This NY Times article describes InGalera, a restaurant located “inside the Bollate penitentiary, a medium-security prison with 1,100 inmates on the outskirts of Milan. The waiters, dishwashers and cooks have been convicted of homicide, armed robbery, drug trafficking and other crimes.”
According to the article, “ ‘The main problem has been that they do little during the day, which doesn’t help them at the present, nor for their future outside prisons,’ said Alessio Scandurra, who works for Antigone, a nonprofit group focused on the rights of detainees.
This is an interesting article to examine from a Social Role Valorization perspective, including such elements as:
• valued social roles
• access to the ‘good things of life’
• image enhancement and competency enhancement as avenues toward valued social roles
• theme of interpersonal identification
• theme of personal social integration, and valued social and societal participation
• theme of model coherency
• In the PASSING manual, Dr. Wolfensberger and Susan Thomas write that one of the few human service practices that does not have a culturally valued analog (CVA) is a prison (p. 31).
Marc Tumeinski