The government’s vademecum to prisoners: “With the Prisons decree, automatic sentence reductions”, but it’s not true. “Misleading and dangerous message”

The prisons explode and the government decree on prison matters, just converted into law, does nothing concrete to alleviate overcrowding. The Keeper of the Seals Charles Nordio he knows it well, so much so that he is quick to announce further interventions (possibly able to avoid pre-trial detention for white-collar criminals) while he claims that “in two or three months“the measure will show its effects (video). In the meantime, however, his ministry has found a way to avoid new riots. like the one in Turin in the last few days: to make dying prisoners believe that thanks to the right they will be able to get automatically the longed for sentence reductions for “good conduct“, without having to go through the evaluation of the Surveillance judges. A lexical scam – reported by magistrates, the Prisoners’ Guarantor and the Penitentiary Police unions – contained in a vademecum on the Prisons decree signed by the deputy head of the Dap (Department of Penitentiary Administration) Lina DiDomenicosent on August 12 to the directors of the institutes and to the regional superintendents with the request to give the “maximum diffusionmaking it usable with direct distribution to inmates and interned and posted in the common rooms”.

What (really) changes with the decree – The document begins, with propagandistic tones, praising the “various innovations that improve prison conditions” introduced by the new law. The first point mentions the increase from four to six phone calls allowed each month, omitting however that it will not apply to all prisoners (for those convicted of a series of serious crimes, including drug trafficking, the limit remains at two). But it is in points 3 and 4 that the “juice” is discussed, the benefit most desired by prisoners: the early releasethat is the “bonuses” of 45 days every six months of time served, granted to those who “participate in the re-education work”. The government did not want to increase the days of time served (as requested in a proposed law by Renzian MP Roberto Giachetti) but limited itself to modifying the procedural process: prisoners will no longer have to apply every six months to have the benefit applied, but it will be the judge who recognizes it “everything at once“, after having evaluated the prerequisites, when the accumulation of “bonuses” becomes relevant for the end of sentence or to reduce the residual sentence by allowing access to alternative measures (semi-liberty, probation, house arrest).

The government’s narrative – The problem is that this mechanism, in the government’s vademecum, is described in a rather misleading way. “The sentence will be reduced by 45 days every six months, automatically without the need to make any request to the Surveillance Magistrate, if the prisoner will participate in the re-education activities (study, work, etc.)”, we read in point 3. And again in point 4: “Every time the convicted person makes an application for alternative measures to detention, automatically the Surveillance magistrate will apply the reduction for early release”. The adverb “automatically”, repeated twice, has a clear subtext: to make those serving their sentence believe that the Surveillance judges no longer have a say in the matter, and therefore are “obliged” – like notaries – to grant discounts to those who have participated in re-educational activities in prison. In reality, this is not the case at all: it is always the magistrate who must evaluate, on the basis of the reports of the prison staff, whether the prisoner is worthy of early release. And it certainly cannot be enough to have studied and worked, if – for example – one has been guilty during the same period of episodes of violence. On the other hand, the text of the decree itself clearly states this, in which it is stated that the judge “ascertains the existence of the conditions for the granting of early release in relation to each preceding six-month period”.

“False expectations, risk of destabilizing effect” – The first complaint about the “slippery” expressions used by the government had come from Osapp penitentiary police union: the vademecum, declared the secretary Leo Beneduci“contains a macroscopic error” that a department of the Ministry of Justice “cannot afford”. In the document, Beneduci underlines, “it is erroneously stated that every time a prisoner presents an application he is entitled to days of early release. This is not only a false statement, but also dangerously misleading“. The spokesman for the Prisoners’ Guarantors is also critical Samuel Ciambriellowhich denounces how reading the vademecum can “generate excessive expectations by the prison population” and says he is “surprised” by the “emphatic tone” used in the text. And even the judiciary raises concerned voices: “I find that this communication is dangerously misleading, because it creates false expectations in the prison population already subjected to free suffering for the general conditions of imprisonment and ends up placing the blame on the Surveillance Magistrates responsibility that the law does not allow her to take on,” she tells fact.it the togato advisor of the CSM Marcello Basilicoof the progressive group of Area. An approach, he concludes, which “risks revealing itself destabilizing for a prison situation that is already at risk”. What could be the reaction of a prisoner who is convinced that a judge has not granted him a benefit that was due to him by law?

“Automatic recognition? No, more complex” – Reached by our newspaper, Stephen CelliPM in Rimini and member of the Steering Committee of theNational Association of Magistrates (within which he chairs the Penitentiary Law Commission) puts the concepts back in order: “It is not truesimply, that the recognition is automatic. The only automatic mechanism is triggered when the prisoner requests another alternative measure: in that context, the reductions in sentence are also evaluated and, if necessary, recognized, with the same criteria as before“, he explains. “This actually worsens the mechanism: the longer the sentence, the more semesters there will be to evaluate and the information, opinions and therefore the judgement of the magistrate, which must in any case concern the single semester, will be more complicatedThe danger was reported during the hearings in the Justice Commissionbut in vain,” he recalls. “Then the basic judgment remains: there is no improvement in the inhumane conditions in which the majority of prisoners serve their sentences. In the meantime, prisoners commit suicide and those who do not do so suffer a inhuman prisonwith the not so hidden satisfaction of those who believe that detention entails the loss of all rightsnot only of freedom, which the very fascist Rocco code was satisfied with”.