For the Criminal Chamber of Cosenza, an unconstitutional prison is the death penalty

A penitentiary system that allows or only tolerates, considering it legal and legitimate, can a penitentiary system, that of Italian prisons, which, in the last twenty years, has generated, on average, a suicide every week be considered distant from the death penalty? 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, we are certain 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’s be clear: the State certainly has the right and duty to differentiate detention regimes due to 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 “harsh” regimes and the presumption of innocence). But this elementary safety principle has nothing to do with hateful rulesviolent, often unreasonably sadistic which characterize some penitentiary regimes and which make them close to torture.

The failure of article 27 paragraph 3 of the Constitution it 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 it 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 of which nothing or little is seen, because what does not appear does not exist. This is the meaning of the demonstrations on this topic. To generate awareness about the 31st victim who, in 2024, brings the deaths by suicide in Italian prisons to 1761 in the last thirty years, without forgetting the further 2910 prison deaths due to other causes, including diseases, murders and causes yet to be ascertained. In short, we can and must affirm that, with 4660 deaths in prison in the last thirty years, our penitentiary system is not just made up of cells but of morgues. What to do? We have a duty to democratically constrain the institutions 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, an idiomof appearing, 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. It is necessary that the institutions 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.