A spectacular escape draws attention to a sector with declining means.
by Olivier Bonnel (Rome, Correspondence)
For the guards of Beccaria prison, Christmas day is far from having looked like a tale. In the afternoon of December 25, seven adolescents from this minor remand center located in the suburbs of Milan managed to escape before vanishing in the wild. Taking advantage of the distraction of a goalkeeper who went to seek a football ball, the fugitives, aged 17 to 19, managed to drop the partitions that covered scaffolding surrounding the penitentiary structure under construction. A spectacular escape, and without violence. “This is the first time in several decades that we have witnessed the escape of seven prisoners from a detention center for minors, they have benefited from a series of flaws,” comments Ciro Cascone, public prosecutor with of the tribunal for minors of Milan.
Thursday, December 29, the seven escapees had all been found, some of them being spontaneously returned to the prison. “The priority is that the site ends as quickly as possible and to ensure that the execution of sentences for minors is worthy, aims at rehabilitation and does not simply take the form of a punishment,” commented the sub -Secretary to justice Andrea Ostellari, after the return of the last two prisoners.
For many observers of the Italian prison environment, this escape from Beccaria was predictable. “The contrast is striking between the perpetual expansion district and the prison site in eternal restructuring and whose end is not seen,” notes the Antigone association, which militates for the protection of the rights of prisoners, in its annual report Of the seventeen centers in Italy where nearly 400 minors are incarcerated.
an unsuitable Italian penal code
The escape cannot be instrumentalized to denounce the problems of prison overcrowding or the lack of prison agents warns antigone. “We must insist on an educational model which places the educational needs of minors at the center, it is the task of a society that is said to be an adult,” said its president, Patrizio Gonnella, in a column published on December 27 in the Daily he manifesto.
Through the discomfort of Beccaria fugitives, it is the question of the adequacy of criminal justice and the imprisonment of minors that is posed. “A minor must be educated outside the prison. Respect for others does not learn by enclosing a teenager behind bars,” continues Patrizio Gonnella, who denounces an unsuitable Italian Criminal Code, where the sentences for adults and minors do not are not sufficiently differentiated. “It doesn’t have
Meaning of enclosing a young person in prison if, at the same time, they are not offered a life course after detention, “explains the prosecutor Cascone.
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