Theme is almost daily present in journalistic coverage, and the most critics call the situation “informal death penalty”
Michele Oliveira
He faced a strong heat wave at the end of June, with temperatures close to 40 degrees, when President Sergio Mattarella made a public alert to the conditions of arrests in the country. It has charged investments and dignity to the detainees, so that the chains are not “hopeless” places. “The number of suicides in jails is dramatic, a true social emergency,” said the head of state.
Days earlier it had been Pope Leo 14 to mention the problem. “Frequently, in the name of security, a war against the poor is waged, crowding prisons with those who are the last link in a chain of death,” he said in an event linked to the fight against drugs.
With overcrowded arrests and record suicide fee, the country’s prison system faces a crisis in recent years, accentuated by the constant increase of prisoners. The theme is almost daily present in journalistic coverage, and the most critics call the “informal death penalty,” as Il Post director Francesco Costa said earlier this month.
In an attempt to respond, the government announced, on July 15, the intention to make 10,000 detainees (16% of the total) comply with alternative penalties to prison institutes, such as house arrest and parole. Justice Minister Carlo Nordio said that a task force is being created with members of the judiciary and prisons to discuss the cases.
They may benefit from the measure whose remaining sentence is less than two years and who have not received serious disciplinary sanctions in the last year. Outside the group are convicted of serious crimes linked, among others, terrorism and mobster association. The first results, says the minister, will come in September – when the height of the heat will have passed in the northern hemisphere.
In an interview with the Corriere Della newspaper, after the announcement, the minister said that overcrowding and arrest deaths are two serious problems, but with no relationship between them. “Paradoxically, overcrowding is a form of control. Some suicide attempts have been prevented by cell mates. It is the loneliness that leads to suicide,” said Nordio.
For the Old Association, the main NGO that deals with the theme in Italy, the announcement of the trip of 10,000 prisoners for alternative measures is a response to the media pressure of recent weeks that does not bring news. “It may be a little to accelerate the granting of some alternative measure, but it will not be the solution. Alternative measures have existed for decades, everything the minister said he will have been done,” he told Folha Susanna Marietti, national coordinator.
Marietti is exhaustive about what should be done to relieve Italian arrests: “Arrest less.” “Prison should be used for really serious situations, not for problems related to those who have no home or is a drug addict. Vacancies in prisons are enough, that’s not the problem,” he says.
Last Tuesday (22), the government announced that it will also invest in the restructuring of prisons, with the objective of opening another 15 thousand vacancies in the coming years, and presenting a bill for convicts who are drug addicts serve the penalty in recovery houses, instead of prisons.
With 51,300 official vacancies, the 190 prisons of Italy contain 62,700 people, a number that has been rising from the covid-19 pandemic, up 17% since 2020. Of the total detainees, 31.6% are foreigners-in the entire population, this percentage is 9%.
In the European Union, Italy is the third country, behind Cyprus and France, with the worst overcrowding rate, measured in 119% in 2023, the last year in which the comparison was published by Eurostat, the block’s statistics institute. Currently, overcrowding is 122% in the country.
Although they have other causes beyond the precarious conditions of arrests, such as psychiatric and chemical problems, suicides broke record in 2024, with 91 cases, the highest figure since the survey began to be done in 1992 by the Ristretti Orizzonti Association.
The picture in Italian penitentiaries began to change from the 2000s, after waves of increase in detainees linked to political crimes in the 1970s and 1980s and mobster attacks in the 1990s. “In the new millennium, the great mass hospitalization of all forms of poverty and social marginality began,” says Marietti.
In 2006, the Italian parliament approved a pardon that released more than 20,000 people from arrest. The measure has been discarded by Minister Nordio, who is affiliated to the party of Premier Giorgia Meloni.
Since taking over, in 2022, the Meloni government prioritizes a row-line speech in public safety, which results, according to the Ancientone Association, in more imprisoned people. In June, a decree was definitively approved that filed 14 new crimes and 9 penalties. One of them punishes up to five years in prison those who participate in rebellion within the jail.
