More than 100 deaths in 170 days. To be precise 101. In Italian prisons, in 2024, one person dies almost every day and a half. To go into detail, there are 46 suicides (also counting the case of the young man in the Rome CPR), to which are added 56 deaths from other causes. The latest case dates back to last Thursday (20 June), when a 20-year-old took his own life in the Novara prison. «We have never reached such a high number – comments Aldo Di Giacomo, national secretary of S.PP (prison police union) –. We are in June and the risk, unfortunately increasingly concrete, is that of overcoming the darkest year, 2022, with a total of 84 suicides plus 87 deaths from other causes”. He continues: «For us, the application of alternative punishments to imprisonment, including house arrest, is certainly an important deterrent to the issue, as well as a concrete and effective way to start solving the problem of overcrowding in our penitentiary institutions».
Prison numbers in 2024
As of March 31, 2024, there were 61,049 people detained in Italian prisons, compared to an official capacity of 51,178 places. There were 2,619 women, 4.3% of those present, and 19,108 foreigners, 31.3%. Overcrowding, therefore, is still a central problem. But the situation is worsening according to Antigone data. From the end of 2019 to the end of 2020, due to the measures adopted during the pandemic, prison attendance dropped by 7,405 units. But they immediately started growing again. First slowly, with an increase in attendance of 770 units in 2021, which however was followed by a growth of 2,062 in 2022 and even 3,970 in 2023. In the last year the increase in attendance was on average 331 units per month . And therefore overcrowding at a national level is growing, reaching 119.3%. «An alarming growth rate, which if it were to be confirmed also in 2024 would take us beyond 65 thousand presences by the end of the year» Antigone reports in its annual report. But the services in penitentiaries are also worrying. In six institutes visited by the association, in 99 there were no spaces exclusively dedicated to school and in 30 there were no places for work. Almost all prisons had a library, but only 54 could also be used as a reading room. In 29 institutes there was no green area for interviews in the summer months.
Gonnella: «Withdraw the security bill»
And Patrizio Gonnella, president of Antigone, also adds to raise the alarm about deaths in prison: «If the number continued to grow at this rate it would lead to 2024 surpassing the tragic figure of 2022 when suicides in prison were 85. This is a national emergency. If in a city of 60,000 inhabitants 44 people committed suicide in a few months we wouldn’t be talking about anything else.”
And he appeals directly to the Meloni executive: «For this reason (editor’s note) the government and parliament must deal with it as a priority, even in the face of an increasingly serious overcrowding situation, with over 14 thousand people detained without a place regulations, increasingly difficult living conditions for inmates and very tiring work conditions for prison workers”. But there are also other requests: «We need to intervene with measures that lead to a reduction of the burden on prisons through the granting of alternative measures; it is necessary to liberalize telephone calls by equipping cells with telephones where there are no security problems with respect to contacts with the outside; you need to hire staff; it is necessary to reduce the weight of the insulation; we need to modernize the sentence; life in the institution needs to be full of initiatives, without obstacles or bureaucracies; there must never be violence.”
And, furthermore, Gonnella refers to a particular provision: «We therefore invite the government to withdraw the security bill which goes towards a path that is the opposite of what would be needed and, above all, with the introduction of the crime of penitentiary revolt, in which also punishes passive resistance and non-violent protest with a sentence of up to 8 years, will leave detained people with their own body as the only tool to bring out difficulties and problems, with a foreseeable increase in acts of self-harm and suicides” .
