Italy: Scandal of newborns in prison – far-right jubilant as Meloni’s ‘anti-Roma’ law gets passed
19 September 2024
On 12 September, Italy’s Chamber of Deputies passed article 15 of its controversial Security Bill, that makes the postponement of sentences optional and no longer mandatory for pregnant women and mothers with children under one-year-old.
Patrizio Gonnella, president of Antigone, dismissed the provision as a ‘propaganda rule’, part of a package of repressive measures that ignore the harmful consequences for the health of women and children: “The new provision is conceived, and publicly reported, as an anti-Roma law, starting from the prejudice that all Roma women are dedicated to theft and choose motherhood to escape imprisonment. In reality, the numbers of Roma women in prison are so low, a few dozen, that they undermine any prejudice.”
Francesca Danese, spokesperson for the Third Sector Forum of Lazio described the move to make the detention of pregnant women and mothers of young children optional as “completely out of line with the commitments made in the past by many political-parliamentary forces regarding the execution of sentences to protect the very little ones, who are not to blame. Furthermore, it appears to us to be a rule that clashes with Article 27 of our Constitution: 'Punishments cannot consist of treatments contrary to the sense of humanity'."
For its part, the far-right Fratelli d’Italia was jubilant. Milanese deputy Riccardo De Corato, called it ‘turning point day’, and declared that, thanks to the Meloni government, “finally, there can be prison for pickpockets who exploit the fact of being pregnant to steal from citizens.”
This blatantly populist move runs in stark contrast with European norms and rules where arrangements must always be made for detained women to give birth outside of prison, according to Gonnella, who also highlighted that women account for a mere 4.3% of all prisoners, and that the data shows that women “tend to commit less serious crimes and are characterised by marginalisation and social exclusion to a greater extent than men."
Samuele Ciambriello, national spokesperson for guarantors of prisoners and detainees, condemned the disconnect between the dramatic reality of inhumane conditions in overcrowded prisons and the legislative measures being approved. In addition to the pregnant mothers’ provision, the bill also adds the crime of arbitrary occupation: anyone who illegally occupies a property intended for someone else’s domicile, will face a sentence of two to seven years. This rule applies also to garages, courtyards, balconies and terraces.
The security bill introduces a raft of new crimes, harsher sentences for non-violent forms of protest, a crackdown on legal cannabis, and a series of measures to drastically curb any protests in prisons and repatriation detention centres. It will also allow police officers to possess weapons off-duty without a licence.
One key objective is to criminalise any form of dissent against state authority, and punish dissenters with exemplary severity. As regards the anti-pickpocket law, Ciambriello described it as “a huge step backwards with respect to the protection of motherhood and childhood, and is in stark contrast with the pronouncements on the subject by the Constitutional Court and international conventions.”
Critics maintain that politicians, abetted by loyal media outlets, generate moral panics around certain crimes to fuel public demands for security, and then legislate on the back of the emotional wave, amplifying the discrepancy between perceptions and actual reality. According to Vitalba Azzollini, this results in ‘manifesto’ criminal laws, that “rather than actually solving the problems they claim to want to prevent and repress, have the sole effect of feeding public opinion with new criminal hypotheses, further sanctions and increases in existing penalties. Criminal populism, in short.”
