Sebastiano Ardita
(Magistrato. Director General of the Directorate General of the Treatment of Prisoners and the Ministry of Justice)
by Casablanca on 11 November 2010
The knowledge of the universe
penitentiary, with its contradictions and its structural limitations, it may now be a good opportunity to measure the state of implementation of the criminal policies of our nation, and not just them.
shrouded in mystery with thick walls that have little or nothing left glimpse from the inside, the instrument of the imagination of people imprisoned for years was considered the only possible answer to the many crimes that we saw told by the press, but, at the same time, a place of removal of evil and those who have accomplished.
Its history, the problems of those who work, even with its rules appear to still unknown more.
So also its function is still a prisoner of a myth: that of security that is guaranteed to citizens by the fact that the bad guys are safe, separate from law-abiding citizens, and made it impossible to do more harm.
The photograph of the prison today is very different from this conventional representation.
is true that inside there are many dangerous people, and that some of these are there to atone for long sentences.
But it is true that among the nearly 70,000 inmates there are more than a third from outside the Community.
Much are real poor. In the sense that not only can not afford to have a scooter or go to the movies, but in some cases have the problem of finding something to eat or do not know what a doctor.
A proportion of these also are not just criminals - even if they have violated the criminal law - and indeed would have had the intention to work, if it had been granted a few opportunities.
then add that among the prison population 20% suffers from varying degrees of mental disorders and that quarter is represented by drug addicts.
But there is another important issue. The prison building as a place of detention, as a place where you enter and pay for their sins is nothing less than utopia. A study
I commissioned in 2007 showed that 30% of those arrested and taken to the prison found freedom after only 3 days. And even 60% will stay for less than a month.
Compared to these, therefore, the detention, for its brevity, is not able to offer or provide security for citizens, or rehabilitative treatment to inmates.
Combining the two figures it follows that, along with dangerous criminals, including a mass of poor and misfits in a jail for a few days and it passes. Crowded facilities and could be recruited by organized crime. Among these unfortunate few, already suffering from serious trouble, take their own lives. Often in the early days of detention.
What comes to mind reading this data? First, that our criminal justice system as a whole does not work. But it's only a euphemism.
We could also say that it is on the verge of collapse, because it determines the failure of a large part of his undertaken and therefore does not provide a useful service.
By comparison it is as if the school system 60% of young people leaving school. If the health system 60% of admissions ended with the death of the patient.
The second consideration is that what is missing is a director in the overall criminal justice system, not only political but also legal, which starts from the observation of how many and which detention it produces, and for how long, which raises the question of who manages to achieve concrete results.
The third observation is that prison workers are the most productive among all the relevant criminal, if only because, speaking last segment, are called to a superhuman effort to correct the distortions generated by other parts of the system: to prevent the suicide of the desperate, poor and HIV patients receive by offering them a job or another interest in life, to interpret the language and the problems of aliens.
Yes, because until this Constitution shall be in force, in prison more than any other place will be impossible to discrimination of "race, sex, language and religion."
Not to mention the need to rigorously enforce the rules against what they have tried to assert their abuse even within the penal institutions: members of the mafia and other criminal powers.
Only by knowing this world is impossible to understand the role that the institution has to play prison, the prison as a laboratory and develop anti-racist, as a last frontier of the welfare state, as both a place of injury and repair of the values \u200b\u200bof our Constitution. And then, inevitably, an area non-political, ideological anti, to keep away from the cracks that are determined in the Nation. A place where suffering prevails, and where human dignity has to assert itself even before his individual needs. Where operators share the discomfort with the prisoners on their skin and they pay their involvement in an extreme environment.
Where the disease, suffering, and even suicide eventually bring together the prisoners and those who are still considered by some ungenerous captors.
not deal with the prison is wasting a chance to know the health of our democracy.
A missed opportunity, not only for society, but also because many experts think the justice system that this world does not know him at all.
And all this while tanti benpensanti ritengono che tutti i cattivi stiano bene e stabilmente lì: al sicuro dietro le sbarre.
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