Pandemia e carcere. Lezioni per il futuro

The essay maintains that, due to their overcrowding, Italian prisons in the pandemic period are very risky places for prisoners. At the moment, there are very few spaces for the quarantine of prisoners who have been in contact with other positive detainees. Only allowing the use of home detention or in health care facilities it will be possible to assure the safety of prisoners, but an old case law prevents this solution discriminating detainees and depriving them of their right to health. The extraordinary measure adopted by the Italian government had a very poor effect on the number of prisoners. In the spring what caused a decisive decreasing of the number of people in jails was the attention of public prosecutors in the use of pre-trial detention and in the incarceration for short times of authors of petty offences. In spite of the decreasing of incarceration, we did not have an increase of crimes, and this experience shows that we can, normally, drastically reduce the use of incarceration. Moreover, with the new spread of COVID-19, we must come back to a little number of incarcerations to guarantee a minimum of safety to prisoners.