The unjust and absurd death of Stefano Cucchi, and the suicide of the new Red brigade militant Diana Blefari have served at least to talk about the prison problem in Italy, ignored and censored for years. Art. 27 of the italian Constitution, not applied as unfortunately happens to most of our basic charter, states that "Punishment cannot consist of treatment contrary to human dignity and must be aimed at rehabilitation of the offender."
This is not currently the situation in Italy. Many citizens feel toward the inmates a sense of annoyance, at best, or hate, without knowing all the stories of people who are in prison. Some is true were sentenced for violent crimes such as murder and rape and it is difficult to feel compassion for them. Yet we should also understand that there is no point in hating these people, lock them up for years and then hope they leave prison better than they entered it. It's needed a recovery path and a surveillance system even after the end of their sentence, thus avoiding repetitions of the crimes that are a little too common.
The majority of prisoners is in prison for less serious crimes and for shorter periods. First, theft: the common people hate thieves because they feel victimized, many had something small or large stolen, but in this case the prison as it is, serves no useful purpose at all. The state spends 150 to 300 euros per day for each detainee. From 4500 to 9000 euros per month. Without counting the cost of trials. Should think about how absurd it is spending, to punish a thief, ten or a hundred times the amount he has stolen. Moreover, while the perpetrators of violent crimes are often discovered, it is known that the majority of thieves can get away. It follows that prisons aren't even useful to the prevention of crime, because most of the thieves has a good chance of not ending up in jail. The punishment of thieves in Italy then it is particularly unfair when we see that those who commit serious financial crimes, that steal a lot more money, always manage to escape prison in one way or another. The first thing to do to avoid theft would be to create unemployment benefit, that in Italy doesn't exist, to eliminate at least the problem of those who steals out of necessity. The second thing would be to create career paths for social rehabilitation of those who committed a theft, otherwise to hope that after a few months in jail they don't return to the previous life is pure utopia.
Another group of prisoners are those who have committed drug-related crimes, as happened to Stefano Cucchi. These people are not really dangerous, and punish them with prison has not the slightest reason, unless they are major drug traffickers linked to organized crime. The truth is that drugs are not really more dangerous than alcohol, and have been declared illegal for totally arbitrary historical motivations, and thus their consumption can be limited only by alternative measures to imprisonment, such as periods of social services and pathways to recovery. Finally there are the immigrants, who often end up in jail for petty theft or small drug dealing but also simply because they are immigrants, as happens today in the CIE. Here too the state spends up to 3000 euros a month to detain an immigrant who has not committed any crime. It would get better results giving airplane tickets to illegal immigrants and legalizing those who have a job. The punitive rage favored by certain laws (but only for the crimes of the poor, because towards the crimes of politicians and the rich there are great guarantees and never jail) doesn't accomplish anything, besides being contrary to the Constitution.
Not to mention that it is contrary to the Christian message, which calls for forgiving our enemies, to respond to evil with good, visiting prisoners, and many other things that the majority of Italian Catholics does not and has no intention of doing. Their Catholicism wakes up only when they have to be against something, against homosexuals, against the freedom of mothers to decide whether or not to have a child, against the freedom of people who don't want a religious education for their children. Instead, when a poor Christ dies in prison even though he had done no harm to anyone or is rejected into the sea or imprisoned simply because it is alien, who knows why the protests of Italian Catholics are much more timid. Yet the priorities set by Jesus are very clear in Matthew 25, 34-46: no mention of assisted reproduction, crucifixes in classrooms, gay marriage or abortion. There is talk of the hungry, the thirsty, the sick, the foreigners and the prisoners.
Francesco Defferrari
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