Rome (NEV / Riforma.it), March 15, 2020 – Schools and cinemas closed, quota for coffee bars and night-clubs, distances to be respected, people and families in red or yellow areas invited to stay at home (unfortunately an invitation to responsibility not adequately implemented by many people), to protect themselves and above all to protect elderly people, the immunosuppressed patients, and not to clog hospitals and critical-care rooms.
In recent days – after the initial simplifications that told us about “a banal flu” – the medical and scientific evidence of the effects of corona virus have imposed on the government greater prudence and even more drastic measures.
This situation generates anxiety, also accentuated by the massive and mono-thematic mass communication.
Anxiety that sometimes degenerates into panic, even among ordinary people who are less exposed to risks. Anxiety first experienced only in red areas and now extended to prison communities, who feel they cannot protect themselves in the most appropriate way and who live the awareness of being, in a certain sense, a possible and dangerous incubator of contagion. The signal of this unease are the riots, carried out by the detainees, in recent days and which have caused the death of some of them.
“It will be the legal authority to shed light on these tragic deaths – commented the Waldensian pastor Francesco Sciotto, former coordinator of the Prison Commission of the Federation of Protestant Churches in Italy (FCEI) -, for now the dynamics of the deaths are unclear. But the situation highlights a previous discomfort. It is no coincidence that the latest government law decree, issued to respond to the corona virus emergency, contains in the part relating to the management of penitentiary institutions, the increase in the duration of telephone calls by prisoners to family members and the incentive to adopt alternative measures and home detention”.
Pastor Sciotto reminded that until last week he could visit the prisoners, now he is no longer allowed.
“Even self-certification is no longer sufficient. All this set of limitations obviously increases fear. The necessary prevention measures, however, do not solve a central problem, namely that those places are usually overcrowded and that the sanitary conditions are often precarious. It is difficult to respect the minimum distance of one meter in cells, they are often 6 meters rooms (standard provided for each individual person according to the indications provided by the Council of Europe, ed.). Today, due to prison overcrowding, those cells contain at least two, sometimes three persons. There is a further problem, the prison remains and is permeable to the outside, despite the new restrictions. So the decisions taken by the government as a last resort, unfortunately, are not enough to counter the problem of contagion and also reduce prisoners rights, who can no longer see their relatives – one of the few moments of relief and prospect over the arc of a week reclusion.
This provision carries a basic dichotomy, “on the one hand the attempt to stem the spread of the virus, on the other to close a structure that cannot be closed, because operators, prison officers, educators and health personnel, rightly, continue to enter and get out of those structures. The case of a virus-positive agent is already known” – said Sciotto.
One of the main themes for the pastor is therefore overcrowding.
As of June 30, 2019, the latest report of the Antigone association informed there were 60,522 prisoners restricted in 190 Italian prisons. The overcrowding rate is 119.8%, which is the highest in the European Union area, followed by that in Hungary and France. The Ministry of Justice specifies that there are 50,496 places available in Italian prisons, a figure that does not take into account the closed sections.
“The congestion index is evident – continued Sciotto -, those who attend Italian prisons perceive it clearly”. One of the most important precautions issued to counteract the spread of corona virus is precisely to avoid overcrowded places.
“Prison is now by definition an overcrowded place. And it would be so even if the 48 thousand people detained required by the law and the capacity of the structures were respected. Today, therefore, it is not enough to eliminate external visits; everything possible should be done to relieve congestion in Italian prisons. For example, and I’m not the first to say this, make sure that the people most exposed to infection and possible disease can, at this stage, live their sentence in an alternative place. It is compulsory to activate different measures to detention also for people who are at the end of their sentences”.
Prison is the mirror of what also happens outside, Sciotto remembered: “Even in ‘free’ society we observe scenes ranging from excess of tranquility to excess of panic, scenes of hysteria and of escape. So it is clear that also in prison there are the same, often not rational, reactions”.
Meanwhile in Iran, where the virus has already infected eight thousand people, the head of the Tehran judiciary, Ebrahim Raisi, has released, with temporary permits, about 70 thousand prisoners.
“We too should do school in Europe, we are the most affected country – continued Sciotto -. We should be the first to set an example. We have the legal instruments to do this: we wrote in our Constitution that the penalty is not just imprisonment. As a Country, we have never invested in alternative measures, on personnel able to deal with external criminal enforcement. Even the recent decree, if not implemented locally, may not bring immediate benefits. The problem is not therefore to copy the example that comes to us from abroad, but to be the example by putting in place suitable tools. Courage is needed today, the State should seriously ask itself a question: what has to be done to solve the problem of overcrowding?”.
In 2019, 53 people died of suicide between prisoners and between prison guards. “Prison – concluded Sciotto – is a place where it is easier to get sick because it is more difficult to access treatment, where it is easier to suffer from depression because in fact you live an emotional loneliness. The tip of the iceberg is the annual suicide count. We must think of prison as a fragile place and understand that in the emergency situation we are experiencing, this fragility increases. Today it is necessary to put in place any action to mitigate the contingent situation of fragility. Later, when the alarm is over, we’ll have to find a solution to the age-old situation of overcrowding”.
