Italy's Prisons, Already Overcrowded, Now Overheated

The New York Times reported this week that Italy's prisons, long overcrowded, have been further strained by heat, with temperatures in the country approaching 90 degrees Fahrenheit and inmates sleeping on concrete cell floors. The paper noted that even prison guards have complained. The story is not about a single facility but about a national condition that summer makes worse.

The mechanism the Times describes is cumulative rather than sudden. Overcrowding is a standing problem in the Italian system; heat is seasonal; the two together produce conditions that staff as well as prisoners describe as untenable. That guards are named among the complainants matters, because it moves the story out of the register of prisoner advocacy and into the register of institutional capacity.