Propaganda on the skin of children

This article is published in number 14 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until April 4, 2023

In some small islands or mountain villages there are also mixed classes of all ages that do not reach ten children, but normally how many children are there in a class? 23, 25?
Here, imagine a nice full class: 26 children. 26 children aged ten and under, boys and girls. But now try to imagine that these children can’t go out to play with their classmates, or to a birthday party, or to play sports, but not even to go to the park or to the ice cream parlor, that they can’t go anywhere at all, because they are locked up in prison. A child in prison: amazing huh? Yet in Italy it is like this. 26 children are many, but they are also few if there was the will to protect them: to build family homes where they could live with their mothers, one and a half million euros was enough, an amount that had been allocated in the 2020 budget, but the Regions did not they had started using this money because they were waiting for the law which had been approved to the satisfaction of almost all the parliamentarians last May. That had been a beautiful day, with many deputies even from distant sides who had congratulated each other. The newspapers had written: “No more children behind bars.” Instead. Other than the unconstitutionality of some rules of our penitentiary system, the most criticized in Europe, here there is no limit to the worst. The latest bogeyman of the right, which after Cutro will wait a week or two before going back to criminalizing migrants, are pickpockets. He likes to win easy: who loves pickpockets or pickpockets? Who’s happy if their wallet is stolen? The leader of the League, on the day his party managed to overturn the law, tweeted: “Our amendment has passed which stops the shameful exploitation of pregnancy by pickpockets and criminals.”
And the children? What guts does it take to make propaganda on their skin.

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