Calogero Tessitore was the director of the “San Pietro” prison on that terrible 22 January 2022, the day in which the rebel prisoner Alessio Peluso, after yet another display of insubordination with respect to the rules of normal coexistence in the penitentiary institution, was savagely beaten by a group of prison police officers, and by their commander, now in the dock for a range of serious crimes including the hypothesis of torture. The director Tessitore, who was not present at the “San Pietro” that day, told the Court his version of events, first questioned by the prosecutors and then by the defendants’ defence. First question on the problematic management of the 30-year-old Neapolitan, who arrived at “San Pietro” after a series of removals from at least four-five Italian prisons. Difficulties confirmed by Tessitore: «The inmate showed himself to be problematic from the start, we knew that he came from another institution where he had carried out important actions that disturbed the security of that institution».
Same modus operandi at “San Pietro”: «In Reggio Calabria, also teaming up with other inmates, he always tried to destabilize the order of the structure. Several times for each action that Peluso carried out, reports were systematically drawn up which were forwarded to all the competent authorities and offices, and also to the department, to which several requests for removal were sent”. It was impossible to manage him, but the then director recalls the attempts and strategies to keep him under control: «Several times we tried to manage Peluso, so to speak, with a lot of patience in quotes, so much so that a few days before, Peluso, before the event we are talking about, practically returned to his cell at midnight. Therefore, we tried for a moment to manage the Peluso with the hope that time would give us the possibility of placing it in a management that was as ordinary as possible”.
From their story Peluso found every excuse to destabilize the order. As? «For example, he expected objects to be delivered to him that arrived via external parcels and perhaps there were departmental instructions that instead went in the opposite direction. He also had to be accompanied in his movements, because precisely the particular surveillance, in fact he was a prisoner for whom, in short, it was appropriate that he was, so to speak, always accompanied in his movements outside the section. Perhaps these were internal requirements of the institute.” What specifically happened? «Failure to return… that is, through violent attitudes, I don’t think so because I don’t remember there being any clashes between the prisoner and the prison police. I only remember that the attitude that we put in place, especially in the days before the date of the event, was precisely an attitude that aimed in a certain sense at making the prisoner tired who stayed out until midnight, then at a certain point he also needed to go to sleep. Therefore, we were not going to stimulate excessive reactions from the prisoner. We weren’t there to rage and try… I remember with great patience the previous days, we tried to wait until the prisoner got physically tired and asked, as happened, to go to sleep.”
At “San Pietro”, in the management phase of the director Calogero Tessitore, the line of tolerance and understanding was favored: «Over time we always tried to find a sort of management compromise in compliance with the rules, to find a formula that could allow the prisoner to be detained and us to respect the law. In my experience we have had difficult subjects and in the end it was found, also in agreement, in other experiences, with the Surveillance Magistrate to find management formulas that could allow us to coexist for a moment, in quotation marks”.