Sassari, in prison even if incompatible with detention

Forced into prison without being able to stay there. It is the singular case of a twenty-six year old from Sassari, yesterday sentenced by the Sassari court to six months for damaging a table and an armored door in Bancali. «I would like to understand», his lawyer Marco Palmieri asks during the discussion, «how this person is declared incapable of understanding and will by the courts of Cagliari and Nuoro and not in Sassari».

There are eleven trials pending against the young man, currently hospitalized in a psychiatric ward of a prison on the peninsula, whose "double diagnosis" has been ascertained, i.e. being affected by both a mental disorder and the use of substances. The lawyer has long supported a fight to get the 26-year-old out of prison: "It is completely incompatible with a prison facility."

A battle that has reached the European Court of Human Rights to prevent him from ending up behind bars again and which Palmieri himself is paying for out of his own pocket. “It should be in a place,” he says, “where those with a dual diagnosis are treated. But when I send the PECs to these communities to host them, they don't reply to me." As if the young man, given his problems, was not welcome. « However, this neglects a social emergency. People with dual diagnoses will increase exponentially." And they are already crowding courts and prisons, creating an explosive mixture, for themselves and for others.