Prisons: Uilpa, very serious riots underway in Reggio Calabria

(ANSA) – REGGIO CALABRIA, 23 AUGUST – The Uilpa penitentiary police, in a note, reports that “very serious disturbances are underway in the Arghillà prison, in Reggio Calabria, where a group of inmates of Georgian origin – the union says – are refusing to return to their cells with the intention of attacking an inmate allocated to another detention section with whom there was an argument yesterday. Tension is very high and members of the penitentiary police force who are free from duty have been recalled, while further reinforcements are arriving from other penitentiary institutions in the region”. “The riots in the country’s prisons continue like this, practically without interruption, from north to south, including the islands – says the general secretary of Uilpa -. What is happening is clearly the effect of the state of substantial abandonment in which the prisons and the inmates continue to be. And the one paying the price, in addition to the latter, is the Penitentiary Police Corps, which is serving the punishments of hell for the sole crime of being in the service of the State. Now you go to work and you don’t know when and how you will get out. Shifts of 16, 18 and even 24 hours. There have been over two thousand attacks on officers since the beginning of the year. There are 14,500 inmates over the available places, while the units missing from the Penitentiary Police are 18 thousand. This year alone there have been 66 suicides among inmates and seven among officers. A situation that requires extraordinary measures with a tangible and immediate effect and not the placebo constituted by the “prison decree”. “We hope – De Fazio continues – that the Government as a whole, but especially Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, want to take full note of it, before the system collapses definitively, with unimaginable consequences”. (ANSA).