What is separate detention? The absurdities and hoaxes of the Meloni government's prison plan.

Summer in prison is the opposite of summer in freedom : it's sad, it's suffocating, it's distressing. And it's marred by "prison plans," which come back to mock us with disarming regularity . I've picked up the 2014 plan, and it's practically a carbon copy of the one just presented by the government. But it also has some "creative" definitions, the void described as if it could actually happen.

As for early release, we're told that the information profile is being "strengthened," "especially with a view to ensuring maximum updating of prisoner reports." That is, explain: " maximum updating " means that the days always remain the same, but does anyone (the magistrates?) clarify, wasting time and energy, what everyone already knows: how many days you're entitled to if you don't screw up and don't waste them badly? Someone (the Minister) also told us that it would be a state failure to grant two extra months of early release each year for all the unnecessary suffering, hardship, and violations of rights endured by prisoners. What if we called it "compensation " instead? What Europe asked of us, when it suggested that if we can't guarantee prisoners respect for the law, we should at least try to give them something that "compensates" for their neglected and violated dignity. But how can we volunteers respond to the media and political " war machine " that tells us that bringing forward the release from prison by a handful of days for people already close to the end of their sentences means putting the country's security at risk?

The fact that the prison plan cites 10,000 inmates who appear to be "suitable" for home detention is called "differentiated detention ." Undersecretary Alfredo Mantovano says , "With this bill, we are introducing a significant innovation. We are offering drug and alcohol addicts who have committed crimes a serious, concrete, and verifiable alternative: home detention in a rehabilitation center." But the serious alternative quickly becomes Minister Nordio's "loaves and fishes ," who talks about sending 10,000 drug addicts to rehabilitation centers! " Considering that 31% use drugs or alcohol, if just a third participated in this type of program, we would see a reduction of ten thousand drug addicts in prisons. This would significantly reduce overcrowding."

But if prisons are full of drug-addicted inmates with two or three years left on their sentences, if they're placed in community prisons it's certainly not easy to find them, if it's unclear who's paying, if the much-promised community prison register has gone missing, what purpose does it serve to make community prisons accessible not under six years, but under eight? It's called " differentiated detention ," but differentiated by what? By the fact that here, imagination and superficiality have no limits? (And what will the evaluation commission that will submit each inmate's therapeutic program to do?) The " city center or sea view prisons," says Building Commissioner Marco Doglio, will not be sold but "enhanced and transformed." “Real estate valorization ” is the government’s new, imaginative creation. I’ll requisition your cell with a sea view and in exchange I’ll give you a container, an Albania-style prefabricated building , the latest invention in terms of placing detainees in confined spaces to sleep, eat, perhaps breathe, certainly not to serve a sentence that “tends towards re-education ” as the Constitution requires.

Question: But when the commissioner says that " the approach is new modules, expansions, renovations, and large-scale real estate transactions ," what are these real estate transactions, and how are they supposed to generate new bunk beds? By depriving prisoners of their sea view and "selling" it to the highest bidders? If it weren't for Covid, a disaster for everyone, except prisoners, video calls, introduced during the pandemic and which no one has had the courage to remove, wouldn't exist now. It seemed like it was finally understood that phone calls must be liberalized, as is already the case in many countries, because they are one of the few true ways to prevent suicide; strengthening relationships, maximizing space for loved ones, is perhaps the only way to make people feel less alone and isolated. But no, it's too luxurious; what the "epochal" prison plan allows is a paltry two extra phone calls a month; there isn't even the courage to implement a small, cost-free reform like liberalizing phone calls.

Finally, perhaps we should feel reassured by the creation of a task force, a term which refers to " a small group of highly competent and/or specialized individuals, with specific functions and duties to carry out an operation or purpose." This task force is supposed to meet once a week. To do what? As a citizen so deeply involved in the lives of detainees that I still come in every day in July, accompanied by many volunteers, to provide a breath of fresh air for those who must endure this suffocating summer in prison, I would like to know who this "task force" is made up of and what it will do. Am I asking too much?

*Director of Ristretti Orizzonti

FROM

Ornella Favero