Pompei and the Social Sector – Cultural places ever closer to the community

The Park experience two years after subscription of the convention

With the court of Torre Annuziata for public utility works

29 May, 11 o’clock, Vivaio della casa di Pansa, (nursery of the House of the Pansa)

Meeting between the Director of the Park, Zuchtriegal, the President of the Tribunal Court, Aghina, and the Director of UIEPE for Campania, Nannola for the project budget.

Pompei, the pilot for the Convention of carrying out public utility works at archaeological sites, was signed in 2021 with the Tribunal Court of Torre Annuziata.

Two years after the signing, the evaluation of the experience for the Park, the Tribunal Court and the UIEPE is more than positive. So far there are over twenty-five defendants involved in public utility activities. This was made possible thanks to the institution of ‘probation’, (article 168 of the Criminal code), which allows those who have committed crimes of limited gravity to suspend criminal proceedings, and to ‘prove themselves’ by carrying out a service at the end of which, if the outcome is positive, the crime is extinguished. The agreement – the first stipulated in Italy by an archaeological park, thanks to the initiative of the then Director Massimo Osanna and the President of the Tribunal Court of Torre Annuziata, Ernesto Aghina, was then followed by other projects in many other cultural sites- it lasts five years and is renewable. It allows the acquisition of work services useful for public benefit in the context of a particular cultural value: a circumstance that should hopefully accentuate the re-educational purpose of the sentence provided by the constitution.

The people welcomed to the Park have been assigned to different activities, in different offices (library, personal, communication and in particular, green maintenance) and in the various archaeological sites, (Pompei, Stabia, Boscoreale, Oplontis). The procedure for activating public utility works provides for a formal request to the Park by the lawyers of their clients, an interview to define skills, educational qualifications and aptitudes in view of assignment to the office and to the reference tutor, activation of INAIL insurance and at the end of the activities, an outcome report relating to the work performed and the conduct maintained. All is in accordance with the UIEPE, (Interdistrict Office for the External Penal Execution) for the region of Campania which flanks and supports the Park in various phases.

Those who have already completed the process have also successfully completed their trial period. There are very few cases of rejection or suspension of nominations for the Park.

“This project is proving to be an initiative of great value for the community” declares the Director Gabriel Zuchtriegal. “Considering the short time spent in our facilities, which includes no more than 4 hours a week for 6 months or a year at best, we found great involvement in the proposed activities. In particular, in the works inside the archaeological area, as in the case with green maintenance and therefore in more direct contact with cultural heritage, there was a particularly important both in the contribution made and in the participation. This pleases us, because it demonstrates how much culture, through museum institutions, can play an important role in the re-education and social rehabilitation activities but also simply in approaching cultural heritage”

"The application of public utility works as a substitute sanction for punishment - declares the President of the Court of Torre Annunziata, Ernesto Aghina - is a legislative novelty now established in the criminal procedural system that combines the reduction of the use of prison sentences with the possibility for the convicted to take responsibility and resocialize, while guaranteeing the community the perception of a concrete social "advantage".

Providing work within the archaeological sites of the district consolidates the tendency to make use of art in prison re-education also exporting it outside prison institutions.

The archaeological sites concerned undoubtedly have their own unrepeatable and universal identity, but they are also and above all recognisable and identifiable by their symbolic value.

Re-educate in beauty may be the slogan to characterise ‘The New Days of Pompei’.

"Beauty and the oppressed". The experience of the agreement for public utility works between the Court of Torre Annunziata and the Archaeological Park of Pompeii - declares the Director of the UIEPE for Campania, Claudia Nannola – “also symbolically evokes that hoping for beauty allows us to probe the space of possible change, widening the perspectives on the crime, on punishment and on the very concept of doing justice and therefore taking a longer and more open look at the function of public service. Here is the meeting point between apparently distant worlds: justice, to increase its ability to give meaning to criminal paths, must interest the community, in an osmosis of mutual utility, so that the fallout of well-being can extend to all citizens. On the other hand, the institutional Charter itself requires us to imagine and hope and therefore strive towards a better world”.