The double punishment of prisoners with disabilities

by Ivano Abbadessa - 2012.05.25

According to the Department of Prison Administration, several hundreds of disabled people are serving a sentence in Italian prisons. Ensuring that “prisoners’ health is adequately preserved” in prison is a recommendation that the European Court of Human Rights has recently addressed to our country. A high number of convicts lodge an appeal to the European Court in Strasbourg: in 2011, Italy ranked third in the European classification, only after Russia and Turkey. The vast majority of disputes concern the well-known slowness of trials, but many convicts went to Court complaining about the conditions of prisons today.



In the early 2012, some Italian media outlets reported that the ECHR condemned Italy for the “inhuman and degrading” treatment” prisoners are subject to. The case concerned Nicola Cara-Damiani, held in Parma despite its disabilities and the impossibility to receive adequate care within the prison. The 65-year old man, from Bari, after a paralysis of the lower limbs, was in fact unable to move easily on a wheeled chair due to architectural barriers. The Court, moreover, reasserted that Countries are obliged to guarantee that “all prisoners are held in prisons in conditions which comply with the respect of human dignity and, as for detention needs, that “the health of prisoners is adequately preserved”.



The disabled serving a sentence in prison face a dramatic situation: unfortunately, the availability of suitable areas and facilities which may be extremely important for their condition is often denied. Just imagine what it means for a person with motor disabilities to use squatting pans which are usually common in prisons, or the inconveniences that prisoners obliged to move on a wheelchair in tight over-crowded cells may cause to themselves and their mates. Disease and disabilities are not compatible with prison. In Italy, indeed, there is no specific legislation on prisoners with disabilities: a single reference set out in Art. 47 ter of the Prison Regulation, relating to house arrest, establishes under paragraph 3 that “a penal servitude not more than four years, even if is the remaining part of a longer sentence, and the sentence of detention can be served at home or in any other private residence or in a centre of care, assistance and of accommodation, in case of people in particularly serious health conditions requiring constant contacts with local medical centres”.



“Prisons conditions are a point of departure to measure the level of civilization of a country – said Minister Paola Severino at the opening ceremony of the judicial year 2012 in Catania - and even for those who soiled their hands with a foul deed, including offences involving organised crime, suffering of punishment and detention pending trial in prison must be the symbol and means through which it is possible to reaffirm that the State never pays back with revenge; on the contrary, it wins with law arms and severe applications of rules”. This idea is to be agreed with but should lead the State to think carefully about the double sentence – physical and custodial sentence – inflicted to inmates with disabilities, in the hope that treatments more focused on the needs of human beings can be introduced.