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Penitentiary institutions, 2022 was the year with the most suicides ever

Overcrowding, suicides, self-harm. The situation of Italian penitentiary institutions is rather critical, as the photographer il XIX report of Antigone on the conditions of detention. The number of people in prison continues to grow and many of the chronic problems of our prison system are aggravated. The report is based on data collected during 2022, in 97 penitentiary institutions (64 prisons, 22 prisons, 2 institutions with attenuated custody – Eboli and Laureana di Borrello – and the Icam di Lauro).

Overcrowding

If the official capacity is 51,249 places, there were 56,674 prisoners in prison as of April 30, 5,425 more than the regulatory capacity. However, the unavailable places, which were 3,646 in May 2023, must be subtracted from the regulatory posts. Against an official average crowding rate of 110.6%, the most crowded regions are Puglia (137.3%), Lombardy (133.3%) and Liguria (126.5%). However, if counted and unavailable seats are taken into account, actual crowding is 119%.

A third of prisoners are over 50

In prisons, the average age of the prison population continues to rise: at the end of last year, the over 50s were 29%. Ten years earlier, at the end of 2011, they were 17%. In the same period of time, the over 70s doubled, going from 571 (1%) to 1,117 (2%). The under 25s have decreased from 10 to 6%.

Few women

Women remain few. At the end of April there were 2,480 prisoners in Italian prisons: 4.4% of the total prison population. A percentage which is substantially stable over time, and which has not reached five points since the early 1990s. Yet the percentage of complaints that reach women stands at 18.3% of the total: the gap between complaints and attendance in prison is considerable. Antigone hypothesizes that this difference is the result of various factors: the scarce “criminal depth” of the women which means that a number of complaints do not have a criminal follow-up, the sentences tend to be shorter received by women, the specific rules on alternatives to prison for mother prisoners, the higher level of trust that women enjoy in the supervisory judiciary which determines greater access to the external penal area.

The suicides

Last year went down in history as the year with the most prison suicides ever. They have been 85 people who took their own lives within a penitentiary institution during 2022 – out of 214 total deaths – or more than one every four days. Five suicides occurred in the Foggia prison alone. This year, in the first months of 2023, there were 23 suicides in prison.

In prisons suicides are about 23 times higher than suicides in the wild. Of the 85 people who killed themselves, 5 were women. There were 36 foreigners, 20 of whom were homeless. The mean age was 40 years. The youngest person was a 20-year-old boy, the oldest a 71-year-old gentleman. Most of these people (50, or almost 60%) took their own lives in the first six months of detention. 21 in the first three, 16 in the first ten days and 10 even within the first 24 hours of arrival in prison. Of the 85 people who died by suicide in 2022, 28 had previously made at least one suicide attempt (in 7 cases even more than one attempt). In 68 (equal to 80%) they were involved in other critical events.

On April 25 and May 9, 2023 two inmates died on hunger strike in Augusta prison after 41 and 60 days of fasting. About 30 prisoners are on hunger strike every day.

Source: Vanity Fair

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