"No more suicides in prison." The representatives of the Criminal Chamber of Cagliari asked for it loudly, gathered today in front of the courthouse of the capital for a flash mob. With them also the guarantors of the Sardinian penitentiaries and the associations in defense of prisoners. During the initiative, the names of the thirty crosses planted inside prisons throughout Italy were listed, complete with the dates and cities in which the death occurred.

The demonstration to raise a cry of alarm and ask for action to be taken as soon as possible. «By now the number of suicides is so high that it is practically double those that occur outside and involve prisoners - said Franco Villa, president of the Criminal Chamber of Cagliari -. To these we must add four prison officers who took their own lives in 2024." The suicides, Villa specified, "are a symptom of a general malaise among our prisoners because they are in conditions of prison overcrowding - he added - there is penitentiary healthcare which is absolutely in disarray, there are too many drug-addicted prisoners and psychiatric patients in the inside our prisons. This creates an explosive situation."

Among the short-term solutions highlighted by Villa are "amnesty and pardon to reduce prison pressure". In the long term, some possibilities could be "housing activities, that is, providing homes to those who can go to alternative measures". But the regional guarantor of prisons, Irene Testa, also speaks of an emergency, according to which we are faced with «an urgency as well as an emergency. The urgency is for politics and legislators to intervene and the emergency is that prisons cannot be left in these conditions: it serves neither the prisoners nor society." Then the guarantor's alarm: «If we don't want to wait for further sentences from the European Court of Human Rights we must intervene on the serious overcrowding that afflicts our penitentiaries. Politics must have the courage to take on responsibilities, launching measures that are deflationary in some way because otherwise the problem will not be solved."

(Unioneonline/vf)

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