In the morning of 30 April 2024, in the framework of the meetings with the Heads of the four Police Forces, Mr. Giovanni Russo, Head of the Prison Administration Department, delivered a lecture addressed to the XXXIX Advanced Training Course on the topic “Article 41 bis of the Penitentiary System and other tools to counter organized crime.”
Mr. Russo recalled how the 41 bis Penitentiary System regime is a measure introduced in our legal system to exclude the possibility that dangerous inmates may continue to maintain criminal ties with the outside world and then to carry out their criminal activity even from prison.
This is a particularly strict form of detention to which perpetrators of organized crime or terrorism offenses are subjected, in the case there is evidence that they continue having links with the associations to which they belong.
This measure was introduced into the Italian legal system in the aftermath of the Capaci and Via D’Amelio massacres, with the aim of facing a problem that those dramatic events had highlighted, namely the inability of the prison sentence, in its ordinary mode of execution, to neutralize the dangerousness of inmates who, by virtue of their links with the criminal associations to which they belonged, continued from prison to exercise their leadership role, thus issuing orders and directives to their accomplices at large.
The special detention regime, which drastically reduced opportunities for contact between inmates and the outside world, as well as among the inmates themselves, is aimed at preventing, or rather reducing, links with associations, thus making effective the neutralization function represented by prison sentence.
At the end of the conference, President Russo met all the attendees and staff of the Penitentiary Police to whom he extended his best regards. Then he posed for a group photo.
