Overcrowded prisons and a massacre of suicides

Suicides in prison

Who are the inmates in Italian prisons?

Prisoners per inhabitant

Prisons overflowing with inmates in a country where justice doesn't exist, there's no guarantee of punishment, and a fair trial within a reasonable time is pure utopia. And yet, we have an incarceration rate thirty points higher than Germany's, where if you commit a crime, it's difficult to get away with it. The data are fromUnited Nations Office of Drugs and Crime: In Italy there are 100,5 prisoners per 100 inhabitantsIn Germany, the figure reaches 77 prisoners per 100 inhabitants.

The gulf separating the (nonexistent) justice system from prisoners (real people abandoned like animals) is confirmed by the fact that a third of Italian prisoners are behind bars awaiting trial. Considering the average length of trials, and as some magistrates reason, pretrial detention is a way to make someone serve a sentence who, between one statute of limitations and another, will never receive a final prison sentence. Only to later discover, as often happens, that the defendant, once the various levels of trial have concluded, was innocent. And thus, he has unjustly contributed to prison overcrowding. A hellish mechanism that undermines the rule of law and only adds to our country's poor reputation for respect for human rights.

The Lombardy case

Italian prisons are overcrowded

There are nearly 11 million prisoners worldwide, and this figure should be considered rounded down given the extremely poor transparency with which some large countries, such as China, provide data on their prison populations. Since 2000, the prison population has increased by 24 percent., and Italy is also part of this trend. With one additional factor: the enormous expenditure we record for managing the prison system. 2,4 billion a year, triple what the Spanish spend. All this to overcrowd our prisons.

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