In the hot summer of prisons, suicides do not stop and 2024 risks pulverizing the record of 2022, the horrible year with 85 deaths behind bars. The count to date, Saturday 3 August, stops at 61 confirmed suicides among prisoners, one every three days or so. If the dramatic pace does not stop, at the end of the year the risk is to reach levels worse than those of the last two years. In 2023, confirmed suicides were 70 and in the last ten years (since 2014) 556 prisoners have lost their lives in prison. If we add the data from 2024, the toll exceeds 600 coffins, cross-referencing the data from Antigone, associations that operate in prisons and the National Guarantor of the rights of persons deprived of personal liberty.
Figures that replace names and surnames, data that hide stories of desperation: there are many situations of presumed or confirmed psychiatric pathologies and many homeless people among the victims. Two women took their own lives, one in Bologna and the other in the Turin prison of Le Vallette, for an emergency that knows no registry office. The average age of suicides is about 40 years, but the deadly bulletin includes one over sixty and six young people (18-25 years).
In the recent focus of the Prisoners’ Guarantor, it emerges that approximately one in two people took their own life in the first six months of detention; of these, six within the first 15 days, three of which even within the first five days of entry. Only approximately 38% of the dead have been definitively sentenced. Among the most alarming situations – with the most suicides – are the Poggioreale prison in Naples, the institutes of Pavia and Verona and the cells of Regina Coeli in Rome.
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