Two Suicides in a Few Hours in Italian Prisons

Due suicide within a few hours in prisons Tuscan hospitals in Prato and Sollicciano are once again raising the issue of overcrowding and staff shortages in the Italian prisons.

Yesterday afternoon, a North African prisoner of just over twenty years of age took his own life in prison of Prato by inhaling gas from a camping canister. In the early hours of today, a 39-year-old Romanian prisoner hanged himself in the bathroom of his cell in the Sollicciano prison.

Gennarino De Fazio, general secretary of Uilpa Polizia Penitenziaria, declared: “The massacre continues, despite ourselves and with the substantial indifference of the majority politics, in the prisons of the country where a death penalty is in force that strikes indiscriminately regardless of any crime committed and regardless of whether one is a prisoner or a worker.

It is clear that the timid attempts at intervention by the Minister of Justice Carlo Nordio and the Meloni Government, as we had widely predicted, have turned out to be a placebo.

The inmates have lost all hope and the operators, first and foremost the Penitentiary Police Corps, are exhausted in their pride and disheartened in their morale, subjected to inhuman workloads, with shifts that continue uninterrupted even beyond 12 hours and the denial of constitutional rights, only to then see every sacrifice debased with deaths, illicit trafficking, corruption and violence of all kinds that are rampant. Not to mention the 3.500 attacks suffered during the year 2024 alone”.

De Fazio calls for “immediate interventions to deflate the prison density, there are 16 thousand inmates over the available places, to strengthen the staff of the Penitentiary Police, lacking more than 18 thousand units, and of other professional figures, to modernize the structures, infrastructures and equipment and to ensure health care.

At the same time, comprehensive reforms of the entire criminal enforcement apparatus must be initiated within the framework of a reading of the Constitutional Charter updated to the historical-political context".

Overcrowding in Italian prisons is a long-standing problem that is becoming increasingly acute. Prisons are places of suffering and violence, where inmates live in inhumane conditions and where prison police officers are forced to work in difficult and stressful conditions. The lack of staff, the lack of adequate facilities and the lack of attention from politics only make the situation worse.

The hope is that the recent suicides and De Fazio's statements will shake the consciences of politicians and public opinion and that urgent measures will be taken to resolve the problem of overcrowding and staff shortages in Italian prisons.