A 57-year-old assistant chief coordinator of the Penitentiary Police Force serving in the Cosenza prison took his own life while he was free from duty (the tragedy occurred in his home in Mangone, a municipality in Savuto a few kilometers from the Bruzio capital). The news was given by the Autonomous Penitentiary Police Union (Sappe), through the deputy general secretary Giovanni Battista Durante and the regional secretary of Calabria Francesco Ciccone. «It’s news – add Durante and Ciccone – that shocks all of us. The man, a father of two children, worked in the shift service and had also been attacked a few years ago. The reasons for the extreme gesture are unknown at the moment and the necessary investigations are obviously underway.”
He also intervenes on the matter Donato Capece, general secretary of Sappe, which recalls «how that of suicide prison officers is a drama that has been going on for too long without concrete signs of attention from the Ministry of Justice and the Department of Penitentiary Administration». Capece, given that “investigations are currently underway into the reasons for the tragic gesture”, notes that “the prison officers are left abandoned to their own devices, while instead they clearly need an instrument of help and support. Concrete solutions are needed to combat the work hardship of penitentiary police personnel. As authoritative experts in the sector have also highlighted, it is necessary to structure as soon as possible a specific medical direction of the Penitentiary Police, composed of doctors and psychologists committed to protecting and promoting the health of all employees of the Penitentiary Administration. Here we need concrete actions on the issues of psycho-physical stress of members of the Corps.”