Italian NGO and Liberties member Antigone held a press conference last week to present the progress and findings of its prison monitoring work in a mid-term report. The report highlights the worrisome recurrence of old problems in Italian prisons, namely overcrowding and inadequate detention conditions.

It's getting crowded in here

The number of detainees has been growing since the beginning of the year; there are now 57,000 detainees in Italy, causing an overall overcrowding rate of 113.2 percent.

In many prisons, this has caused prisoners' allotted personal space to shrink below three square meters, the minimum allowed to avoid running afoul of Article 3 of the European Convention of Human Rights, which prohibits inhuman and degrading treatment.

The new revelations about prisoners' personal space hold even greater significance because Italy has already been charged with overcrowding by the European Court of Human Rights, back in 2013.

Glacial judiciary

The reasons for this continuous rise in the number of detainees is to be found in the slowness of Italian judicial procedures and the very frequent use of pre-trial detention.

This mid-term report has been mostly based on visits already made to 53 prisons for 2017. The monitoring work showed that in many prisons, basic detention conditions are not always granted. Moreover, Italian prisons have the lowest prisoners-to-guards ratio at 1.7 to 1, while there is a significant lack of educators.

Prisoners' rights to education and work are also not always granted. Even when inmates are allowed to work, they do so within the prison administration, not for an external public or private company, thus their prospects for finding employment once they are released are not enhanced.

Disconnected

Same goes for prisoners' right to family relationships: it is basically impossible for them to have access to modern technology in order to communicate with their relatives. For instance, only one prison in Italy allows detainees to talk to their relatives on Skype.

This is the picture of prison trends so far in 2017, a picture that is not showing any real progress towards safeguarding prisoners' rights, and on the contrary confirms the backwards steps already highlighted in Antigone's 2016 report, aptly named "Prison Is Back."

The association will continue its monitoring work in order to achieve a comprehensive view of the Italian prison situation in 2017, which will be used to carry out meaningful data analysis and draft the full annual report.