Spoleto (Perugia), 23 June 2024 – Flames, chaos and riots in cells. The situation in Umbrian prisons is anything but calm, particularly in the Spoleto district housewith the prison police staff who today found themselves “having to face important critical events due to fires set by prisoners to furnishings of the cells”, informs Sappe, the Autonomous Penitentiary Police Union.
The damage would be limited only to the structures, but yes tragedy was near “when a non-EU prisoner, simply in an attempt to obtain a higher dose of psychotropic drugs than the one prescribed for him, set fire to the mattress of his cell, thus destroying all the furnishings of the cell and flooding the entire section and the floor with toxic fumes above”, reports the Umbrian secretary Fabrizio Bonino.
“We applaud all the personnel involved who, with professionalism, a spirit of self-sacrifice and despite the small number of troops available and the scarcity of resources, managed to put out the fire, put the prisoner was saved and temporarily evacuate the sections invaded by toxic fumes”, underlines the Sappe trade unionist.
However, in the operations to put out the flames and quell the revolt of the prisoners, it was a penitentiary police inspector who ended up in the emergency room and an assistant chief who suffered the worst, precisely because of thesmoke inhalation due to fires in the cells.
The unheard appeal: “Severe overcrowding and staff shortages”
Without prejudice to “the gravity of the Umbrian penitentiary situation”, Bonino defines as “disconcerting the indifference of the central and peripheral administration, totally insensitive to the countless reports of the union which, on several occasions, has highlighted the very serious condition of overcrowding which affect the medium security sections and the age-old issue of the staff shortage which has now reached almost 40%. Shortage which should have been mitigated with the arrival of 38 units expected with the 2024 mobility but to date of the 38 only 2 units have arrived to support the Spoleto department – comments the Umbrian secretary – which continues to be harassed on a daily basis with the denial of thousands of days of unpaid holidays from previous years, with grueling hours and shifts and thousands of hours of overtime carried out even beyond the limit allowed by regulations and often not even paid”.
