Inmates Make Ice Cream

[Sally Donaldson]

Intriguing article on the ANSA website today.

Prisoners at Milan's Opera jail also run quail's egg farm

(ANSA) - Milan, July 23 - Italy's world renowned ice cream is helping a group of the country's most dangerous inmates regain a sense of fun and achievement.

The Opera Prison, a few kilometres outside Milan, is offering inmates usually excluded from rehabilitation schemes the chance to work in a new ice cream workshop.

While many prisons offer training to help inmates find work once they leave jail, few invest precious resources in those likely to be locked up for a long time. Angelo, 39, is one of those working in the ice cream workshop.

He freely admits that the skills he is learning are unlikely to ever help him in the outside world, as he is serving a life sentence. ''But this is still a real opportunity for me. It's put a smile back on my face for the first time in 13 years,'' he said. Angelo is one of 19 inmates serving long sentences at the Opera Prison involved in the scheme, which produces traditional, handmade ice cream. Plans are under way to expand the workshop's output to include mousse and ice-cream-based cakes. ''This is the first chance those of us in the high security wing have ever had to do anything,'' said another inmate, Elio, who is serving a 13-year jail term. ''We hope that other inmates will get the chance to taste what we produce - although prison rules here say you can only have ice cream six times a year''. The Opera prison, which houses the country's bloodiest Mafia boss, Salvatore Riina, has a capacity of 1500 and is currently home to around 1300 people.

Some 200 are serving life sentences and 250 are doing time for mafia crimes. Around a quarter of the mafia convicts are kept in isolation under a top-security regime known as 41-bis but the rest of the high-security inmates are eligible for the new initiative.

Dozens have applied and are now being interviewed for the ten extra places available under the workshop expansion. ''The truth is, that with the right efforts, it's possible to combine top-security conditions with rehabilitation,'' said the prison's governor, Giacinto Siciliano. TOP-SECURITY PRISONERS RAISE 100 QUAILS. The jail has also opened a quail's egg farm for top-security prisoners, on top of a number of workshops already catering to 450 low-security inmates.

Samir from Albania explained: ''For now, we are raising 100 quails but we soon hope to get up to 900''.

Like the 300-square-metre ice cream workshop, the quail farm has been carved out of a small piece of prison land, and includes space for the birds to run around in vegetation. While the projects are just a positive way to pass the time for some, such as Angelo, others hope the scheme could eventually become a way of life on the outside, even though their release date may still be many years away. Explaining how fond he had become of the quails, Ivan said he hoped to turn this current opportunity into something more. ''We here [at the quail's egg farm] are the lucky ones,'' he said.

''We work six hours a day, with a regular contract and a salary. I'm absolutely certain that when I get out I want to spend my life raising quails''.