A 31-year-old prisoner, originally from Campania, with mental problems and a life sentence, committed suicide today in the Poggioreale prison in Naples.
It is the fifth suicide in Italian penitentiaries in just two weeks of the new year to which we can add six more victims "for other causes". In 2023, there were 69 suicides plus 88 inmates who died "for other causes".
Compared to the average annual prison population, in 2022 there were 15,2 suicides per 10 people, while in 2021 there were 10,8 per 10.
For Aldo Di Giacomo, deputy secretary general Osapp “it is the sign of failure of the
Italian penitentiary system, as managed, which does not even guarantee the life of the people in its custody. The identikit of the suicidal prisoner is characterized by age (increasingly younger) and mental problems.
The man had been sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of his partner
This last victim should not have been in a cell either, but in a mental health and care facility. Instead, despite the fact that there are several thousand prisoners with mental problems, the number of those hospitalized continues to remain below 600, corresponding to the maximum capacity of the places available in Rems (the number of those hospitalized in Opg, before the closure, had always fluctuated above 1.000); 131 (22%) are foreigners and 71 women (12%).
The young man had mental problems and should have been in a mental health care facility.
A lack, that of psychiatric care, common to all prison facilities, where the presence of inmates who use drugs is close to 60% and there are countless prisoners with mental disorders, as evidenced by the increase in suicides behind bars.
In this situation characterized by the serious shortage of psychiatrists and psychologists in prisons, politics is completely absent except to express regret in cases of suicide. Added to all this is a generalized climate of tension. It is no longer enough to admit, as happens in political-parliamentary circles, that the Rems have revealed themselves to be a failure as we have been maintaining for many years.
Nor is it that the Ministry of Justice is thinking about what to do, because with the REMS, which are completely inadequate to contain the most dangerous subjects, hundreds of psychiatric subjects have been returned to prison, whose management today poses enormous security problems for the prison staff who cannot perform "psychiatric assistance" functions and for the other inmates".
