A prisoner’s suicide highlights the crisis in Italian prisons

During the night in Santa Maria Capua Vetere prison, a Campanian inmate committed suicide: 53-year-old VB was in a cell with another person. The judge ordered an autopsy. This was confirmed by the regional ombudsman for people subject to restrictive freedom measures, Samuele Ciambriello, who maintained the numbers: since the beginning of the year, there have been 78 suicides in Italian prisons, by mid-September 1,335 suicide attempts, about 100 in Campania, where since the beginning of 2024 there have been 10 suicides. “There are no politics,” Ciambriello said. “He is silent, he removes the prison. Italian prisons have become society’s garbage dump, with too many drug addicts and psychiatric prisoners. About 8,000 prisoners have less than a year remaining on their sentences, 900 are in Campania. Deaths and state murders have been announced, with complete indifference even from civil society to what is happening in places of deprivation of liberty.” Report According to the spokesman, appeals from President Mattarella, the Pope, associations and spokesmen are “unheard.” “We hope,” concluded Regional Ombudsman Samuele Ciambriello, “that next week’s mobilization of bar associations, various associations and ombudsmen against the security decree, which is having an explosive impact on the prison system, can at least bring politics and government together, overcoming penal, political and media populism to address the issue of prisons.”