In 2000, the Italian prison regulation established that by 2005 all cells should have a shower: a regulation that was both late and optimistic. Twenty-one years later the Antigone association entered 67 prisons and was able to verify what happened to that rule: in one out of three of those visited there are no showers in the cells.
And after all, even if there are showers, it can happen that there is no water. “In the Frosinone prison”, the researchers of the association write in a new report, “frequent episodes of lack of running water have been reported”. In the prison of Santa Maria Capua Vetere, where on 6 April 2020 the prison police brutally beat the inmates who had protested to ask for more protection against the coronavirus, there is no water connection, so everything that comes out of the taps is not drinking. On the other hand, it is “particularly ferrous and cloudy in color”. In the institute of Borgo San Nicola, in Lecce, the light went off for two days along with the water. It was the end of June and the temperatures in the area were close to 40 degrees.
Today, the heat is no less merciless, yet “due to the pandemic, in 24 percent of the institutions there are sections in which we have passed from the open cell regime to the closed cell one”. In these incandescent furnaces of iron and concrete, there are three, four, five and even six. In Taranto the overcrowding rate is 181 percent, in Latina 167 percent, in Como 152 percent. For many prisoners and detainees it means not having even those three square meters of floor space available below which the Strasbourg Court speaks of “inhuman and degrading treatment”. Among them, almost 20 thousand have to serve less than three years, so they could access alternative measures: but many have committed impedimental crimes (i.e. serious crimes such as murder but also home burglaries and robberies), many do not have a home where to serve homes or a community that welcomes them, and some lack any legal help to request them, so they remain behind bars. Without blame, 29 children under the age of three also remain in prison with their mothers.
Water is not the only thing missing: “In 42 percent of the institutes being monitored,” says Alessio Scandurra of Antigone, “cells were found with screens on the windows that prevent the passage of air and natural light”.
In the prisons, the air that pulls, when it pulls, is this. And this is the summer that the people who are locked up in it live.
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