Italy’s prison panettone offers sweet way to cut crime

Walking past the prison of the northern Italian town of Padua in December, you can smell freshly baked Italian Christmas cake wafting through an open window.

Within these walls, white-coated bakers in the Pasticceria Giotto are carefully mixing ingredients, chopping fruit with immense concentration and hanging freshly baked panettone Christmas cake upside down to preserve its traditional domed shape. But these bakers are different from the norm; they are all prison inmates, some of them serving sentences for manslaughter.

The panettone they make come in flavors including beer and sweet wine, all based on the traditional recipe for a 1-kg cake that takes 30 hours to make from a precise mixture of flour, butter, eggs and sugar that was enshrined in Italian law in 2006.

Sixty-two-year-old inmate Elio, serving a 22-year sentence for international drug smuggling, says people on the outside could never imagine this type of activity could take place inside a prison.

"Someone from outside looking at these prison walls, what do they imagine happens inside? Certainly not something like this," he said.

"But we exist and you can see that from our products. Now we are making quite a lot," Elio added.

The prison bakers carefully wrap the cakes in packaging clearly labelled "Made in Padua Prison." White Christmas ribbons with gold stars are carefully tied around the boxes as a final seasonal touch.

The local Giotto Cooperative opened what they say is Italy's only bakery inside a jail in 2005.

They say that the re-offending rate among prisoners who work in their projects at Padua has dropped to 1-2 percent from a national average they calculate at over 70 percent, and they are proud of the psychological benefits of their work.

Repeat offenders are a pressing problem for Italy, whose prisons are among Europe's most crowded and are costly for the state budget.

"They start to change, they become the type of good worker that it is hard to find even outside, because they regain their dignity, self-esteem," said the cooperative's president Nicola Boscoletto.

"They are able to send home money to their families, so they feel that they are husbands again, fathers of children, sons of parents," added Boscoletto.

The prisoners receive a stipend of 800-1,000 euros a month for working in the bakery, which lets them buy items like coffee and toothpaste as well as send money home to contribute to their families' needs.

"Now I've learned a trade. Before, I used to be a scruffy kid from Naples who didn't know how to do anything and ended up in prison," said 38-year-old Marco, who has been in prison for 15 years.

"I had the good luck to come to Padua where there is this initiative to follow, and now I have a trade to my name. I've learnt an art and I will roll up my sleeves and use it in the best possible way imaginable, particularly for my family," he said.

The final stage of packing up Christmas gift boxes was interrupted by one prisoner from Naples with good tidings.

"How do I feel? After 20 years how do you think I feel? I didn't think that this was going to happen," said an overexcited Maurizio, who had just received the best possible Christmas present, that he would soon be leaving prison.

His joy knew no bounds as he hugged and kissed his fellow bakery workers, who seemed equally delighted for him. Presumably, when Maurizio leaves, he will be proudly carrying a panettone for his family. — Reuters