishing a physical contact with people outside. Radio’s connective func-tion, then, turns the medium into a tool capable of recreating intimacy with theOther, and making it a possible experience through the voices, words, emotionsand feelings that those who are broadcasting share with the audience.

Radio creates, in these cases, a form of distance, non-reciprocal intimacy, asdefined by Thompson (1995), thus an intimacy different from the experienceof face-to-face relationships, which on the contrary can exist only in a sharedspace-and-time frame. Such an intimacy could be called ‘panoptical’, meaningthat someone – the listener – is listening to and, unseen, somehow ‘sees’ some-one else – the speaker, the call-in public, the singer – whose thoughts, historyand weaknesses the listener gets to know without any possibility for the otherparty to do the same.

This enriches the background of those who have been bereaved of freedom,if only through the possibility of virtually, deeply meeting other people, keep-ing them connected: ‘through the power of sound the world becomes intimate,known and possessed’ (Bull, 2002: 87). In some cases, when there is such astrong link between music, words and emotions, radio takes up a feminineside, it receives a gender identification (‘my girlfriend the radio’), so much thatit becomes a surrogate for the feminine gender itself: ‘radio is the voice ofwomen’, said Lello, 17 years in prison without either physical or visual con-tact with a woman that was not a guard. ‘I enthuse, get excited hearing stuff,during those four hours I’m with her’ (Poliseno). Roland Barthes had similarfeelings when speaking of the grain of the voice on the radio:

… radio picks up from up close the sound of speech and lets out in all their materi-ality, their sensuality, the breathing, the rippling, the pulp of lips, all the presence ofhuman muzzle (that voice, writing be fresh, soft, lubed, finely grainy and vibrant asthe muzzle of an animal), for it can drag the meaning very far and throw, so to speak,the anonymous body of the speaker into my ear. Something grains, crackles,caresses, scratches, cuts, rejoices. (Barthes, 1999: 127)



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Isolation: the fourteenth barrier

The detainees spend inside the cells most of their time: 8 square metres to beshared, in some cases, with five or six more people. A little more than 1 squaremetre each, and never more than 4 square metres. Apart from some wings,where, as we’ve seen, inmates can go out of their cells and move around theirfloors, in most cases what dominates everyday life is the space inside the cell.One’s own body and person is not only subject to limited movement andexpression, but also continuously exposed to the public eye of inmates andagents. Gestures and words are constantly in everybody’s range. Thoughts only,the unexpressed ones, remain private. The cell’s spatial discipline implies can-celling the private dimension. The forced publicity of the body sanctions theexcision, the tear of that invisible sphere in which our private dimensionencloses us. Radio, in this context, is used to sew back the rip, rebuild a privatesphere around one’s self, mark the distance between one’s self and the otherdetainees. Using headphones creates a ‘communication bubble’, a private islandlarger than the cell’s few square metres; it creates ‘the experience of being“cocooned” by separating the user from the world beyond’ (Bull, 2002: 94). Ifthere are 13 barriers, 13 gates that must be gotten over from the prison’sentrance to each cell, we might say that turning on the radio is equivalent toerecting a 14th barrier, which leads into a private cell. It’s a diaphragm betweenone and the others, that allows to be ‘on one’s own’, think for oneself, let one-self be distracted (the last being a recurring use before sleep, with headphonelistening in bed).

I listen to Radio Maria, because it’s a quiet way to be on your own, then you fallasleep. It also helps when you wake up in the middle of the night, because there arenights when you are restless.… You wake up at three, at four, in that case it helps …(Marcello)

When I have to sleep, when I need … – I’m in no therapy, no … – I take RadioItalia, as soon as I put it on, boom, even during the day, even if there’s someonearound moving, doing their business, loud television, I can fall asleep, that’s mytherapy … (Marcello)

In Novara I did Yoga and I liked a background. At the end of the ’80s, I discoveredRadio Milano Europa, that played only classical music. (Lello)

But the radio here in prison is a very personal thing.… There are moments whenwe all gather and do stuff when the radio can be fine, but mostly you listen to it onyour own, just because with the radio it’s a break time, and here there’s a fewmoments you are on your own and can really think for yourself. You can have abreak, put the headset on, you get out of the context of the cell. (Claudio)

Then in the evening … I think radio is fine from nine p.m. on, when you are calmand relaxed in your room with your headphones on, even if there are other people.…And radio allows you to isolate yourself, and to escape, enter the speaker’s worldaccording to the way he speaks or what he says or what he talks about he takesyou to a world.… And you travel, travel a lot, because I imagine the studio wherehe is … you travel … (Miguel)



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The main content is music (especially Italian), because allows for simpledistraction, ‘distraction from reality’; it makes you close your eyes and letsyour mind relax, or because it creates an aesthetic pleasure.

Getting isolated in listening often implies folding into oneself. This alsomeans starting to think. Music, the speakers’ voices, phone calls provide notonly simple distraction but also nostalgia, affection, memories (the song youlistened to when you were out, when you were with your wife or fiancée) thatmake you ponder on your previous life, remember loved ones. A song, a sen-tence can be a reminder of past situations, produce emotions, even material-ize distant people, make them feel closer:

In the afternoon I go out in the air and during those hours I listen to two more hoursof music, with my earphones so as not to annoy others, and I mainly listen to musicfrom the ’60s, because I relive my youth a bit. Listening to old songs gives meemotions. (Poliseno)

You think, you find a song that reminds you of something, an episode, and youtravel, you think about an episode of your life before this thing here, and this makesyou think, it reminds you of memories, you think a bit … then in fact you stop rightaway otherwise your head goes away … (Claudio)

Think about not being in touch with someone you love. You have memories withthat song. With the radio you’ve got that contact, those memories that allow youto relive … in that moment it’s like you are close to that person, although you arenot … (Claudio)

The radio contents that accompany these moments and evoke them are bothtalk and music. If it’s words, they are often those of the (few) programmesdevoted to detainees and to prison-related issues: Radio Maria serves as atelephone to the families of prisoners; Radio Radicale speaks, more or lessrecurrently, about Italian justice policies; Radio Popolare organizes, onChristmas day, an ‘open microphone’ in the prison to put inmates in touchwith their relatives:

For us that day radio served as telephone, since here all is closed on Christmas, youcan’t have visits, there’s no mail, no telegrams, that was the only channel and wereceived live wishes and talked to our relatives. This is another way to use radio.(Claudio)

I was alone in a cell in the prison of Monza, and I got hooked on Radio Maria. Ilistened to Radio Maria because there was the programme where relatives calledthe detainees … stuff from the ministry on Radio Radicale, when they talked aboutpardon, mini-pardon … (Pippo)

Dailiness: the re-timing of everyday life

The first thing I do in the morning is turn the radio on … then I get ready for myworkout and listen to Lifegate.… I imagine how the voices are, I can make it outfrom the voices.… It’s a habit you get when you’ve been alone for so long.… One



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more thing I like … when I cook, radio keeps me company, talks, sings, there’ssomeone with me … (Lello)

The everyday practices of radio listening4 become in certain cases so deepthat they decisively affect the detainees’ perception of time.

With the radio one wakes up, shaves, washes, gets dressed, has coffee, goesto the hour in the air, fixes dinner, eats, relaxes in bed, reads, falls asleep,every day. But radio makes every day different from the others:

In the morning I wake up early, I don’t want to disturb my cellmates, by early Imean six a.m. I have my breakfast and listen to my radio with headphones.(Marcello)

It’s a pleasant habit, it’s a bit like eating, taking a dump, listening to the radio, plusmy cellmate turns it on right away in the morning, so we wake up, and it keeps youcompany more or less for the hours you stay in your cell … (Marco)

As Scannell puts it:

Time is at once reversible and irreversible, linear and cyclical. Linear time is one-way and irreversible, ‘the arrow of time’. Stories and days are linear: they have abeginning, middle, an end; morning, noon and night. Yet each day is succeeded byanother day in an endless cycle of repetition. Cyclical time is reversible time. Eachday is a fresh start, a new beginning…. Lifetime is essentially linear…. Yet ourday-to-day life is essentially cyclical. (1996: 153)

Due to the prison’s spatial constraints, the detainees experience in particularthe cyclical dimension of time: they live always in the same spaces, with never-changing rhythms; they live by appointments, by standard days that periodi-cally repeat themselves, by rituals (one of which is the ‘small ceremony’ ofpreparation for a loved one’s visit).

Right in this sense, in-cell radio is particularly important. Its intrinsic feature,dailiness, allows the prison listeners to set their time free, to reinvent it every dayin new ways, to spangle it with appointments, in a constant dialectic betweenprogramme seriality and single events created by the medium (the Festival ofSanremo – a famous Italian song competition – sports, or trials). Radio re-timesprison time, playing with repetition in order to create affection, to confirm, tomake taste more specific and link itself to habits, accompanying the listeners allthe way along the arrow that takes them from the beginning to the end of theirsentence, trying to continuously rearrange the tune of their standard day.

After you’ve been here for a while, you set up your day so that time passes a bit.…You have definite schedules, the time at which you listen to the programme, thetime for you to go take a shower … (Francisco)

If the habit of programming is one of the main modalities by which those wholive in prison face their days, radio enters this predictable game and dictatesthe fashion of the day, significantly contributing to ‘make time flow’.



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Conclusions

The first time we crossed the threshold of San Vittore, escorted by guards andguided by volunteers, we had a feeling of disorientation, of being lost, a sortof cultural jet lag: we were in a land whose language or codes we did notknow. We entered and exited the place as if it were a vacation to an exoticplace, where the tourist area and the slums, although confining, are often veryfar apart. As time went by, we started entering alone, waiting at each gate forthe guard to open it, we started feeling all barriers one by one, smelling, atleast, the complexity of that everyday life.

Facing this complexity, we had the feeling that we would not easily under-stand the relationship between radio and prison unless we first more deeplyunderstood the rules, often unwritten, that govern it. Before doing the inter-views, we decided to participate in some of the meetings where the volunteerinmates (who would then take part in our study) assembled their magazine.During these meetings at first we mostly listened, then we started chattingwith them, answering their questions, feeling them somewhat closer. Theassumptions of our research project started during the meetings, where weestablished a trusting relationship with the detainees and started (‘on thequiet,’ as de Certeau would say) understanding and interpreting the vast semi-osphere of prison.

After months of visits, a fortuitous episode ritually marked the passage toa new phase of our study. One of us, Tiziano, was waiting as usual for theprison guard to let him out of the floor; after a few minutes the officer arrivedand, although he himself had opened the gate two hours before, instead ofopening asked, ‘Are you a detainee?’ For the first time we realized how thinis the boundary between belonging and not belonging to that place. For thefirst time we felt on ourselves the prison’s ‘enclosing’ action, of whichGoffman speaks. The Canadian sociologist defines prison as a total institu-tion because it ‘seizes time and the interests of those who depend on it, pre-vents their social exchange and their exit into the world’ (Goffman, 1980:34). From that moment on we realized that we could not keep exploringradio listening without taking into account the prison’s totalizing dimension.A year after the start of the project, the prison started to be less unimagin-able, less exotic, more and more an everyday thing; it started telling some-thing to us as well.

Once the in-field phase and the interviews were over, although aware of theinevitable volatility of any conclusion, we thought we’d see a ‘red line’ in thecorpus of listening-habit data; a thin line, but clearly distinct, that we believedcould lead to new reflections on how prison can be inhabited. Starting froman intuition by Michel de Certeau, the distinction between place and space asdescribed in The Practice of Everyday Life5 we thought we saw, in thedetainees’ use of radio, an attempt to practise a place (the cell and the prisonin general), make it their own, ideally redefining its boundaries, breaking itsestablished spatial order.6



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I listen to the radio in moments of relaxation, while I shave in the morning, waitingfor the visit, while you have those moments of privacy – you’ve got few inprison – but on the day of the visit you pay a bit more attention to your outfitbecause you are going to see your relatives so you use your cell … you really useit, you keep the radio on, listen to it, dress up, choose what to wear, because youknow your mom or your fiancée is coming … (Francesco)

Rather than ‘escape’ from prison, radio helps surviving in it, becomes atactic7 (one of many, but one of the most important) to loosen the enclosing gripof everyday life. Even in its simplest use, that of ‘making time go by’, there’sthe feeling that radio does not only accompany the passage of time, but evenaccelerates it towards the end of the morning, towards the end of the day and ofthe night, towards, finally, the end of the stay in prison. Perhaps it’s the samefeeling we get when staring at the sand that falls to the bottom of an hourglass,believing that the simple fact of staring will actually make time go faster.

Notes

1. According to regulations, children up to three years of age can stay with theirmothers.

2. See http://www.ildue.it/Alberino/CarcereVitaCella.htm (accessed 24 June 2004)3. We must thank Mr Pagano, along with Emilia Patruno, chief editor of Il Due

Notizie, for making it possible for us to approach San Vittore and develop our project.4. Here we draw on Scannell’s intuition, which maintains that ‘dailiness’ is ‘the

specific character of broadcasting’s temporality … the particular ontological charac-teristic that most fully encompasses the specific nature and being of radio as well asof television’ (1996: 5).

5. It’s a place where the (any) order by which some elements are arranged followsconsistent relationships.… Its space is the effect of operations of orienting, circum-stantiating, timing, which make it function as a multi-purpose unit of conflicting pro-grammes or contractual proximities. Space is to place what language becomes whenspoken.… In sum, space is a practised place. Likewise, the road, as geographicallydefined by urban planning, is turned into space by walkers. (de Certeau, 2001: 176)

6. We happened to notice this kind of practice in a couple of tales of our intervie-wees, who have modified their radio sets looking for different uses of the medium.These modifications, not always legal, and alternate uses of objects allowed in cells,are everyday occurrences in the economy of the prison and could fall under whatErving Goffman calls ‘secondary adaptations … usual adaptations, through which amember of an institution uses tools in order to seek illegal goals’ (1980: 212).

7. About the distinction between ‘tactics’ and ‘strategy’, see de Certeau (2001).

References

Appadurai, A. (1990) ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’,Theory, Culture & Society 7: 295–310.

Barthes, R. (1999) Il piacere del testo. Turin: Einaudi. (First published 1973.)Bull, M. (2002) ‘The Seduction of Sound in the Consumer Culture: Investigating

Walkman Desires’, Journal of Consumer Culture 2(1): 81–101.



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de Certeau, M. (2001) L’invenzione del quotidiano. Roma: Edizioni Lavoro. (Firstpublished 1980.)

Foucault, M. (1975) Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard.Flichy, P. (1991) Une histoire de la communication moderne: espace public et vie

privée. Paris: La Découverte.Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-identity. Cambridge: Polity.Goffman, E. (1980) Asylum: le istituzioni totali: la condizione dei malati di mente

e di altri internati. Turin: Einaudi. (First published 1961.)Menduni, E. (2001) Il mondo della radio: dal transistor a internet. Bologna: Il Mulino.Scannell, P. (1996) Radio, Television and Modern Life: A Phenomenological

Approach. Oxford: Blackwell.Silverstone, R. (2002) ‘Complicity and Collusion in the Mediation of Everyday Life’,

New Literary History 33(4): 761–80.Thompson, J.B. (1995) The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media.

Cambridge: Polity.

Tiziano Bonini is a PhD student in Media, Communications and the PublicSphere at the University of Siena. His main research interests are new mediaculture and its social uses, mobility, domesticity and globalization. His bookon the history and aesthetics of radio on the internet will soon be published.Address: Università degli Studi di Siena, Dipartimento di Scienze della Comuni-cazione, Via Roma 56, 53100 Siena, Italy. [email: [email protected]]

Marta Perrotta is a PhD student in Communications and New Media atMilan IULM University and teaches Radio Commericals at Siena University.Her research interests include radio audience studies, sound studies andconsumer culture, visual culture and television aesthetics. She has publisheda book on radio formats in Italy. Address: Libera Università di Ligue eComunicazione IULM, Istituto di Comunicazione, Via Carlo Bo 8, 20143,Milano, Italy. [email: [email protected]]



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Documents

On and off the air: radio-listening experiences in the San Vittore prison