According to Italian law, inmate mothers can keep their children with them until they reach 3 years of age. After that, children have to leave prison and are entrusted to the care of the other parent, a relative or, as a last resort, to social services. This provision, on the one hand, guarantees the right of prisoners with children to be mothers and the right of children to grow up, at least for the first years of life, with their mothers, but, on the other hand, it entails that the children concerned have to spend the delicate age of formation in the unhealthy environment of prison.

How are things in practice?

Today, 60 children aged between 0 and 3 are living in Italian prisons. However, we seldom hear something about them. Recently, news came out about a one-year-old baby, living in the prison of Messina with his mother, who accidentally ate some rat poison and nearly died. The prison was infested by mice and a police officer took the initiative and put the poison in the section where children and mothers live. This is an extreme example, but it highlights the dangerous and, in general, inappropriate conditions in which some unfortunate children have to spend the first years of their lives.

To avoid that, in recent years several associations of volunteers, together with political and judicial institutions, have worked hard in order to find some valid alternatives to children’s incarceration without interrupting the relationship with their parents. Thanks to these efforts, in 2001 the so-called 8 March Law was approved, which changed some parts of the previous regulation and favored the introduction of new mechanisms to facilitate the access to alternative measures for inmate women with small children.

Nevertheless, the alternative measures provided for by the law are accessible only to some categories of inmate mothers, in particular, to women who do not present any risk of recidivism and who can demonstrate the real possibility of re-establishing a cohabitation with their children. In this way, such conditions excluded all women on the margins of society, such as women who are incarcerated for drug-related offences. And house arrest is an alternative to prison that is not available to foreign women who don't have a fixed residence and whose fate, along with the fate of their children, is therefore inevitably to be confined to a prison cell.

The way forward

A further reform was introduced in 2011. This new law provided for the possibility, except in cases where custody is deemed absolutely necessary, for women with children to serve their sentence in an Institute of Attenuated Custody for Detainee Mothers (ICAM). This would allow them to live with their children until the age of six. There are also so-called Protected Family Houses, where women who do not have a stable domicile can serve sentences of house arrest.

The ICAM are facilities of the prison administration established experimentally in 2007. They are designed to not look like traditional prisons: officers wear regular clothes, the security systems are not recognisable by children and the structures look like familiar environments. However, aside from their appearance, the ICAM are containment structures, not alternatives to detention. They are often located close to the real prison and far from the city fabric. Even though they do not have the look of a normal prison, they are still places designed to keep people in.

Protected Family Homes

A valid alternative to children’s detention are Protected Family Houses. They are real apartments with no bars or gates, integrated in the urban fabric, with play grounds, places for the educational activities, for medical treatments and for receiving visits from other relatives. In a Protected Family House, the inmates have more opportunities to behave as real mothers. For example, they are able bring their children to school and to play with them in the outdoor garden.

The 2011 law, however, do not provide any financing for the Protected Family Houses, which, unlike the ICAM, are not under the direction of the prison administration and have to be managed by local authorities.

Until today, only a single Protected Family House exists, opened in Rome in July 2017. With the establishment of five or six other houses, all the children who are currently living in Italian prison could be hosted with their mothers in structures more adequate to their needs. At the present moment, however, the realization is still far from being achieved.