In Italy a heat wave is coming and there are people who live in 4 or 6 in a room of 3 meters for 2 with no air conditioning , nor even fans: the prisoners. Italian prisons are dramatically overcrowded and on the verge of general revolt, but no media tell it. Effect of repressive laws adopted in recent years by the politics to deal with a "security" emergency which in reality does not exist.
Everyone in prison, from drug addicts, to immigrants who do not obey the order of expulsion, to petty thieves. At a cost of 157 euros per day for each prisoner, a charge that the community could use much better to recover and help those who could change their lives if they had the chance.The prison police unions launched the alarm since years now, but politics, with some exceptions, ignores them.
While the UN has admitted that repression of drug use has failed, in Italy thanks to the law Fini-Giovanardi even who has cultivated a small amount of marijuana can end up in prison and die, as happened to Aldo Bianzino. Now the criminalization of undocumented immigrants is likely to send to jail thousands of people whose only fault is to be unemployed and not having had the opportunity to renew the residence permit. In a country where the perpetrators of the worst financial fraud and the many politicians condemned never pay for what they have done, and certainly never end up closed in these inhumane prisons.
While the UN has admitted that repression of drug use has failed, in Italy thanks to the law Fini-Giovanardi even who has cultivated a small amount of marijuana can end up in prison and die, as happened to Aldo Bianzino. Now the criminalization of undocumented immigrants is likely to send to jail thousands of people whose only fault is to be unemployed and not having had the opportunity to renew the residence permit. In a country where the perpetrators of the worst financial fraud and the many politicians condemned never pay for what they have done, and certainly never end up closed in these inhumane prisons.
But public opinion shaped by the lies of the regime imagines that in prison there are only murderers, rapists and terrorists, and confuses criminals really dangerous to society, who are a minority of the total, with the mass of prisoners that if they were treated as human beings could escape marginalization. 90% of prisoners are inside for minor offenses and would be entitled to decent living conditions and an effective path to recovery for the benefit of society. But anyway, whatever the crime, inhumane prisons are useless, to punish someone treating him in the worst possible way it will simply means that he will go out worse than he entered.
Instead in 2009 Italy prisons are a black hole, inhuman places where anything can happen, as unfortunately demonstrated cases of Manuel Eliantonio, Marcello Lonzi, Niki Aprile Gatti and many others of whom we don't even know the names, who were not ferocious criminals, just ordinary people who had committed a mistake or, as in the case of Niki, no one knows whether they had actually committed a crime. Yet they have been killed in jail without reason, without justice. In Italian prisons there were 1449 deaths in 9 years, 514 classified as suicides, but many, too many cases lacks serious investigation on the real causes of death.
"There is no freedom when laws allow that in some events a man ceases to be a person and become a thing." wrote Cesare Beccaria in 1700. In three hundred years we have not learned anything. And Karl Popper wrote that "The state of civilization of a country is recognized by the state of its prisons. Then there is no doubt that here we are in an inhuman and uncivilized country.
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Comments
The USA is in such a terrible state. (1 in 147 incarcerated).
Numbers are growing.
what a mess and it's true here as well. Very few people seem to even be aware of it, let alone care.
be well my friend