Security decree, more mothers in prison with their children

The inflatable slide is on the lawn. In Lauro (Avellino), in the only attenuated custody institution in the South, Mother's Day will be on Wednesday. Too difficult to organise on a Sunday. After all, it is a prison. Despite Lion Kings on the walls and children's wails in the corridors.

Children who share the pain of their mothers, whom the outside world has failed to take care of. As of 30 April there were 20 women incarcerated with 24 children. Numbers with daily fluctuations, in an attempt to find alternative solutions soon; but 'on the rise' agree the operators. The cause, one of the security decrees (Decree-Law 48/25 converted on 9 June '25): it dropped the obligation to defer sentences in the case of pregnancy or young children. In January 2025, during IlSole24ore's trip to prisons, there were 12 children. Half.

"Now more mothers in pre-trial detention or with low sentences are arriving," they say from Milan to Lauro: here the facility, closed for five months, was hastily reopened after the detention of a woman with a newborn baby. In Icam there is the mother convicted of exploitation of prostitution, the one arrested after a robbery; those who have a history of drugs or those who have committed robberies. Different profiles, different nationalities, also different orientations of the surveillance judiciary.

If in the Lombard capital, for example, the judges did not immediately apply the decree for offences committed before its entry into force, other courts assessed it differently, considering the change only procedural. The 39550/2025 ruling of the Court of Cassation then clarified: with offences committed before the decree, penalty frozen. The new law entrusts the Surveillance Authority with the decision on the deferral of punishment, to be denied in the case of 'exceptionally significant danger of reiteration of the offence', the text states. Compromise after negotiations with the Colle.

But if the five ICCMs were born under the banner of "no more children in prison", "that spirit has been distorted by the regulations and today we have more of them for longer", reflects Marianna Grimaldi, coordinator of the ICCM at San Vittore. Invited by the Human Rights Commission of the Lawyers' Association of Milan, she drew attention to the lack of specific professionalism: 'Who takes care of children with different ages and needs? In Milan we are lucky, elsewhere there is only voluntary work'. Despite the efforts of 'generous operators', in the words of the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella, it cannot be the prison staff to take care of, for example, the little one released from San Vittore after eight years inside or the future transgender mother in Lauro.