Penitentiary police, Del Mastro promises the reopening of the Liguria district administration

Genoa. Visit, yesterday Thursday 18 April 2024, by the Undersecretary of State for Justice Andrea Del Mastro Delle Vedove to the Valle Armea prison in Sanremo. And the occasion was useful for a meeting with a representation of the most representative unions of the Penitentiary Police (SAPPE, Sinappe, Osapp, Cisl, CGIL, CNPP) on the problems and critical issues of Liguria.

“It was a useful opportunity to highlight to Undersecretary Del Mastro, in addition to the problems relating to the management of the detained population, and the overcrowding recorded in the Ligurian territory as in the entire District, the urgent need to strengthen the police force Penitentiary which, according to a dramatically inverse proportion, is short of 181 units”, explains the regional secretary of the Autonomous Penitentiary Police Union, Vincenzo Tristaino.

“Of the 936 units envisaged by the Ministerial Decree of 12 June 2023, the force currently operational in the region is 755 units. And the new Agents who will be assigned to Liguria at the end of the 182nd and 183rd courses are only 31, a drop in the bucket even compared to the latest retirements”. Tristaino recalls that Liguria, compared to a regulatory capacity of 1100 beds in regional prisons, today exceeds 1400 presences, of which 60% are non-EU citizens, drug addicts and suffering from serious personality disorders, if not carriers of psychiatric pathologies. “In this context”, continues the trade unionist, “the constantly growing critical events, suicides, self-harm, attacks on staff, fights between prisoners, protests, damage to the already old penitentiary structures, the introduction of illicit use of narcotic substances, mobile phones and unauthorized objects through launches from outside and with the use of drones, the lack of safety equipment”.

Undersecretary Del Mastro has ensured attention and sensitivity to the trade union demands and has indeed made a precise commitment, by the end of his mandate, to the reopening of the Superintendency in Liguria. This acknowledgment of the unfortunate choice to abandon Liguria to Piedmont is important”, concludes Tristaino. “It is indeed essential that the institutions take up our appeal again: invest in security to have safer prisons. This applies to all Ligurian detention facilities, which are marked, more or less, by organic and sometimes even organizational defects. There is no way in the world, for example, that the city of Savona does not yet have that prison that, in words, everyone says they want but which is instead still written in the book of dreams. And it was a serious political mistake to suppress, in Genoa, the regional Supervision of the Penitentiary Administration, merging everything in Turin. Genoa must be put in a position to have its own regional Superintendency, with organizational and management autonomy, certainly useful for the Penitentiary Police services and the management of prisoners”.