Prisons on the Brink of Collapse

Presentation of the volume "The Denied Emergency"

by Gianni Alemanno and Fabio Falbo

Thursday, December 11, 2025 – 5:00 PM

Sala Figlia di Iorio – Provincia di Pescara

by Luciano Troiano

The book that Gianni Alemanno and Fabio Falbo wrote together with other inmates in the G8 wing of Rebibbia has been released, to tell what they see and have understood from their experience in Italian prisons. The title is: “The Denied Emergency. The Collapse of Italian Prisons”.

A volume that will be presented on Thursday, December 11 at 5:00 PM in the Sala Figlia di Iorio of the Provincia di Pescara in Piazza Italia.

The meeting will be moderated by journalist Luciano Troiano, Deputy Editor of SulSud.it and will include the participation of Erminio Cetrullo, Abruzzo regional secretary of the Indipendenza movement, Massimo Arlechino president of the political formation, Fiammetta Trisi former official of the Ministry of Grace and Justice, and Francesco Campo Scientific Director of The Global Review - International Academic Review in Tel Aviv, professor of Sociology and Anthropology of Conflicts and Complexity in Hostile Environments. The event will open with greetings from the President of the Provincia di Pescara, Ottavio De Martinis.

“Yes, anyone who truly wants to understand what happens inside Italian prisons can use this sort of vade mecum in which we tried to list the political and institutional causes and the human and social effects of this disaster in the heart of Italian society – write Alemanno and Falbo - It is also the product of our friendship and our alliance: two completely different people who found themselves together against what appeared to us, and still appear, as unacceptable injustices, bureaucratic slowness and laziness exercised directly on the living flesh of inmates, chasms opened between what our Constitution writes and what happens in reality.”

“We tried to demonstrate – continue the authors – that all this is the exact opposite of what is needed to guarantee citizen safety and certainty of punishment. Because Italian prisons are a multiplier of illegality, a mechanism to reinforce in the minds of inmates, especially the younger ones, the conviction that Italian institutions are no better than the ‘street’ and the sick solidarity that can be created there. An anti-meritocratic place where those who want to behave badly feel at home in the chaos of overcrowding, while those who want to rebuild a clean life path, want to rehabilitate and reintegrate, see their difficulties grow insurmountably.”

The event will also be an opportunity to discuss alternatives to prison which, alone, is no longer able to meet the needs for justice, security, and reintegration that our society demands. For decades, and partly still today, we have reasoned within a prison-centric model, where deprivation of liberty was the almost automatic response to crime.

The great turning point came in 1975 with Law 354, the Penitentiary System Act: a law that implements the concept provided for in Article 27, paragraph 3 of the Constitution, namely that punishment must aim at the rehabilitation of the convict, and that to do so it cannot be limited to prison alone.

Then, in the 1980s, the so-called Gozzini Law further expanded these instruments: from probation to house arrest.

In the 1990s, with the scandal of Mani Pulite, prison once again came to be perceived as the tool for moralization.

Strongly symbolic of those years is the ‘case’ of Gabriele Cagliari, who died by suicide in prison after a detention lasting 134 days.

In the last twenty years, professionals: supervisory magistrates, prison directors, lawyers, social workers, have shown in practice that alternative measures work because they lower recidivism, accompany the person on a controlled but open path. And they also work from a social, health, and economic point of view: prison is the most expensive, most afflictive, and often also the least effective response.

In this context, the most recent legislative developments fit in, including the so-called Nordio Decree, which brings some themes back to the center:

• strengthening community pathways for certain categories,
• easing entry into prison for less serious offenses,
• reducing the use of detention in cases where other responses are more useful,
• and simplifying some institutions of external penal execution.

It is not a revolution, but it is an important signal: politics — even in a often punitive public climate — has returned to recognizing that prison is not the universal answer.

Our Constitution does not only ask us to punish; it asks us to rehabilitate , to return better people to society, not worse ones. And rehabilitation requires relationships, contexts, work, responsibility: all conditions difficult to rebuild after long years in a cell.

Sources and Credits:

Agenzia Stampa Parlamento

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