He spent one night in prison, the second he hanged himself. Massimiliano Pinna was 32 years old: last Saturday the Volante officers stopped him in San Benedetto, Cagliari, while he was driving a car. He had tried to escape on foot, but was stopped again: he had documents, credit cards and other personal effects on him that had just been stolen from a parked vehicle. Thus the arrest was made and the doors of the Ettore Scalas penitentiary in Uta opened for him.
A difficult view outside, inside it couldn't hold: last night Pinna took his own life. His is the thirty-second suicide in prison since the beginning of the year: 29 inmates who took their own lives, three prison guards.
Making the chilling count is Gennarino De Fazio, general secretary of UilPa, penitentiary police. «Yet another death "by hanging" in our prisons, where we are now facing a de facto death penalty», denounces the trade unionist, «is part of a context of unstoppable crisis if not with immediate and impactful interventions that take note of the perhaps truly unprecedented emergency, at least considering the record number of those who take their own lives."
Prison overcrowding, with 14 thousand prisoners in excess of the regulation places, "the lack of operators - the Penitentiary Police alone lacks 18 thousand units - and the many other structural, infrastructural, equipment and organizational deficiencies cannot be addressed with ordinary actions", he claims De Fazio.
Hence the appeal to the Minister of Justice, Carlo Nordio, and to the entire Meloni government, to «take concrete note of this and pass a prison decree with tangible measures which cannot be summarized in the reduction, sic et simpliciter, to 60 effective days of the training course for penitentiary police officers which will have an imperceptible impact on the number of hires, but which will end up being detrimental in terms of professionalism, competence and growth of the force".
(Unioneonline/E.Fr.)