Report
Italian courts upheld 6,000 prisoner appeals last year of ‘inhuman’ treatment
The prisoners' rights association Antigone has collected thousands of appeals in a new dossier supporting a campaign for “a comprehensive reform of the prison system,” launched with a petition to Parliament and the government.
“Four-person cells where seven of us live”; “the school turned into a dormitory”; “windows without glass”; “rat infestations in all the rooms and infestations of various insects”; “insufficient and expired food”; “lack of hot water”; “the cooking area next to the latrine”; “enormous lines for the bathroom”; a “climate of fear”; and “repression of any attempt to complain or report.”
And finally, a statement that sums it all up: “Not everyone can afford to live as a prisoner. It's like being homeless.”
All different, yet all starkly similar: such are the living conditions described in the thousands of appeals from prisoners that reach Italy’s Supervisory Courts every year. There were more than 10,000 such appeals in 2024 alone, a 23.4% increase from the previous year. Of those, nearly 6,000 were upheld, resulting in a censure of the Italian state and allowing the petitioning prisoner to receive either a reduction in their sentence or, if already released, financial compensation for the “inhuman and degrading conditions” they were forced to endure.
The prisoners' rights association Antigone has collected these appeals in a new dossier supporting a campaign for “a comprehensive reform of the prison system,” launched with a petition to Parliament and the government, for which signatures are being collected on their website.
This appeal process, introduced in 2014, is now the only form of redress available to those who have suffered in Italy's prisons from overcrowding and treatment that violates Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
This is the same type of infringement that led to Italy’s 2013 conviction by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in the famous “Torreggiani” pilot judgment. At that time, to avoid paying further sums for “just satisfaction” (financial damages) to each prisoner, the Italian state was forced to adopt structural measures to resolve overcrowding within a year and to introduce compensatory remedies.
This led to the establishment of the National Guarantor for the Rights of Detainees, a special early release program, and the new appeal process. If such an appeal is upheld, the inmate is entitled to a sentence reduction of one day for every ten days served in violation. Alternatively, for violations totaling less than fifteen days or for those no longer incarcerated, civil courts can award compensation of €8 for each day of imprisonment.
Currently, according to Antigone, Italy's prison overcrowding rate has surpassed 135%, with over 63,000 people detained in a system with fewer than 47,000 available places. The prison population has grown by 917 people in just six months and by 1,336 over the past year. “In 2024, Italian Supervisory Courts received 11,440 applications for sentence reductions. Of these, 10,097 were decided, and 5,837 (57.8%) were upheld in favor of the prisoner. This is 23.4% more than the previous year. The number of upheld claims was 3,115 in 2018, rising to 4,731 in 2023, and reaching 5,837 in 2024.” As the Antigone report states: “Italy is being systematically condemned, more and more, by its own courts for violating Article 3 of the ECHR – more so than at the time of the Torreggiani ruling. Back then, there were about 4,000 pending appeals; today, we are at almost 6,000 upheld ones per year.”
However, as the dossier points out, not all who suffer inhuman and degrading treatment will file an appeal, often due to the “well-known conditions of extreme fragility of many prisoners, particularly foreigners.” But while the conditions described in the appeals are similar across the country, there is an “enormous inconsistency” in the rates of upholding such appeals between different courts. “While the national average is over 57%,” the report notes, “looking at the data by jurisdiction, we see situations like Salerno (86.7%), Trento (83.4%), or Brescia (75.3%), where upholding is a likely outcome, and then situations like Cagliari (29.2%), Bologna (28.4%), or Catanzaro (27.8%), where it is clearly less so. Obviously, this does not mean that prison conditions in Salerno, Brescia or Trento are worse than in Cagliari, Bologna or Catanzaro.”
So why does this happen? The usual types of analysis offer no answers: essentially, each court decides in its own way. However, and this is the crucial point, this is happening amid the complete indifference of the government, Parliament and the public. In the words of Antigone’s report: “It’s a disaster if Europe calls prison conditions in Italy unworthy of a civilized country. But apparently, it’s no big deal if our own judges do so.”
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/celle-inumane-condanne-record-e-6mila-risarcimenti on 2025-10-30