«What logic justifies locking up a person with obvious mental illness in prison, even if guilty of a crime? And with what purpose is such a person entrusted to guards who lack the training to provide proper care—creating additional strain on prison staff who are unprepared for the challenge, and making life harder for other inmates?» These are the sharp questions posed by Sergio Abis in Chi sbaglia paga. La voce dei detenuti e l'esperienza di un carcere alternativo (Chiarelettere 2020). In presenting La Collina, a community founded in 1994 by don Ettore Cannavera, Abis also reflects on the very purpose and meaning of prison as currently conceived.
Founded 27 years ago in Serdiana, in the countryside near Cagliari, La Collina houses prisoners granted alternative measures to incarceration by the supervising magistrate. Though technically still a prison, life there centers on work, example, listening, education, lawfulness, and culture—a prison that actually makes sense, whose real aim is the rehabilitation of the condemned. This stands in sharp contrast to the segregative prison system as ordinarily practiced: illogical, pointless, vastly expensive, and inhumane. «It took two hundred thousand years and the label of sapiens,» don Cannavera writes in the book, «to invent an institution that, rather than seeking to rehabilitate criminals and reconcile them with society, places them in a system that at best leaves them unchanged, but in reality makes them worse.» Consider the numbers: while 70 percent of inmates released from traditional prison return after committing new crimes, recidivism at La Collina stands at 4 percent.
Alternative sentencing is not freedom, however. Whether serving time at home, in a community facility, or under social services supervision, the sentence must still be served according to the magistrate's prescriptions regarding duration and method. The difference from classical imprisonment lies not only in the conditions but above all in the purpose: truly to rehabilitate the offender.
Abis's observations on the presence of mentally ill persons in traditional prisons illuminate an aspect of Italy's detention system that usually receives little attention. Yet it is numerically far from marginal. Though precise statistics are difficult to obtain, «prison directors, away from the microphones, admit that on average 30 percent» of Italian detainees struggle with mental illness.
«Mental illness locked away in prison,» Abis continues, «is a horrifying violation of fundamental human rights. Such a person should be treated, not confined to a cell, and cared for by doctors and staff trained in the appropriate therapy for their condition. (…) What rehabilitative path can a prison offer someone with mental illness? What benefit to society?».
This problem is hardly confined to Italy, as the tragic case of Lisa Montgomery demonstrates. The 53-year-old was executed in the United States on January 13, 2020, despite her severe mental illness—she had been raped and brutalized as a child, suffered untreated psychosis, and her condition had deteriorated so severely that she could not even understand why she was being given a lethal injection. Confusing vengeance with justice once more, and threatening the very fabric of community, this grim story raises questions that emerge in Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (Fazi 2019, translated by Michele Zurlo) by Bryan Stevenson, the American attorney and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative. This nonprofit organization works to end mass incarceration and excessive punishment, challenges racial and economic injustice, and protects the human rights of the poorest and most vulnerable.
Back in Italy, Abis's questions find counterweight in the book through countless letters that prisoners have sent to don Cannavera over the years. These letters, as Gerardo Colombo writes in the introduction, «help us understand how utterly abandoned the incarcerated person truly is.» Behind requests for small things—cigarettes, food, clothes, basic hygiene supplies—what prisoners are really asking for is the chance to be heard. To communicate. To try to escape marginalization, loneliness, and exclusion.
These needs become all the more urgent in the presence of mental illness. Which is truly the suffering of the last among the last.
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