In a widely quoted excerpt that is sometimes attributed to Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky and sometimes to French philosopher Voltaire, it is said that the degree of civilization of a society can be judged by entering its prisons. Although there is no evidence that either of the two intellectuals ever uttered or wrote down these words, the idea this statement captures is compellingly contemporary.
It is the idea that our level of advancement as a collective entity does not depend on how the system treats the most successful, who may at least partly owe their successes to certain benefits that come from the formal or informal specificities that are engrained in the system’s structure. Rather, it depends on how society treats those who have failed it, those who have violated the formal rules the system is at least in theory founded upon and are hence being punished for it under the procedural specifications of that society’s criminal justice system.
A civilized society would hence treat detainees not as passive subjects who should await the end of their sentence locked up and spend the rest of their lives feeling like and being perceived as former convicts but as human beings. Sure, human beings who have committed a crime, who have made one or more mistakes, but who if given the right stimuli could be assets.
It is of course a wildly idealistic notion that is often inapplicable to the real world, but I thought about it several times over the past few weeks while reading individual stories of detainees that have little to do with the conception of civilization every society should aspire to.
The story of 42-year-old Stefano Dal Corso, who allegedly committed suicide in jail in 2022 but who is now believed to have actually been beaten to death for having walked into some of the prison’s operatives engaging in sexual intercourse in the infirmary.
The story of 25-year-old Matteo Concetti, who after repeatedly threatening the prison operatives and his family that he would kill himself actually did kill himself, and who had a well-known psychiatric condition due to which he should have been serving his sentence in a specialized institution rather than a general prison.
The story of 26-year-old Stefano Voltolina, who killed himself and who according to one of the prison’s volunteer teachers who told his story to Corriere della Sera – a major Italian newspaper – had been studying hard while in jail and who was thinking about getting into writing when out.
Of course, none of these stories can paint a complete picture of the prison system in Italy, and even data can only paint a marginal picture. I could say that according to 2022 data (the last available), the current Italian prison system capacity is currently at 119%, with peaks at 185% in the north. I could say that there were 85 suicides in jail in 2022, the most since 1990, a rate of 15.2 every 10,000 citizens compared to a national average of 0.7. I could say that 21% of detainees are in jail without having yet been convicted or that more than 30% of detainees are under 35. I could provide further anecdotes of detainees living in six in one room with one broken toilet, of stories of sexual and psychological violence.
Even all of this, though, is nothing but an infinitesimal fraction of an incredibly complex picture that requires great care and effort to be fully comprehended and even greater care and effort to be interfered with at the policy-making level. An infinitesimal fraction, though, which suggests that the degree of civilization that we may pride ourselves on having (in Italy, but also in several other Western democracies) can still be widely increased.
Raised in Rome by Bosnian parents, I try to use writing as a tool to decipher the world around me and all its complexities by taking different perspectives into consideration. In Bocconi, I am studying Politics and Policy Analysis.
