Luciana believes that detention should be an opportunity for people who have failed society and have been failed by it to learn new skills. Her strategy is to train women to learn a new skills in a new profession and to expect the same standards she would demand from employees outside of prison. This has the direct consequence of providing inmates with a clear route away from criminality, as they become employable, thus stirring them away from re-offending once freed. Luciana’s work also has the effect of fostering a whole set of “soft skills” such as self-esteem, collaboration and creativity. The women are initially involved in Made in Carcere as seamstresses, but several move up to become team leaders, designers, marketing managers, etc.
All of them have regular labor contracts, pay into social security and are paid competitive salaries. This allows them to send some remittances to their families and to pay for all legal expenses, thus leaving their detention period without any debt. Luciana began by offering work to 12 women in 2008. In 2015 she employed 89. This has a huge effect on inmates’ behavior and consequently the length of their detention. By keeping themselves busy, detainees are motivated, their days are full and the time to pick up a fight or break a rule becomes limited. By the Italian law, if an inmate does not receive any “behavioural note” in a period of six months, their sentence can be reduced by 45 days. Women working with Luciana have proved to improve their behavior visibly and their sentences have been reduced. This accelerates the return to life outside prison and cuts the cost of detention for the state, as well as contributing to freeing overcrowded prisons.
However, it is extremely unlikely that the women hired in prison can work as productively as in the outside world, even if the law requires them to be paid competitively. Most of them have never worked before, several are illiterate or poorly educated, many suffer from psychological trauma. Not being able to access information on the internet, or directly make a phone call slows the production process and lowers productivity. To continue hiring more people and offering them a chance to change, Luciana had to lower cost elsewhere: the cost for the raw material needed to be reduced. For this reason, Luciana has actively involved the outside world in Made in Carcere, especially the wider fashion industry. She has begun to reach out to large and small businesses in the textile and fashion industry asking them to donate their left over material. Sometimes it is a box of silk, sometimes is a truck full of fabric. She currently purchases 30% of the material and gets 70% donated. She would like this proportion increase to 10/90 in the next years. This system also has an impact on the environment, as it focuses on material to be reused and given a second life.
Her model is completed by connecting the work inside the prison not only to other industries, but to responsible consumers. Made in Carcere is therefore made into a powerful brand and its products are sold through dedicated shops, online or through third-party retailers. The more Made in Carcere products are recognized and sold, the more inmates will be able to be given a contract. For this reason, Luciana began to branch out in her requests to businesses to donate their scrap material beyond just fabric in 2014. She has started to accept donations of other materials and to search for new prisons who would want to start a new Made in Carcere production lab. A ton of flour has led to the production of biscuits. When she received a cargo of pallets, she designed “vertical gardens”, wooden structures which occupy little space and on which inmates can grow plants and vegetables, to be used in the prison’s kitchen. At the same time caring for plants has a therapeutic effect on inmates. She is changing how detention should be lived while at the same time beginning to re-design part of the economy: prisons become centers of production and rehabilitation, connected by a network through the Sigillo project, connecting to the outside world that serves as both providers of the working material and as consumers of the final products. If inmates are socially excluded from everyday life as a punishment for their criminal behavior, Luciana gives them a chance at least not to be economically excluded. In her vision, prisons can become part of an ecosystem of production in which material wasted on the outside can be worked inside and made into something valuable that can be sold outside. This is so far the only successful method of giving inmates a paid job and a prospect for the future. The Ministry of Justice has noticed and Made in Carcere has the potential to heavily influence the debate on how to reform the prison system in Italy.
Made in Carcere can expand both to new prisons, giving work and training opportunities to more and more people, as well as to more industries, using the waste from yet more areas as the raw material for new production. Luciana would also like to focus on a new spin-off which could help women at the end of their sentence be directly linked with the same industries that provide the free material, to close a circle in which prison is a temporary status which works acts as a training period for reinsertion in society beginning with a real job in the real economy. Another area of development is to continue her work with the Minister of Justice to profoundly change detention, so that every inmate can be given a chance to shape their own future while in prison.