Prisons Case

Italian Prisons

Since the unification of Italy in the 19th century, countless prisoners have been in Italian jails without being recorded. Nowadays, however, inmates are about thirty percent more of the number that prisons could host; indeed, “Italy’s jails are the third most overcrowded in Europe behind Serbia and Greece, the Council of Europe said earlier this month”. (GazzettaDelSud, 2013) It is time for the Italian government to push for creating reforms to stop these shocking conditions.

“In a prison in Busto Arsizio, ‘there was only an educator for 420 inmates, and the only psychologist could dedicate just six minutes of his time to each of them every year’, said a prisoner called Claudio”. (Silvia Giannelli, 2013) Unfortunately, this happen not only in Busto Arsizio but also in many Italian prisons, where lack of education has always been a significant cause of many important issues, such as drugs abuse. Indeed, according to the Prison Observatory, “25 % of the almost 70,000 Italian prisoners are drug addicted” (Silvia Giannelli, 2013), which means that one prisoner out of three is probably unaware of the consequences of drugs’ misuse. As a matter of fact, however, the cuts in the governmental economic intervention are affecting negatively this situation, where the number of detainees is sharply increasing, and less and less money is spent on education, which is actually the cornerstone of prevention and control. Moreover, the Italian Government is unconscious that locking people in prisons is extremely expensive and does not make our society safer.

“In April Italy challenged a ruling that orders to correct the ‘degrading and inhumane conditions’ in its prisons and to pay 100,000 euros in damages to seven inmates, who had fewer than three square meters on space each” (GazzettaDelSud, 2013). The systematic violation of human rights is a huge issue in Italian prisons, where