Prison overcrowding alarm: "Conditions bordering on torture, immediate action needed."

Italian prisons are collapsing, and Poggioreale is the epitome of a penitentiary system that has long ceased to be constitutionally tolerable. In the height of summer, with scorching cells and unbreathable air, the Campania Regional Observatory on the Conditions of Persons Deprived of Personal Liberty raises a cry of alarm that also amounts to a denunciation: "Today, detention is torture." Average overcrowding has reached 130%, but in facilities like Poggioreale, the threshold has exceeded 160%, with over two thousand inmates crammed into spaces designed for less than half.

President Sergio Mattarella recently spoke clearly: Italian prisons are in "serious and now unsustainable" conditions and must be reimagined as spaces that include not only custody, but also social, emotional, and re-educational opportunities. These words, however, seem to have fallen on deaf ears. According to the Observatory, cells become furnaces in the summer, with inmates forced to sleep on third bunks, just inches from scorching ceilings, while the outdoor courtyards are used only during the hottest hours of the day, making even activities on the farms or in the greenhouses impossible.

The reality documented daily by the Observatory's staff is clear and irrefutable: people live, or rather survive, in undignified conditions, where the basic rules of human dignity are trampled upon. And with the imminent arrival of the summer holidays, the risk is that abandonment and isolation will increase even further: fewer staff, fewer support staff, fewer opportunities to ask for help.

The request is drastic but necessary: ​​immediately empty prisons with extraordinary measures, such as the release of inmates serving sentences of less than 12 months (excluding pre-trial detention offenses), and reopen the debate on Giacchetti's proposal for special early release, already tested after the Torregiani ruling. These measures, in addition to breathing new life into a dying system, would bring the State back to respecting its own constitutional mandate, recognizing prisoners as people, not just bodies to be punished.

The country, the Observatory warns, must decide whether to continue ignoring this shameful act or to resume the journey toward a justice system that punishes not with suffering but with responsibility. At stake is not only the condition of prisoners, but the very credibility of a democracy that still claims to be civil.