«An unconstitutional prison is the death penalty»

COSENZA Can a penitentiary system that allows or only tolerates, considering it legal and legitimate, be considered distant from the death penalty? This is one of the questions posed by the president of the Criminal Chamber of Cosenza, the lawyer Roberto Le Pera.
«The thought of the death penalty is only apparently distant from our rule of law; let’s reflect: we are now indifferent to the continuous deaths in Italian prisons. So, are we sure that we are not ready to accept the idea of ​​an unconstitutional prison, of a torture prison, of a prison that is the death penalty? Let me be clear: the State certainly has the right and duty to differentiate prison regimes based on the seriousness of the crimes committed by the prisoner and his proven dangerousness (even if there are more than a few residual reservations on the compatibility between “hard” regimes and presumption of innocence). But this elementary principle of safety has nothing to do with the hateful, violent, often unreasonably sadistic rules that characterize some penitentiary regimes and which make them close to torture”, continues Le Pera.
«The failure of Article 27 paragraph 3 of the Constitution is the failure of an entire society, because if people continue to die in prison it means that prison is torture; that prison is the death penalty. The penitentiary system has now become a sort of circus, not a circuit, in which, however, there are no stilt walkers and clowns, but only cages that hold human beings who, on a weekly basis, surrender to life; they commit suicide in cages. The silent massacre of our prison system, which is talked about less and less and which little or nothing is seen, because what does not appear does not exist. This is the meaning of the demonstrations on this issue”, he adds.

Some data

«To generate awareness about the 31st victim which, in 2024, brings to 1761 deaths by suicide in Italian prisons in the last thirty years, without forgetting the further 2910 prison deaths due to other causes, including diseases, homicides and causes still to be ascertained. In short, we can and must affirm that, with 4,660 deaths in prison in the last thirty years, our penitentiary system is not only made up of cells but of mortuaries”, underlines the president of the Criminal Chamber of Cosenza. What to do? «We have the duty to democratically force the institutions and the political world to admit that prison, as it has become today, constitutes the drift of human rights as well as to admit, or rather to confess, that article 27 of the constitution is, at present, a way to say, to appear, useful only to calm and calm consciences in the face of the outrage of deaths due to suicides in our prisons. Only in this way could we avoid an approach characterized by serious constitutional ignorance regarding the function of punishment set out in the constitution. The institutions need to address the man and not the crime. The moment has come when the rule of law, first and foremost, must admit that prison, as it has become, is torture. That this prison is unconstitutional. Because this prison is the death penalty.”