How do you live in a cell? In five minutes the challenge of the lawyers at the Book Fair

Five minutes in the cell to experience for yourself what life in prison is like. Here is the challenge of Italian lawyers to public opinion. The National Bar Council and its newspaper, “Il Dubbio”, present at the Turin Book Fair, will set up a life-size cell in their stand and from 18 to 21 May all visitors will have the opportunity to experience “detention” in a real cell. It will be a narrow space, with all the limitations and living conditions typical of a prison environment.

«The main objective of the experience – they write – is to promote awareness and stimulate public debate on the need to reform the prison system, improving living conditions within prisons and promoting the adoption of alternative measures. Today, as also sanctioned by the European Court of Human Rights, the majority of Italian prisons are in inhumane conditions due to overcrowding and totally inadequate penitentiary construction”.

The Italian prison, mirror of the civilization of a nation, continues to be a scandal. Old-fashioned structures and archaic regulations, added to the overcrowding, which is modest in some regions, but is dizzying in others, have created a daily malaise. It is no coincidence that year after year suicides increase among prisoners and among prison police officers themselves, “victims, one like the other, of this state of degradation”.

It will not be a game, but an experience. The “detainees for a day” will undergo a body search, and will be asked to wear clothes normally used in prison. They will enter the furnished space like a real prison, noises included. As Piero Calamandrei, president of the National Bar Council from 1946 to 1956, wrote, “you must have seen prison as a prisoner”. And to accompany the visitors there will be a special guide: Marco Sorbara, former municipal councilor of Aosta and regional councilor, who spent 909 days in pre-trial detention as innocent.