ROME, Aug 6 — A European court ruling that Italy must pay a Bosnian man €1,000 (RM5,000) in compensation for cramped conditions while he was in jail for theft has sparked a debate about how to relieve overcrowding in Italian prisons.
Amid warnings there could be many more such claims unless Italy provides more space for a jail population of 63,587 people – some 20,000 over capacity – proposals ranged from building more prisons to jailing fewer people pending trial.
Prisoners’ rights group Antigone said Italy might have to pay the same compensation to all inmates as it paid out to Izet Sulejmanovic, who complained to the European Court of Human Rights about the conditions of part of his confinement.
“Following the European Court sentence in favour of this Bosnian prisoner, the state risks having to pay €64 million in compensation,” said Antigone’s president, Patrizia Gonnella.
The court ruling, issued in mid-July but only reported this week, said the lack of space in a cell Sulejmanovic shared with six other people in Rome’s Rebibbia Prison from November 2002 to April 2003 constituted “inhumane or degrading treatment”.
It cited guidelines setting the minimum space for prisoners as seven square metres each. He only had 2.7 square metres, to which he was confined for 18 hours a day until he was moved to a less crowded cell until his release in October 2003.
The head of the Prison Administration Department, Franco Ionta, acknowledged that Sulejmanovic had been held in very crowded conditions for “a very short time”.
PRISON-BUILDING
The justice ministry has promised a major prison-building plan in response to warnings from rights groups, prison guards and politicians of all stripes, including members of the ruling centre-right government such as Rome’s Mayor Gianni Alemanno.
“We need to build more jails to guarantee not just humane treatment and civil rights but also the safety of our citizens,” he said at the presentation of a programme to have a small group of prisoners in Rome doing “civic” work such as street sweeping.
Prison guard unions say the combination of record numbers of inmates and lower staff numbers due to government spending cuts mean Italian prisons “have become mere deposits of human lives”.
With justice ministry data showing that 30,436 prisoners, or half of the total, are in preventative custody awaiting trial, an association of penal judges recommended that this measure be “reserved only for crimes that are a real danger to society”.
One recent anti-overcrowding solution was a mass pardon in 2006 declared by the then centre-left government, which ended up freeing twice as many prisoners as the 12,000 originally intended and was blamed for a subsequent rise in crime.
The conservative government of Silvio Berlusconi, which came to power last year promising a crackdown on crime, rules out any new pardon. It promises 17,000 more prison places and wants more foreign prisoners to serve their sentences in their homelands. – Reuters
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