Overcrowding in Italian Jails. A Quantitative Analysis of Foreigners (Supraaglomerarea în închisorile italiene. O analiză cantitativă asupra străinilor)

Abstract

Victims of prison-overcrowding in Italy are part of a structural and systemic problem which is still struggling to find plausible solutions. When natives and foreigners are separately considered, the overcrowding phenomenon assumes a perspective that goes beyond the mere Italian attribute and, therefore, better focalises on the ones who, having the status of foreigner, are somehow in a weaker position in comparison with the native ones. As a matter of fact, the combination foreign prisoner-overcrowding has allowed to address the prison issue in accordance with a more specific approach that compares the Italian native component and the foreign one. This highlights that the overcrowding phenomenon in Italy is not an aspect suffered mainly by foreign prisoners, but it is equally endured by most of the native ones. Additionally, this analysis takes into account, on the one hand, the most outstanding foreign nationalities housed in Italian prisons and, on the other hand, the Regions having the highest rates of overcrowding, foreign inmates, and prison capacities. The outcomes reveal that Moroccans, Romanians, Tunisians and Albanians are the ones at increased risk of prison overcrowding since, in fact, they represent 60.0% of the total foreign presence in the Italian jails. However, there is a sort of “equal overcrowding distress” that comes out of this context: actually, the four major foreign presences are housed at the same percentage by the six selected Regions (the most overcrowded by foreigners), circumstance that generates a kind of homogeneity of the unlivable conditions in prisons.

Keywords

• Italian prisons
• inmates
• overcrowding
• migration