Sassari An inmate took his own life in the Sassari Bancali prison, hanging himself with sheets in the intensified assistance service. The incident happened today, Saturday 15 June, around 3.30pm. The prisoner, a 43-year-old Italian, was hospitalized in the infirmary. This is the fourth case in just over 24 hours in Italian detention facilities – this morning an elderly prisoner committed suicide in Teramo prison. With the Bancali episode, the number of cases since the beginning of the year rises to 44.
«Crazy numbers, unworthy of a civilized country – declares Gennarino De Fazio, General Secretary of the Uilpa Penitentiary Police -. We no longer have words to comment and appeal to the sensitivity of politics. In the face of all this, in fact, two great beings stand out, the Minister of Justice, Carlo Nordio, and the Meloni Government. Suicides, murders, fights, assaults, rapes, illicit trafficking, but what else must happen for the executive to take note of the existing emergency and various consequential measures? A decree-law is urgently needed to allow the deflation of the prison density, there are over 14 thousand prisoners in excess of the useful capacity, extraordinary and accelerated hiring in the Penitentiary Police Force, lacking at least 18 thousand units, and the strengthening of health care, above all psychiatric, in very deep crisis. At the same time, structural reforms must be undertaken. We are in a massacre”, concludes De Fazio.
«The agent on the floor seems to have been responsible for the surveillance of the II Section, III Section, Box and the surveillance of the SAI. At the moment we have no further news”, says the general secretary Sappe Donato Capece. The trade unionist highlights that «similar episodes, in a certain way, bring with them the failure of the penitentiary system, sometimes incapable of intercepting the discomfort of the most vulnerable who see the only way out in an extreme gesture. We are dismayed and heartbroken: a prisoner who takes his own life in prison is a defeat for the State and for all of us who work on the front line.”
