The italian death penalty

”As everyone knows, the death penalty doesn’t exist in Italy. It’s true, there’s still the freedom to torture, in that our penal code does not mention it and some people take advantage, as they did during the Genoa’s G8 at Bolzaneto and at the Diaz school. But since 01 January 1948, the death penalty no longer exists, as stated in the Italian Constitution. That’s the reason why capital sentences are executed with discretion in the prisons, without being too visible. The beating up is called a heart attack or a cerebral haemorrhage. Strangling is always a suicide, often with the laces of their shoes that even a cricket wouldn’t be able to use to hang itself. You can die in your cell and during your death throes, that can last for hours, as they did for Aldo Bianzino or for Stefano Cucchi, no one is present. The prison orderly is constantly somewhere else. The duty doctor late. When he arrives, reassuring, with his bag, he never notices the signs of the hitting, the bruises, and the injuries. The death is natural. The doctors’ photocopy diagnoses state that the injuries were self inflicted. They always hurt themselves. The detainee was depressed, he couldn’t cope. The signs of the dark badness that the dead prisoners inflicted on themselves are the witness letters sent to the relatives, and especially their mothers, shortly before their death.
They are announcements of death, from lads who are shouting out in an uncertain handwriting, desperate, lads who are about to be killed dead. The mothers ask for an interview, a transfer, but however, right up to the death, that is denied, as in the case of Niki Aprile Gatti. Prison, the place that by definition is the safest and the most looked after in the world, is an arm of death that extends right down the peninsula from Genoa, to Florence, to Rovereto. Each year, about 180 detainees die in prison.
A third are suicides. The ones that take their own life are usually the lads being imprisoned for the first time. In 2009, there were sixty nine suicides, a record as never before, a suicide rate that is twenty one times the rate for the Italian population not in prison. It’s possible to think that it’s normal that that happens, in Italy like elsewhere. However, Canada has a rate that is four times lower than the Italian rate and the Polish Minister of Justice had to resign because of a suicide. In prison, the ones who survive and don’t commit suicide or get themselves suicided becomes habitual criminals, a danger to society when they return to freedom. The option of being on probation in the care of the social services has in fact been eliminated. Probation is a measure for re-education to protect the safety of the citizens. The prisoners on probation with the social services, in fact, almost never commit other crimes and go back inside: only three out of ten. Those who serve their whole sentence in prison continue to commit crime: a good seven out of ten.
This book is a painful chorus of voices that tell us the story of infernal to-ing and fro-ing in which the death penalty is inflicted without a verdict, without guilt, without witnesses, and above all without anyone being guilty. The prison, like the uniform, is not put on trial, and anyone ending up behind bars is just a number with no longer any rights. The death penalty has never been abolished, it has evolved. Anyone, to general surprise, found dead in his cell, with a swollen face, his organs in a state of devastation, is just one who is “differently suicided”.( Beppe Grillo)