A new jubilee

Overcrowded prisons? We begin to free those who have less than two years to serve. The proposal is not from the Keeper of the Seals, but from Msgr. Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life.

With his intervention in a national newspaper, he took up some considerations of Mauro Pianta, national guarantor of persons deprived of their liberty, in which he underlined the importance of "gradual access to alternative measures" considering it "a element of strength in the construction of a path towards reintegration".

In prison today there are about 1,300 prisoners who have to serve sentences of less than one year and almost 2,500 with sentences of between one and two years. The guarantor points out that: «For these people, time is totally empty. They often stay there because they don't have a home or legal assistance, they belong to an overall poverty. If we were able to bring them to other territorial control and support structures, the numbers of overcrowding would also decrease".

Taking inspiration from these considerations, Msgr. Paglia illustrated how the liberation of prisoners affects the very content of the biblical message. “The very tradition of the Jubilee – he explained – meant the elimination of injustices: every 50 years everyone started over, even the prisoners had to start afresh for a new society together with everyone. I still remember Professor Valdo Vinay, a great Waldensian pastor and professor, who explained salvation as grace with the example of a state envoy who goes to death row and shouts to everyone: "You are all pardoned!". This – he explained – is the Gospel, the Good News of God to men”.

In his reflection, the president of the Pontifical Academy for Life remarks that if on the one hand imprisonment, the constraint of freedom, separation from the community, cannot be understood as an anticipation of the universal judgement, which it belongs only to God, "the limitation of freedom and sharing which form the habitat of the community has its own content of sacrifice and expiation which has an ethical sense: and precisely for this reason it must be oriented towards recovery and recomposition and reconciliation with the community".

But he warns: the problem arises when its methods and effects appear disproportionate: or even contradictory. "The proportions of this gap - he concludes - evaluated in global terms, still today present figures of constraint and humiliation very close to those for which the biblical prophets expend words of promise and admonitions of justice, in the name of God: the exiles, the persecuted, the slaves".


Chiara Genisio
NP October 2022