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Italy

Capital city — Rome

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Inmates that show good behavior may request a sentence adjustment after 26 years of sentence served.

Prisoners serving life sentences for specific crimes like mafia or terrorism are sentenced with ergastolo ostativo (life imprisonment without parole) if they do not cooperate with justice.

  • On 13th June 2019, The European Court of Human Rights, (ECHR) ruled against Italy in the case of Mr. Viola v. Italy for violation of article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
    Mr. Viola was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1995 for Mafia-related activities. At the time, he refused to cooperate with investigators out of fear for his and his family’s safety. As a result of his refusal, the sentence administration court rejected his application for sentence reduction in 2015. The court considers him a dangerous criminal.
    The ECHR found that, despite the seriousness of the crimes for which Mr. Viola was sentenced, his progress during his imprisonment should have been taken into consideration.

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    13/06/2019
    / Cour européenne des droits de l'homme

Individual acts of protest are recorded

yes

There were 1,089 protest movements in 2016.

Collective protest movements are quite frequent. The penitentiary police in most occasions act in a professional manner towards these protests.

Inmates who take part in collective movements cannot be subjected to criminal sanctions. However, in some cases, punitive reactions from the administration have been recorded.

Hunger strike is the most common form of protest. The reasons behind such protests are often individual (unfulfilled requests, access to work, etc.). Collective hunger strikes generally aim to denounce poor living conditions in prisons.

The public administration has a general a duty to respond to any request from a citizen. The prison administration does not have this obligation and often does not respond to requests from prisoners.

  • A mutiny began on 22 May 2019 at Campobasso prison (Molise region). Mauro Palma, President of the Italian MNP, was on ground to assess the situation. The regional coordinator of the Antigone association spoke about the tense atmosphere existing for the past several months within the overcrowded prison.

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    27/05/2019
    / Osservatorio Diritti

Total number of prisoners

57,608

i
2017
/ Ministry of Justice, “Prison population” (in Italian)

Italy’s prison population downward trend reversed in 2016 for the first time since 2010. The number of inmates increased to 57,608.

According to the observations of Antigone, the rise of prison population is not related to the number of offences registered that year. In 2016, there were 47,323 entries in prison, 1,500 more than in 2015. Nevertheless, there were 200,000 less offences registered than during the previous year1.

One of the reasons that explain overpopulation is the overrepresentation of foreigners in prison (up to 38%). According to the submission of Antigone to the UN Committee against Torture in 2017, the main reason for overpopulation was the migration crisis that started in 2016.

  1. Antigone, “One year in prison. XIV Report on: press release”, 19 April 2018, p.4. ↩

  • On 16 May 2019, the Antigone association published its 15th annual report on the Italian prison system. The report highlights, among the main trends, the increase in the number of people detained in Italian prisons. There are 8,000 more prisoners than in 2015, even though crime is reported to have decreased by 15% compared to 2018. The report also compares two other trends in Italian prisons: overcrowding (120%) and suicide rates (11.4 per 10,000).

    i
    16/05/2019
    / Diritti Umani