“Last March 18 – we read in the document of the National Conference of Territorial Guarantors – the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, receiving the Penitentiary Police, declared: “Urgent interventions are needed on suicides in prison”. Now there is no time left to enumerate the cases of suicide that we are immediately forced to update the chilling list. It is an unbearable drip, like the feeling of inadequacy of prevention activities. And therefore, it is more necessary than ever to analyze and decipher the dramatic phenomenon of prison overcrowding , reiterating, once again, forcefully the urgent need for urgent interventions.
The majority of prisoners live for over 20 hours a day in overcrowded cells, from which they only leave in prison. “hours of air”. This represents, without a doubt, a clear violation of the principles and guarantees recognized by our Constitutional Charter and the Penitentiary Regulations. This situation is not insurmountable. It is necessary to fill the time of detention with meaning, offering more “treatment” activities (cultural, work, sporting and recreational). Family and volunteer relationships must also be strengthened with an increase in interviews, telephone calls and video calls.
We also underline the absolute need for specialized personnel (psychologists, educators, psychiatrists, pedagogues, social workers, linguistic mediators) who listen to prisoners and are able to understand the reasons for intolerable suffering.
A greater number of alternative measures to detention are needed, making the Surveillance Jurisdiction efficient and effective, also by allocating more resources. In fact, there are several thousand prisoners with a final sentence of less than or equal to three years in prison.
We therefore ask all Parliamentarians for specific and urgent regulations, and for concrete measures to be taken quickly by the Minister of Justice, in accordance with the words of the President of the Republic who called for: “urgent interventions, also to stem the emergency”.
Just as we urge parliamentarians (national and European), regional and municipal councilors and supervisory magistrates themselves to visit prisons with greater continuity and frequency, because, even today – as Piero Calamandrei wrote in 1949 – “we must see them, we must be there states, to realize it”.
Suicides are, in fact, the product of the distance of politics and civil society from prison. On 18 April 2024, i.e. exactly one month after the appeal of the President of the Republic, the National Conference of Territorial Guarantors of Persons Deprived of Personal Liberty will issue the following appeal, recalling the names of the prisoners who died from suicide, illness and other causes
yet to be ascertained as well as the names of the prison police officers who took their own lives this year.
From now on we are available for meetings with the Minister of Justice, the justice commissions of the House and Senate and the penitentiary administration to give our contribution of science and experience to the resolution of the serious problems that afflict the prison, the people detained and those who work there every day.”
