Everything can be done in the face of the prison emergency except placing it on the shoulders of good Italians. But precisely for this reason the government and Parliament have only one insurmountable limit in deciding what to do: reject the blackmail that comes from the prisoners and that in these very weeks is manifesting itself with violence and abuse. Be careful because this is the central point of the issue, even more so if we consider how things have gone in the past. For those less gifted with a memory it is worth remembering that in the decades behind us the issue of overcrowded prisons has arisen several times and has substantially always reached some form of solution by releasing (or in forms certainly less controlled than prison detention) several thousand people.
Well, every citizen with a sense of state and a reasonable approach to questions of justice knows that prison must have the purpose of re-education and reintegration into society. In short, in a civilized country you don’t think by saying “let’s put them in there and throw away the key”. At the same time, however, it is in no way admissible to pretend not to see that in these very days “radio carcere” is inciting prisoners to acts of widespread violence, which are not coincidentally occurring in many institutions (Parma, Turin, Biella, Ivrea, Pescara, La Spezia, Bari, Florence, Trieste, Prato, Terni, Rome). Why is all this happening? For a very simple reason: prisoners (some with convictions but many awaiting trial) “breathe” air that is good for them, in the sense that they see good possibilities of getting out or, in the worst case scenario, of ending up in facilities other than those in which they are. Here then is the tool that has always been used to increase the pressure on institutions: it makes life impossible for operators (prison police, health personnel, social workers) to join in an increasingly pressing request for intervention.
Call it what you like, but I think that all of this has a perfect definition in one word: blackmail. Precisely for this reason, however, it must be rejected in the most absolute manner and this must be even more true for the Meloni government, which makes security one of the distinctive points of its program. Does this mean eliminating the problem without addressing it? Of course not. We must work immediately to indicate structures capable of hosting the less dangerous prisoners without allowing them to do harm.
And we need to honestly undertake a program for new prisons, having the courage to abandon obsolete and inefficient buildings, whose location in the center of cities has always been convenient for everyone, including lawyers and magistrates.
Finally, it is possible to set up some of the infinite state properties that lie unused where it would be relatively easy to create lungs capable of functioning during emergency peaks (former barracks, just to give an example).
Then, of course, there are the aspects related to the timing of sentences and the application of the rules. In short, much can be done, but putting small and large criminals back into circulation for the sole fact that we cannot manage their detention is a mortal offense to the citizen who pays taxes and only tries to live in an acceptably safe nation. President Meloni, Minister Nordio and Minister Piantedosi must reject the blackmail of the prisoners without any delay. They too are people and many of them are Italian.
So we have to take care of them too. But first of all we have to take care of the others who cannot always be the ones who pay the bill.
#Prisons #government #give #blackmail #prisoners #shortage #solutions #Tempo
2024-08-19 16:32:31
