Mattarella's slap to the government: "Enough suicides, do something about prisons"

“Serious and now unsustainable conditions of overcrowding ” and “dramatic” number of suicides have now become a “ real social emergency that we must question in order to put an immediate end to ”. This is the alarm raised yesterday by the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella during his speech at the Quirinale, where he met a representation of the Penitentiary Police Corps on the occasion of the 208th anniversary of its establishment and the Head of the Department, Stefano Carmine De Michele .

We are therefore faced with yet another reminder from the Head of State, after the end-of-year speech and last March, on the indecent state of liveability of our prisons. According to data from the Ministry of Justice, as of May 31, there were 62,761 inmates for a regulatory capacity of 51,296 places, not counting those that were not usable. Which means an overcrowding rate of 122 percent. Thirty-six suicides have already occurred behind bars since the beginning of 2025, according to the numbers provided by associations and some prison police unions. Added to this is the fact that, according to estimates by Ristretti Orizzonti , July is the month in which the highest number of self-eliminations in prison are recorded. Mattarella then underlined that the detention space "cannot be conceived solely as a place of custody, but must include environments intended for sociality, affection and treatment planning".

A clear reference to the Government's failure to implement - except for two rare cases - the decision of the Constitutional Court that a year and a half ago established the "right to love " in our penitentiary institutions . Towards the end of his speech, Mattarella highlighted " the lack of staff that has long been a critical condition of the penitentiary system and that concerns the body and concerns all operators, I think of the serious insufficiency in the number of educators, the difficult access to health care within the institutions, especially for prisoners suffering from mental health problems; it is necessary that the penitentiary institutions be equipped with new and more adequate professional skills".

Finally, the Head of State said, "places of detention must not be transformed into a training ground for new crimes, a training ground for crime, or into places of hopelessness, but must be effectively aimed at the recovery of those who have made mistakes. Every recovered prisoner is equivalent to a security advantage for the community, in addition to being the objective of a notoriously declared constitutional commitment". And in fact, according to numbers provided in 2024 by the National Council for Economy and Labor (CNEL), 68.7 percent of prisoners return to crime (about 2 out of 3). Despite the evident tragic situation of our prisons and the continuous appeals from Mattarella to do something and immediately, the political majority remains guiltily still. In fact, the statements of Minister Nordio commenting on those of the Head of State are not enough to reassure. According to the Minister of Justice , “the prevention of self-harm and suicide is the priority of this Government”, “committed on three fronts to reduce overcrowding” . From Via Arenula they have been making these announcements for over a year, but the situation is only getting worse.

Different reactions to the words of the Quirinale. For the Democratic deputies Debora Serracchiani and Federico Gianassi " the total lack of awareness of the gravity and urgency of the situation is alarming. The measures proposed by the government so far are useless and harmful: a structural intervention is needed to address the root causes of this crisis. The situation requires immediate and coordinated action by the institutions to guarantee dignity and human rights to all prisoners and to all the people who work in prison and live this terrible situation". Instead, the president of the deputies of Italia Viva, Maria Elena Boschi , recalled that "we, with the Giachetti bill on early release, had made a solution available to the majority, but once again the government, with its pan-penal mania, has chosen to go in an obstinate and contrary direction".

For Ilaria Cucchi, senator of Avs, "all this is no longer tolerable in a civilized country. We need to change course. We need alternative measures to prison and, in an extraordinary situation like the current one, we need to have the courage to think about clemency measures". Also for the secretary and deputy of +Europa Riccardo Magi to the " dramatic appeal of Mattarella " we need to respond immediately: "We are working on a proposal for a 'little pardon' and a measure on suspended free sentences. Then we would need reforms such as the restricted number and the Social Reintegration Houses, another proposal of ours already filed, for those with less than a year of remaining sentence. The proposals are there but the political will is lacking on the part of the majority and the government" . From the majority parties, no position has been taken at the time of going to press, apart from a very lukewarm one from Giorgio Mulè, vice-president of the Chamber and deputy of Forza Italia, who on the " Sciascia-Tortora bill for a (more) humane and aware administration of justice " said he was "totally in agreement with the hypotheses that tend, despite the certainty of punishment, to grant forms that make our prisons liveable" without however making any reference to immediate deflationary measures.

For Gennarino De Fazio, Secretary General of the UILPA Polizia Penitenziaria, " tangible and immediate measures are needed, certainly not the proverbial oxymorons of the Minister of Justice, Carlo Nordio, or the substantial indifference of the Government". Meanwhile, Rita Bernardini is on her sixteenth day of hunger strike: "I asked the parliamentarians not to go on vacation without having brought the prisons back to constitutional legality and, therefore, to have ensured humane treatment for the prisoners ", wrote the former Radical parliamentarian on Facebook. Hence, the Radicals' call for an extraordinary mobilization for the month of August, "the most critical and narrow period for the conditions of Italian prisons" . The initiative includes visits to various penitentiary institutions throughout Italy with the involvement of some parliamentarians, in order to monitor the conditions of detention of the inmates.

FROM

Angela Star