Sappe: “2 suicides in Poggioreale, only two psychiatrists for 2 thousand inmates, scandalous”

After the suicide, in a few days, of two inmates in the prison of Poggioreale, the complaint of Donato Capece, general secretary of the Sappe Union, is firm, who underlines that, following the closure of the Judicial Psychiatric Hospitals, many people with psychiatric problems are confined in the country's prisons and often they are the protagonists of serious critical events, even self-suppressive ones like the one that happened in Poggioreale.

"It is simply scandalous and absurd that the Neapolitan prison of Poggioreale, with over two thousand inmates present, the most crowded in Europe!, has only two psychiatric doctors on duty!" - Capace states in a note, and bitterly highlights that "mental distress, after the closure of judicial psychiatric hospitals, has been poured into prisons, where there are no people trained to manage these problems, adequate structures and operational protocols are lacking.

The Penitentiary Police can no longer manage this situation and in the next few days will evaluate whether to declare a state of agitation. The effect that the presence of psychiatric subjects produces is the cause of a series of critical events that undermine the security of the institute as well as the safety of the penitentiary police officer”.

“These are also the consequences of a short-sighted and improvised policy, which closed the judicial psychiatric hospitals without finding a valid solution on where to put those who crowded them. The OPGs must reopen, better structured and better organized, but they must be operational again to contain this particular group of prisoners.

The prison cannot house prisoners of this type unless there is a significant increase in the number of penitentiary police personnel and psychiatric pathology specialists. – concludes Capece –

Once again, the serious shortage of doctors within the penitentiary facilities of the Campania region is highlighted, especially of specialized medical personnel (psychiatric and psychological) and the need to integrate them, given that the State-Regions Conference identifies for every 350 prisoners only one psychiatrist, one psychologist and one health professional.

In the Poggioreale prison, however, there are only two psychiatric staff present in the morning, while in the afternoon there is no psychological support figure. Added to all this is the very serious shortage of prison police officers".