Simone Niort is a young man with significant psychiatric problems who has been in prison since the age of nineteen. In eight years in prison Simone attempted suicide at least twenty times, injured himself at least 300 times, underwent more than one hundred disciplinary proceedings and was incessantly transferred from one prison to another in Sardinia. In June 2023, for disciplinary reasons, he was moved to Turin, losing contact with his family. At the end of January he was sent back to Sardinia, thanks also to the intervention of Susanna Ronconi and the Guarantor for Turin prisoners Monica Gallo. Simone’s journey is a true Calvary and must be told.
Until his arrest in June 2016, Simone’s life was marked by difficulties in integrating due to his mental distress. During adolescence her condition worsened due to the use of substances. She commits crimes against people and property and ends up in prison.
But Simone doesn’t understand, he doesn’t have the ability to understand the reason for his imprisonment, his illness doesn’t allow him to. After countless suicide attempts, self-mutilation and disciplinary sanctions, in 2020 the Surveillance Office ordered a period of psychiatric observation as required by the penitentiary system to verify whether Simone’s condition is compatible with prison. The conditions are all there also because, in 2019, in a criminal case, the officially appointed technical consultant had ascertained that Simone’s illness had worsened further in prison where the young man had developed a “prison reactive syndrome”. The psychiatric observation was completed in 2021, but the report remains confidential: neither Simone nor his defender will be able to obtain a copy of it.
The Surveillance Office at the time instead read the law and in November 2022 indicated that Simone has a condition that makes him incompatible with prison status. Nonetheless, he does not decide to place him outside of prison, but orders the Penitentiary Administration Department to identify a suitable penitentiary institution to house Simone and his baggage of suffering and mental distress.
The request is reiterated in 2023, but the right answer will never come. The reason is simple, the request was addressed to the non-competent administration. The Surveillance should have asked not the Dap but the competent administrative health authority to identify an alternative treatment path to prison. Perhaps due to the structural lack of healthcare facilities in Sardinia for people like Simone, perhaps out of fear, the choice was a non-choice or an obligatory choice. Simone could not be placed in a place suitable for his condition while respecting his dignity as a human being, but he could not even be freed because his sentence would end in 2026. All this ends on the shoulders of the most fragile, on Simone, the person who would need all the attention of those who have his body, his time and his life.
The Calvary continues, the suicide attempts do not stop, the wounds, the cuts, the ingestion of objects, the screams, the violence against things are daily. Simone regularly ends up in a “smooth” or “transit” cell so that he does not harm himself or others. He remains isolated, does not carry out any educational activity. The disciplinary sanctions, some suspended because he was totally incapable of understanding and wanting, increasingly distance him from social life. He remains alone, alone with himself and his discomfort.
For all this, after all the attempts in Italy had no effect on Simone’s fate, the Strasbourg route was tried. Now the proceedings are underway, but even before the Judges of the European Court of Human Rights, the Italian Government seems to be indifferent to Simone’s fate. Here too, the psychiatric observation prepared in 2021 was not transmitted where it should appear that Simone is incompatible with prison. And a medical report certifying Simone’s real condition was not even presented as requested by the Strasbourg Judges. The indifference that surrounds Simone, completely incapable of understanding the reasons for his detention, impervious to the possibility of using his time to work on his own rehabilitation and re-education, leaves the writer with an indignant pain. Acting for Simone was born from the belief that true justice can only be achieved through the commitment of everyone, no one excluded. Therefore I write against indifference and in the hope that everything that is happening to Simone will cease as soon as possible, before other suicidal attempts can be successful, if anything this end of the sentence can be defined as good.
Antonella Mascia, *Lawyer, Board of Directors of Hands Off Cain