Prisons, the alarm from the Guarantor: ‘Too many inmates with sentences under 2 years, 29 suicides from the beginning of 2022’

“Of the 54,786 inmates registered in Italian prisons (which correspond to 53,793 people actually present) and of the 38,897 who are in criminal execution, as the others do not have a definitive sanction, 1,319 are in prison for execution of a sentence less than one year and another 2,473 for a sentence of one to two years “. The data is provided by the guarantor for the rights of persons deprived of personal freedom, Mauro Palma, in his speech in the Senate at the presentation of the Report to Parliament. Numbers that demonstrate “the accentuation of the presence of social minorities in prison”. There is “a very present unease in the adult detention system – underlines the guarantor – the numbers of self-harming gestures and above all suicides, 29 to date, in addition to 17 deaths due to causes to be ascertained, of age and frailty, often already known, the authors of these definitive gestures are a warning; they question us not to attribute blame, but for the necessary reflection on what to learn for the future from these inscrutable subjective decisions, what to learn to reduce the risk of their repetition. intrinsic fragility that they communicate to us “.