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On and off the air: radio-listening experiences in the San Vittore prison
Tiziano Bonini
UNIVERSIT DEGLI STUDI DI SIENA

Marta Perrotta
UNIVERSIT IULM MILANO

One mans imagined community is another mans political prison. (Appadurai, 1990: 295)

PR OO F

The development of modern societies has involved a complex reorganization of the spheres of experience. With the emergence of specialized knowledge systems and institutions, some forms of experience have gradually moved away from everyday life and have been relegated to particular institutional environments. For example, the experience of chronic illness (either physical or mental) or the death of a loved one is more and more often regulated by a number of 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 contexts of everyday life and assigned to institutions, access to which is often limited or variously controlled. The most painful instance of this sequestration of experience (Thompson, 1995) is perhaps the establishment of prisons and mental hospitals at the beginning of the 19th century (Foucault, 1975). Other equally painful examples are, nowadays, the temporary detention centres for illegal immigrants or, in a different way, gathering centres and camps for refugees. These institutions isolate certain categories of people from the rest of the population, enclosing them within physically and socially insuperable boundaries. Nevertheless, the institutional sequestration of experience, the removal of aspects of it from the public sphere, has been accompanied by an impressive growth of mediated forms of experience. Thanks to the mass media, some of

Media, Culture & Society 2007 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 29(2): 179193 [ISSN: 0163-4437 DOI: 10.1177/0163443706068715]

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what was removed from the normal flow of everyday life becomes once again accessible, 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 visible and 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 thats totally disjointed from reality, full of errors and approximations, commonplaces, distortions that serve only the purpose of being compatible with the requirements of fiction. Even when the movie is based on a true story, its narration tends to portray the tough sides of prison as milder than they are, and make the more ordinary aspects of prison life sound harsher. Television, radio and newspapers, for their part, will mention prison only in newscasts, thus ignoring the complexity of its everyday life. As stated so far, once the experience of prison discipline is sequestered and institutionalized, every citizen receives the opportunity to have a mediated idea of it. Likewise, if inmates are deprived of civil liberty, they are offered the possibility of experience it in a mediated form. A set of moral values can be inscribed 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 as brutal places inhabited by brutal people), or a pedagogic value for those who are inside (TV, radio and newspapers socialize people into the rules and rhythms of civil society). Moreover, within the prisons themselves, radio and TV also serve as sedatives (they keep the inmates attention and energies occupied). Yet we strongly believe that both representations do not exhaust themselves in their systemic dimensions, but also make room for the audiences tactical appropriation. As de Certeau said, Its always good to remember that people need not be considered idiotic (2001: 248). In particular, with this research we would like to explore that complex bricolage of practices associated to radio listening, with the purpose of eluding the limitations and constraints that prison imposes. Our attention is focused on radio because, due to its classic functions of connection, identification and participation (Menduni, 2001), it plays a fundamental role in the everyday life of inmates and in their resistance and survival practices, reinventing and superimposing these functions on 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 concern one 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 prisoners changes continuously. Overcrowding remains one of the most urgent issues to be dealt with in total institutions.

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The District Penitentiary of San Vittore housed, as of 15 October 2004, 1481 detainees, of whom 1347 were men, 136 women and four children.1 The Milanese prison is located in a very central area of the city, in a building whose original plan dates back to 1867, and whose construction was completed in 1879. The complexs external structure outlines the shape of a pentagon over a surface of about 50,000 square metres. Its internal structure consists of three buildings. The cells are located in the star-shaped building, with six wings that accommodate the inmates. The first building contains, along with the offices, the penal section and the special wing, which houses those detainees subject to article 41 bis (high-security prison regime); the second wing, named Coc, houses detainees with drug-addiction problems; the third one, on the fourth floor, is the location of the ship, the new drug-addict-recovery section. The rest 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, the infirmary and the confinement section (where confinement can be judiciary, that is ordered by a judge for internal-security reasons, or resulting from the confined inmates behaviour). On the second floor are protected detainees, that is those who are escorted whenever they are out of their cells, endangered by the fact that the crimes they are charged with are considered infamous by the other prisoners; these are informers, transsexuals and those indicted or condemned 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 hours a day, except for two free hours, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, the working inmates cells are open from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. The same privilege applies to 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 by two 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, its impossible to stand all at once, and it becomes necessary to take turns. A wall separates the room from the restroom (4 metres by 1.1), which also has window bars and a Turkish toilet next to a sink. On every floor of each prison section there are also a 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 it every other week to the whole prison. It was born as a three-monthly magazine in 1996 on the initiative of the journalist Emilia Patruno, and took its name (which can be translated as News of Number Two) from San Vittores street address, located at Piazza Filangeri 2. In the year 2000 it exists also in digital form: the website www.ildue.it stores information on the prison world, and its updating employs inmates coordinated by a group of external volunteers. The cell that serves as the editorial office is located on the fourth floor of the first wing.

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Methodology

Our research project was born in February 2003, with the aim of discovering what use is made of radio in prison. The Italian prison system, since the reform of 1975 up to the most recent updating of 2000, establishes that detainees and inmates are allowed to use a personal radio device and also that internal regulations will fix the modalities of 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 most often denied, and in any case censored: crime news and articles concerning ongoing trials were systematically cut out of newspapers. Television, on the other hand, was able to enter prisons a few years before the reform, first in recreation halls, then in all cells, while a special authorization was needed for listening to the radio, which was usually denied. Inmates are now allowed personal radios. Although we know how and to what purposes it was allowed into prison cells, what we still dont know is the actual use thats being made of it. A study thats both qualitative and quantitative makes it possible to thoroughly analyse each prisons reality, in order to draw general conclusions about the matter. Our choice fell upon the District Penitentiary of San Vittore, the prison of the municipality of Milan, Italy, where we live. Although not devoid of problems common to other Italian prisons (overcrowding, disrespect of universal rights, lack of funds), for many years San Vittore has represented an example of cultural vitality and has shown an open attitude towards getting the inmates involved and employed. This is confirmed by the constant activity of the magazine Il Due, as well as by the promotion of the first distance-job project from within a prison, which now employs 30 detainees in answering Telecom Italias Info 412, the directory-search service. Other examples are theatre labs, and charity and media-oriented events. Mr Luigi Pagano,3 who directed San Vittore for 15 years, began to draw attention to communication issues, directed to both the outside and the inside of 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 promote reintegration, but above all for the sake of society itself.

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

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Our media allow us to frame, represent and see the other and his or her world. They do not, by and large, in their distancing, invite us to engage with the other, nor to accept 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 sanctuaries insulate and isolate as well as protect. (Silverstone, 2002: 780)

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Quantitative results

place of Mr Pagano and because of the overall slowness of the Ministry of Justice. Once inside, however, we were able to conduct our research from a privileged point of view: the newsroom of the magazine, where all preliminary meetings with the editors took place, in order for us to explain the purpose of our study and get people involved in its development. Our research is based on both quantitative and qualitative methods. (1) A semi-structured questionnaire, with multiple-choice, multiple-answer questions. It was distributed to a substantial sample of the prisons population (150 out of 1500 detainees, that is 25 from each wing, representing 10% of the inmates). The data it surveyed concerned listening preferences (stations and programmes), modalities (time of the day, place, possible use of headphones), concurrent activities (work, study, relaxation, physical exercise) and the same variables during the time before entering prison. The survey was distributed by the editors of Il Due, attached to a copy of the magazine itself in every wing of the prison. Turn-in times were very long. The last questionnaires were picked up by the editors one month after the initial assignment. Out of 150, 67 were returned, eight of which were not considered valid because incomplete. In the end, we had 59 valid questionnaires, equalling 39.3 percent of the selected sample. (2) Twelve in-depth interviews, aimed at analysing habits, styles and motivations of radio use. The choice of possible interviewees was made with the help of the magazines editors, who appreciated our project. Some of them made themselves available for the interviews; they gave us names of more people to get in touch with, involved and motivated them, sought them out in their wings and brought them to Il Dues office, where all interviews took place. The 12 interviewees are all 24- to 65-year-old men. Two of them are not Italian (one Chilean and one Puerto Rican), but they speak good Italian after living in the country for many years before entering San Vittore. Eight of the men were in the first wing, penal section, two in the second and two in the fourth and fifth wings. All interviews were recorded on digital media.

A first picture of radio listening in prison, that served as a premise to the interpretation of the in-depth interviews, can be taken from answers given in the questionnaires. The most homogeneous data concern in-cell-listening modalities: 90 percent of the sample own a transistor radio located next to the bed, on a shelf or a nightstand, to which they listen through a set of headphones. This detail, along with the many interviews that explicitly refer to radio listening as having an individual character, highlights the weight of the private dimension usually accorded to radio in life outside prisons. In a place where privacy is constantly denied, radio becomes a vital tool for building and maintaining

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ones private self. The communication bubble (Flichy, 1991) created by a headset (some inmates even say I headphone myself) allows for the separation oneself from the context, getting isolated, belonging for a moment or an hour only to oneself and ones own feelings. Radio, in this context, marks the inmates rite of passage to a liminal dimension, separated from both the prison community and the civil one. What is surprising is the data concerning time devoted to radio listening: 70 percent of the sample state that, before entering San Vittore, they listened to the radio 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 diminished amount of time devoted to the radio now that they are in prison. Although they are 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 the decreased freedom of choice concerning ones own free time: there are no more car trips, no more control over ones own time and space. What seems more interesting is that the majority of individuals, highly accustomed to radio when outside, are able to adapt the role of the medium within such a different context of difficulty and limitations, and still maintain high listening levels. It must also be noticed that radio-listening time increases for those who used not to be heavy listeners, settling at levels similar to those of the heavy listeners. Factors such as age, education level and length of incarceration do not seem to have a significant influence over the amount of time dedicated to radio: varying these factors, the average time stays the same, that is at least one hour per day. Most of this time is concentrated in the morning (80% turn on the radio in the morning), and gradually decreases during the rest of the day (45% tune in the afternoon, 37% in the evening, 10% even at night). The choice 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 the morning and music is at night. Music programmes are listened to by 60 percent, and Radio Italia Solo Musica Italiana (only Italian music) is the preferred station of 50 percent of the sample. Almost half (47%) of the subjects declare themselves also interested in newscasts, while at least 30 percent listen to other news and discussion programmes. This interest in news explains Radio Radicales good levels of audience, which make it the second favourite station. This is the nationwide station of the Radical Party, which broadcasts news, live casts from the parliament, reports, and has always had a special interest in justice issues. Other favourite stations are Radio Deejay and Radio 105, two Milan-based commercial 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 its 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 down listening, wandering with the mind.

Dimensions of radio listening in prison Listening habits so far described serve the purpose of setting a reference frame, within which its possible to place the corpus of interviews and start giving it a shape. The corpus has highlighted many similarities among the interviewees: radio seemed to take different though recurring meanings, depending on the moment of the day, on the mood and on the space conditions of the listeners. Cross-reading these testimonies, we mapped the macro-dimensions of radio listening in prison. These dimensions connection, isolation and dailiness must not be considered as separate, but as tangent spheres, sometimes intersecting or even coinciding with one another. In particular, we noticed how connection and isolation emphasize the space of the listening detainees, affecting their perception and symbolic manipulation, while dailiness emphasizes their time. The three dimensions, operating on space and time as perceived by the detainees, permit the prisoners, as we will see in our conclusions, to resist and survive in a word, to inhabit the prison.

PR OO F
Connection: inside/outside dynamics

Listening to the radio is a chance to experience the world outside ones cell, to escape from prison and re-enter society, to feel part of it and its everyday rituals, by being audience to the same broadcasts that are directed to people outside. As quoted in Scannell: In such an atmosphere life becomes rusty and apathetic. Into this monotony comes a good radio set and my little world is transformed. It worlds for me. Radio worlds for this and countless other listeners (1996: 161), bringing the listeners world from the cell back into the context of the public world, the public sphere, made up of events, debates, novelty. Newscasts, weather and traffic reports; music tunes and the latest hits (to keep up to date with recent music); phone-in radio shows (where many would like to express their own opinions); talk radio, where the speaker reads out dedications, greetings, birthday wishes, are different kinds of contents that fulfil different needs of connecting with reality (reality in general or some particular one).
There are programmes where they can send you dedications, you can listen to more dedications, you may hear voices of friends, who maybe arent calling for you but for someone else, but you know the person, maybe you hear a voice of someone you know that says hello. There are also birthday wishes (Claudio)

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Such programmes, radios basic ingredients, are perceived as elements of closeness to people and things outside, events that take place and those that repeat themselves every day (jam on the A4 freeway), the world that goes on and somehow calls out to inmates to take part in its continuous process.

Its a world that broadens its boundaries and enters the prison, but also the inmates who make their ways between the bars, voicing their wishes to express opinions, give testimonies, be there.
Id like to phone and go in, because sometimes they talk about such bullshit, outside people they dont realize how important certain small things are. I do realize it. When you reach a certain maturity inside the prison you notice how important small things are. (Miguel)

PR OO F

Beside this participation wish, many of the analysed listening experiences give testimony as to how radio is able to create connections among cellmates. Preferences about programmes, music genres or radio hosts can orient choices and practices concerning the medium inside the cell, even to the point of affecting the microcosm of relationships and links among people sharing the same space. Sometimes, indeed, radio is listened to in groups, as more often happens with television. It can be simple music, or a music programme that everyone knows and likes; or, on Sundays when nobody works, its radio commentaries on soccer games, or it can even be group dancing during cell-cleaning time; rarely, its a talk programme that starts a discussion. Radio, then, functions as a connective tissue during the rare moments of integration among inmates in the same cell, or becomes a background (almost always made of music) to moments of the life of a forced community (meal preparation and consumption, cleaning). Radio is a symptom, and sometimes also a cause, of true moments of integration.
Then, on Sunday morning, since we work less, we have less duties, we use the time to do those small things like washing the floor. Here nobody comes and cleans, so that becomes a moment of sociality, you tidy up your cell, this and that and you listen to music. (Claudio) Sometimes, if the days fine, almost everyone listens to the radio. We can amplify a Walkman we did a smart thing, to connect it to the TV set to have it louder. Its a partying moment, maybe cause theres some music that everyone likes, until nine, when someone then goes out in the air or to the showers, then thats it. (Marcello) If there were no television or radio, the prison would be like in South America theyre always fighting, they have murders, dead people (Francisco)

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Life. Dailiness. This is what it is to me: repetitive noises, gates, same smells, same colours. Everyday life, beyond the wall, you hear it this way, traffic, traffic news. I laugh a lot about the A4 cause theres always a jam. I laugh at that, then I think back to when I was there in Agrate at the toll booth, there. I laugh time, the dailiness you cant taste. (Marcello)

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The possibility of integrating talk and music flows on the radio increases also 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 listens to it, and the radio (with the complicity of the warm weather) helps create a beach time.
The hour in the air. I dont work out thats another moment for listening, but there it becomes more of a common use. I mean, in the air you can go out. Im talking about the summer, because in the winter it gets harder, maybe youd usually put on your headphones, because in the air in wintertime you walk and thats it, while in the summer it becomes like a poor peoples Palm Beach, so everyone goes out with a towel, and I assure you theres always at least one with a radio, and he ends up setting it loud in the corner and everybody listens. It happens practically every day in the warm season, when youre in the air, theres always a radio going (Francesco)

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Last, there is a form of connection with the outside world thats not collectively experienced, and that is radios answer to the inmates personal need of establishing a physical contact with people outside. Radios connective function, then, turns the medium into a tool capable of recreating intimacy with the Other, and making it a possible experience through the voices, words, emotions and feelings that those who are broadcasting share with the audience. Radio creates, in these cases, a form of distance, non-reciprocal intimacy, as defined by Thompson (1995), thus an intimacy different from the experience of face-to-face relationships, which on the contrary can exist only in a shared space-and-time frame. Such an intimacy could be called panoptical, meaning that someone the listener is listening to and, unseen, somehow sees someone else the speaker, the call-in public, the singer whose thoughts, history and weaknesses the listener gets to know without any possibility for the other party 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, keeping them connected: through the power of sound the world becomes intimate, known and possessed (Bull, 2002: 87). In some cases, when there is such a strong link between music, words and emotions, radio takes up a feminine side, it receives a gender identification (my girlfriend the radio), so much that it becomes a surrogate for the feminine gender itself: radio is the voice of women, said Lello, 17 years in prison without either physical or visual contact with a woman that was not a guard. I enthuse, get excited hearing stuff, during those four hours Im with her (Poliseno). Roland Barthes had similar feelings 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 materiality, their sensuality, the breathing, the rippling, the pulp of lips, all the presence of human muzzle (that voice, writing be fresh, soft, lubed, finely grainy and vibrant as the 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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The detainees spend inside the cells most of their time: 8 square metres to be shared, in some cases, with five or six more people. A little more than 1 square metre each, and never more than 4 square metres. Apart from some wings, where, as weve seen, inmates can go out of their cells and move around their floors, in most cases what dominates everyday life is the space inside the cell. Ones own body and person is not only subject to limited movement and expression, but also continuously exposed to the public eye of inmates and agents. Gestures and words are constantly in everybodys range. Thoughts only, the unexpressed ones, remain private. The cells spatial discipline implies cancelling the private dimension. The forced publicity of the body sanctions the excision, the tear of that invisible sphere in which our private dimension encloses us. Radio, in this context, is used to sew back the rip, rebuild a private sphere around ones self, mark the distance between ones self and the other detainees. Using headphones creates a communication bubble, a private island larger than the cells few square metres; it creates the experience of being cocooned by separating the user from the world beyond (Bull, 2002: 94). If there are 13 barriers, 13 gates that must be gotten over from the prisons entrance to each cell, we might say that turning on the radio is equivalent to erecting a 14th barrier, which leads into a private cell. Its a diaphragm between one and the others, that allows to be on ones own, think for oneself, let oneself be distracted (the last being a recurring use before sleep, with headphone listening in bed).
I listen to Radio Maria, because its a quiet way to be on your own, then you fall asleep. It also helps when you wake up in the middle of the night, because there are nights 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 Im in no therapy, no I take Radio Italia, as soon as I put it on, boom, even during the day, even if theres someone around moving, doing their business, loud television, I can fall asleep, thats my therapy (Marcello) In Novara I did Yoga and I liked a background. At the end of the 80s, I discovered Radio Milano Europa, that played only classical music. (Lello) But the radio here in prison is a very personal thing. There are moments when we all gather and do stuff when the radio can be fine, but mostly you listen to it on your own, just because with the radio its a break time, and here theres a few moments you are on your own and can really think for yourself. You can have a break, 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 calm and 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 speakers world according to the way he speaks or what he says or what he talks about he takes you to a world. And you travel, travel a lot, because I imagine the studio where he is you travel (Miguel)

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In the afternoon I go out in the air and during those hours I listen to two more hours of music, with my earphones so as not to annoy others, and I mainly listen to music from the 60s, because I relive my youth a bit. Listening to old songs gives me emotions. (Poliseno) You think, you find a song that reminds you of something, an episode, and you travel, you think about an episode of your life before this thing here, and this makes you think, it reminds you of memories, you think a bit then in fact you stop right away otherwise your head goes away (Claudio) Think about not being in touch with someone you love. You have memories with that song. With the radio youve got that contact, those memories that allow you to relive in that moment its like you are close to that person, although you are not (Claudio)

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Dailiness: the re-timing of everyday life

The radio contents that accompany these moments and evoke them are both talk and music. If its words, they are often those of the (few) programmes devoted to detainees and to prison-related issues: Radio Maria serves as a telephone to the families of prisoners; Radio Radicale speaks, more or less recurrently, about Italian justice policies; Radio Popolare organizes, on Christmas day, an open microphone in the prison to put inmates in touch with their relatives:
For us that day radio served as telephone, since here all is closed on Christmas, you cant have visits, theres no mail, no telegrams, that was the only channel and we received 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. I listened to Radio Maria because there was the programme where relatives called the detainees stuff from the ministry on Radio Radicale, when they talked about pardon, mini-pardon (Pippo)

The first thing I do in the morning is turn the radio on then I get ready for my workout and listen to Lifegate. I imagine how the voices are, I can make it out from the voices. Its a habit you get when youve been alone for so long. One

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The main content is music (especially Italian), because allows for simple distraction, distraction from reality; it makes you close your eyes and lets your mind relax, or because it creates an aesthetic pleasure. Getting isolated in listening often implies folding into oneself. This also means starting to think. Music, the speakers voices, phone calls provide not only simple distraction but also nostalgia, affection, memories (the song you listened to when you were out, when you were with your wife or fiance) that make you ponder on your previous life, remember loved ones. A song, a sentence can be a reminder of past situations, produce emotions, even materialize distant people, make them feel closer:

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more thing I like when I cook, radio keeps me company, talks, sings, theres someone with me (Lello)

In the morning I wake up early, I dont want to disturb my cellmates, by early I mean six a.m. I have my breakfast and listen to my radio with headphones. (Marcello) Its a pleasant habit, its a bit like eating, taking a dump, listening to the radio, plus my cellmate turns it on right away in the morning, so we wake up, and it keeps you company 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 oneway and irreversible, the arrow of time. Stories and days are linear: they have a beginning, middle, an end; morning, noon and night. Yet each day is succeeded by another day in an endless cycle of repetition. Cyclical time is reversible time. Each day is a fresh start, a new beginning. Lifetime is essentially linear. Yet our day-to-day life is essentially cyclical. (1996: 153)

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Due to the prisons spatial constraints, the detainees experience in particular the cyclical dimension of time: they live always in the same spaces, with neverchanging rhythms; they live by appointments, by standard days that periodically repeat themselves, by rituals (one of which is the small ceremony of preparation for a loved ones 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 day in new ways, to spangle it with appointments, in a constant dialectic between programme seriality and single events created by the medium (the Festival of Sanremo a famous Italian song competition sports, or trials). Radio re-times prison time, playing with repetition in order to create affection, to confirm, to make taste more specific and link itself to habits, accompanying the listeners all the way along the arrow that takes them from the beginning to the end of their sentence, trying to continuously rearrange the tune of their standard day.
After youve 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, the time for you to go take a shower (Francisco)

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

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The everyday practices of radio listening4 become in certain cases so deep that they decisively affect the detainees perception of time. With the radio one wakes up, shaves, washes, gets dressed, has coffee, goes to 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:

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The first time we crossed the threshold of San Vittore, escorted by guards and guided by volunteers, we had a feeling of disorientation, of being lost, a sort of cultural jet lag: we were in a land whose language or codes we did not know. We entered and exited the place as if it were a vacation to an exotic place, where the tourist area and the slums, although confining, are often very far apart. As time went by, we started entering alone, waiting at each gate for the guard to open it, we started feeling all barriers one by one, smelling, at least, the complexity of that everyday life. Facing this complexity, we had the feeling that we would not easily understand the relationship between radio and prison unless we first more deeply understood the rules, often unwritten, that govern it. Before doing the interviews, we decided to participate in some of the meetings where the volunteer inmates (who would then take part in our study) assembled their magazine. During these meetings at first we mostly listened, then we started chatting with them, answering their questions, feeling them somewhat closer. The assumptions of our research project started during the meetings, where we established a trusting relationship with the detainees and started (on the quiet, as de Certeau would say) understanding and interpreting the vast semiosphere of prison. After months of visits, a fortuitous episode ritually marked the passage to a new phase of our study. One of us, Tiziano, was waiting as usual for the prison guard to let him out of the floor; after a few minutes the officer arrived and, although he himself had opened the gate two hours before, instead of opening asked, Are you a detainee? For the first time we realized how thin is the boundary between belonging and not belonging to that place. For the first time we felt on ourselves the prisons enclosing action, of which Goffman speaks. The Canadian sociologist defines prison as a total institution because it seizes time and the interests of those who depend on it, prevents their social exchange and their exit into the world (Goffman, 1980: 34). From that moment on we realized that we could not keep exploring radio listening without taking into account the prisons totalizing dimension. A year after the start of the project, the prison started to be less unimaginable, less exotic, more and more an everyday thing; it started telling something to us as well. Once the in-field phase and the interviews were over, although aware of the inevitable volatility of any conclusion, we thought wed see a red line in the corpus of listening-habit data; a thin line, but clearly distinct, that we believed could lead to new reflections on how prison can be inhabited. Starting from an intuition by Michel de Certeau, the distinction between place and space as described in The Practice of Everyday Life5 we thought we saw, in the detainees use of radio, an attempt to practise a place (the cell and the prison in general), make it their own, ideally redefining its boundaries, breaking its established spatial order.6

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I listen to the radio in moments of relaxation, while I shave in the morning, waiting for the visit, while you have those moments of privacy youve got few in prison but on the day of the visit you pay a bit more attention to your outfit because you are going to see your relatives so you use your cell you really use it, you keep the radio on, listen to it, dress up, choose what to wear, because you know your mom or your fiance is coming (Francesco)

Rather than escape from prison, radio helps surviving in it, becomes a tactic7 (one of many, but one of the most important) to loosen the enclosing grip of everyday life. Even in its simplest use, that of making time go by, theres the feeling that radio does not only accompany the passage of time, but even accelerates it towards the end of the morning, towards the end of the day and of the night, towards, finally, the end of the stay in prison. Perhaps its the same feeling 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

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References

1. According to regulations, children up to three years of age can stay with their mothers. 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 Scannells intuition, which maintains that dailiness is the specific character of broadcastings temporality the particular ontological characteristic that most fully encompasses the specific nature and being of radio as well as of television (1996: 5). 5. Its a place where the (any) order by which some elements are arranged follows consistent relationships. Its space is the effect of operations of orienting, circumstantiating, timing, which make it function as a multi-purpose unit of conflicting programmes or contractual proximities. Space is to place what language becomes when spoken. In sum, space is a practised place. Likewise, the road, as geographically defined 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 interviewees, 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 what Erving Goffman calls secondary adaptations usual adaptations, through which a member 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).

Appadurai, A. (1990) Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy, Theory, Culture & Society 7: 295310. 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): 81101.

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Tiziano Bonini is a PhD student in Media, Communications and the Public Sphere at the University of Siena. His main research interests are new media culture and its social uses, mobility, domesticity and globalization. His book on the history and aesthetics of radio on the internet will soon be published. Address: Universit degli Studi di Siena, Dipartimento di Scienze della Comunicazione, Via Roma 56, 53100 Siena, Italy. [email: tiz@frequenzaminima.org]

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Marta Perrotta is a PhD student in Communications and New Media at Milan IULM University and teaches Radio Commericals at Siena University. Her research interests include radio audience studies, sound studies and consumer culture, visual culture and television aesthetics. She has published a book on radio formats in Italy. Address: Libera Universit di Ligue e Comunicazione IULM, Istituto di Comunicazione, Via Carlo Bo 8, 20143, Milano, Italy. [email: marta.perrotta@iulm.it]

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de Certeau, M. (2001) Linvenzione del quotidiano. Roma: Edizioni Lavoro. (First published 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 prive. Paris: La Dcouverte. 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): 76180. Thompson, J.B. (1995) The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media. Cambridge: Polity.

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