Cool. 'Poggioreale prison is still too crowded'

“This morning I visited the Poggioreale prison. I saw several departments, some of which have recently been renovated, others that continue to have very serious structural problems. I found a reality that is trying to renew itself, but in which there are still many serious problems to be faced and resolved. We have not yet left behind us the season of overcrowding and degradation, also fueled by wrong laws”. This is what the President of the Chamber, Roberto Fico, wrote on Facebook. “I think that guaranteeing the dignity of detainees is a basic duty of the State. But it is also a duty to ensure resocialization and training courses in prisons”, adds Fico. “As a community of citizens, in fact, we ask for certainty of punishment, but we cannot help but ask ourselves a fundamental question: what will the prisoner do once he has served his sentence, what kind of person and citizen will he be. This is because prison and external society are communicating vessels. And therefore he will be a better person if in prison he has found the possibility to build an opportunity for redemption and to form or rebuild his own identity, for example by following training courses or learning a new job”. The Third Charge of the State then reports that “at the end of the visit I participated in the presentation of a book, written with lucidity but also with emotion by someone who as a volunteer has been following the reality of Poggioreale for years. In his book Antonio Mattone talks to us about this existential periphery in the heart of the city, which is Poggioreale precisely, but this definition can be applied to many other detention facilities. I thank all those who accompanied me this morning on this journey of knowledge: the director of the prison, the commander and the agents of the penitentiary police, the vice-chief of the Penitentiary Administration Department, the doctors of the polyclinic and the representatives of associations and cooperatives who carry out valuable work in these places. And I thank for their strength of spirit the relatives of Giuseppe Salvia, who was deputy director of Poggioreale before being killed by the Camorra in 1981, guilty of simply doing his duty. Today the prison is named after him”, concludes Fico.