The Jubilee of Prisons

In the Jubilee Year, with Pope Francis going to the Roman prison of Rebibbia after the one in St. Peter's Basilica to open a Holy Door right there, the issue of the living conditions of prisoners certainly cannot go unnoticed. A message of hope and mercy, that of the Holy Year, which has always - and also in this 2025 - resounds inside prisons in a particularly strong way. Each nation has its own particularities in this regard, and those of Italy - unfortunately - are not at all positive. Our country has been going through a particularly critical phase for decades, which brings with it the awareness that inhuman and degrading treatments have now become very widespread.

Let's try to take a quick snapshot of the situation. The people detained in Italy at the end of 2024 were over 62 thousand, compared to a regulatory capacity of just over 51 thousand places and an effective capacity (net of cells unavailable for maintenance or unusability) of around 47 thousand places. The effective crowding rate is around 132%: in Italian prisons there are 132 people for every 100 available places. This is overcrowding, the first chronic condition of Italian prisons. And, as always in these cases, we are talking about an average: which means that there are places where it is better and others where it is worse. The San Vittore prison in Milan has reached 225% effective crowding, the prisons of Brescia, Como and Lucca are over 200%, and there are about sixty facilities in total where crowding exceeds 150%: especially metropolitan prisons, where there is the highest number of admissions and the greatest tensions are recorded.

On average, we are talking about very old structures, some – to be blunt – dilapidated, built in the first part of the last century, sometimes even before 1900: it is common for not all cells to be adequately heated, for hot water not to always be available, for there to be no showers, for the spaces to be minimal. The minimum limit of three square meters of floor space for each inmate is not guaranteed everywhere. Three square meters per person. A borderline situation that certainly also affects acts of self-harm (on the rise) and the tragic number of suicides (2024 was a record year with about ninety cases). And there is also a problem of staff shortages (there is one prison police officer for every two inmates and one legal pedagogical officer for every 68 inmates).

For the rest, there are about 17 thousand (out of 62 thousand) inmates who work in prison under the employment of the prison itself and about 3 thousand who have other employers. Then there are a few thousand who attend professional training courses, with large geographical differences (in mid-2024 in Lombardy, those enrolled in these courses were 14% of prisoners, while in Umbria, Puglia, Sardinia and Basilicata it was less than 1%). Around 4 thousand successfully attend school courses (and therefore are promoted).

A varied world (to which is added the population that benefits from alternative measures to detention, such as semi-liberty, house arrest, probation to social services, etc.) on which the Jubilee will help to keep attention high.

Stefano Caredda
NP January 2025