Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni looks set to send more people to jail with her law-and-order crackdown — but the country’s prisons are in no fit state to take more inmates.
On June 9, prison guards in Cagliari in Sardinia discovered a 56-year-old inmate had hanged himself in his cell, the 33rd suicide in an Italian prison this year. President Sergio Mattarella this week urged the government to respond to the “dramatic” number of suicides behind bars, calling it a “true social emergency.”
Facing overcrowding and inadequate psychiatric care, the prison system is under strain. But instead of offering relief, or even amnesties and pardons like her predecessors, Meloni is pressing harder.
In early June, Italy’s right-wing government passed a sweeping security decree that lengthens prison terms, adds 14 new offenses, and restricts alternatives to incarceration — sending more people into a system already in crisis.
Most controversially, the law also targets protest tactics like roadblocks and occupations, tightening the state’s grip on dissent.
Meloni described the new law as a step toward public safety that would protect the most vulnerable people in society. “We are acting with determination against illegal occupations, speeding up evictions and protecting families, the elderly and honest property owners,” she said.
But critics see it as a political crackdown with damaging consequences.
“It’s a dangerous illusion to think that more punishment and more jail time leads to more security,” said Vittorio Manes, professor of criminal law at Bologna University.
Sergio Rastrelli, a senator from Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, dismissed fears that the new decree would send more people to prison. “It is not true that new types of crimes increase the prison population; on the contrary, it sets clear boundaries so those who intend to break the law understand they will be held accountable,” he said.
Cracking point
Rastrelli’s contention will soon be put to the test.
As of April, Italy’s prisons held over 62,000 people in facilities built for just 51,000, according to a report by Antigone, an NGO that monitors prison conditions. With an overcrowding rate of 119 percent in 2023 — among the highest in the EU — chronic staff shortages, inadequate infrastructure and underfunded services, the system is cracking.
The pressure is also boiling over into unrest. On June 4 up to 200 inmates in Genoa’s Marassi prison staged a riot in response to the alleged sexual assault of a fellow prisoner. Inmates overran parts of the prison, climbed fences and rooftops and damaged numerous cells. Two officers were injured, and the unrest was quelled only after riot police intervened — on the same day the Senate approved the final version of Meloni’s security decree.
The decree, which has now become law, also introduces prison riots as a new criminal offense. Critics argue the measure could suppress the ability to make justified complaints about abuse or neglect in the form of organized prison protests.
“There are many examples where prisoners’ protests gradually received the attention of local authorities and led to positive changes,” said Alessio Scandurra, the author of Antigone’s report. “A prison is a community that is not autonomous but that requires external help. … Silencing protests risks making prisons even poorer and less able to respond to growing needs.”
According to the same report, suicides are surging, topping 33 in the first half of 2025. In 2024 some 91 suicides were recorded among prisoners — a record, surpassing the peak in 2022.
“They occur mostly in isolation wards, in spaces where there are fewer activities, less interaction, less human contact,” Scandurra said. “That’s why this trend toward increased confinement is dangerous. The data clearly show that where there is more openness, the incidence of such acts is lower.”
Ghost of Torreggiani
Italy has faced this reckoning before.
In 2013, the European Court of Human Rights issued the Torreggiani ruling, which condemned Italy for systemic violations of the ban on inhuman and degrading treatment. The case concerned seven inmates held in cells with less than 3 square meters per person, a threshold the Court considers inhumane.
The ruling forced Italy to improve conditions and reduce overcrowding by expanding alternatives to incarceration. “We were all surprised by the reactions after the Torreggiani ruling. It was as if, all of a sudden, everyone knew what to do,” Scandurra said.
For a time, reform took root. The prison population dropped, and Italy introduced open-cell regimes, allowing inmates to move more freely.
That reform process is now at risk. Meloni’s government has hardened penalties and explicitly ruled out tools like sentence reductions or collective pardons, measures that were also used by late PM and Forza Italia leader Silvio Berlusconi.
“Amnesties and pardons do not align with the government’s vision of a modern state,” said Rastrelli, arguing that such measures offer only short-term relief without addressing deeper systemic issues. “They erode the certainty of punishment, which undermines citizens’ sense of legal security. Moreover, they weaken the authority of the state, reducing it to a system that yields to compromise in times of difficulty.”
Scandurra observed that Meloni’s government has adopted an approach that differs from that of her predecessors in dealing with the prisons emergency. “It has always been quite resistant, even during institutional visits to prisons,” he said. “Traditionally, there was attention not only to staff conditions but also to those of inmates. Now, visiting officials often avoid speaking with staff or even entering the detention wings.”
Long-term plans, imminent crisis
Last year, Meloni’s government issued a Prisons Decree pledging to ease jail overcrowding by hiring more guards and building new facilities, including appointing a so-called Extraordinary Commissioner for Penitentiary Construction to oversee new projects and renovations.
But critics say these promises miss the urgency of the situation.
“When faced with a crisis like this, talking about building new prisons means offering solutions that don’t help today’s inmates,” Scandurra said. “It pushes the problem into the future — and that’s deeply discouraging.”
Manes called the government’s approach to the emergency “a sort of electoral marketing,” adding that “the problems won’t be solved by building prisons, just like Covid wasn’t defeated by building hospitals.”
Rastrelli, who also served as rapporteur on the Prisons Decree, defended it by explaining that the government’s approach to prison overcrowding was structural rather than a knee-jerk emergency response.
“All previous efforts in Italy have failed because they relied on temporary ‘prison-emptying’ tactics that only delay recurring problems,” he explained. “Our goal is to implement structural measures by allocating financial resources to train prison police, improve infrastructure, and analyze the prison population.”
The real driver of overcrowding, Scandurra added, is repeat offenders. “If people stopped returning two, three, four times, the crisis would vanish. Prison must be a place for reintegration into society, not just punishment.”
“Criminal law manages the failure of society. It doesn’t build civil coexistence,” he continued. “We already know what the solutions are. They are already sitting in ministers’ drawers. What’s missing is the political will.”
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