Gianni Alemanno’s life changed on New Year’s Eve. As fireworks exploded overhead and bottles of spumante popped, the former mayor of Rome was arrested and brought to the city’s Rebibbia prison to spend his first night in jail. 

Since then Alemanno has found a new political battle to wage: Denouncing the woeful conditions of Italy’s overcrowded Italian prisons. It is a somewhat unexpected campaign for a politician from the hard-right camp, which has tended to favor locking more people up, but his political heritage is lending some weight to his crusade.

Alemanno joined the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement in his youth but later teamed up with the conservative mainstream and served as agriculture minister under Silvio Berlusconi from 2001 to 2006. He was mayor of Rome from 2008 to 2013.

He is now keeping a “cell diary,” which is published every Tuesday on his social media page, and is addressing open letters to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and ministers urging reform.

In his letters, Alemanno chronicles everyday tragedies of prison life, sharing the stories of other inmates and recounting suicide attempts.

“He has never been to prison, once he entered jail he was astonished,” said Edoardo Albertario, Alemanno’s lawyer.

One of his most-read posts describes the situation in Rebibbia, Italy’s biggest prison, in summer when jail cells turn into “ovens” because of poor insulation and prisoners have to resort to makeshift remedies, like tap water, to make the heat more bearable. 

“But politics is asleep (with air-conditioning), waiting for the commissioner in charge to magically build new prisons,” Alemanno wrote, questioning the government’s promise to fix the problem by building more jails and its “law and order” approach, as he called it.

There seems little doubt that jails are at a breaking point, just as Meloni is indeed talking tough on law and order.

As of April, Italy’s prisons held over 62,000 people in facilities built for just 51,000, according to a report by Antigone, an NGO that monitors prison conditions. Suicides are surging, with 45 inmates killing themselves this year as of July 24. In 2024 some 91 suicides were recorded among prisoners — a record, surpassing the previous high from 2022.

From the Capitoline to Rebibbia 

Alemanno’s accounts often focus on the individual stories of his fellow inmates such as Roberto, a 77-year-old who can barely see and walks with difficulty but still has to serve three years of detention. 

“What is Roberto doing in jail? What social revenge still needs to be carried out on this person, who is struggling to walk, who cannot see or hear, who is in danger of dying in jail, and who has already served almost half of his sentence? Could he not at least be sent under house arrest, to try to care for himself at home?” Alemanno wrote. 

His letters are co-signed by another inmate, Fabio Balbo, known as “the Scribe of Rebibbia” as he is the go-to person for writing applications for prison benefits and a prisoners’ rights activist. The two have formed a “strange alliance,” as the former mayor put it in his latest letter.

Alemanno was sentenced in 2022 to one year and 10 months for illegal party funding and influence peddling as part of a broader probe, dubbed “Mafia Capitale,” which uncovered corruption in the award of public contracts in Rome. Alemanno was granted his freedom on community service probation. But when judges realized that he was not respecting the terms of his probation, they decided he should serve his prison sentence.

Alemanno is conducting politics even behind bars, leading a hard-right micro-party called “Independence!” whose goal is to pull Italy out of the EU and to fight the “cosmopolitan elites” to defend “the Italian people.”

While his party is largely unknown, his personal battle for prisoners’ rights is winning him headlines.

Meloni under pressure

The problem of overcrowding in Italian prisons is not new — the country was condemned by the European Court of Human Rights in 2013 for the inhumane conditions of its jails — but the situation is not getting any better. Italian President Sergio Mattarella recently called the spate of suicides “a real social emergency.”

In late July, the government again pledged to tackle the problem by building more prisons and cutting red tape for the release of prisoners. 

But that won’t fix much in the short term, critics say, especially as the main focus of Meloni’s right-wing government is sending more people to prison.

“I have never seen someone fixing overcrowding by putting more people in jail,” said Riccardo Magi, a lawmaker from the liberal More Europe party and a prisoners’ rights activist, who is calling for the immediate release of some prisoners and alternatives to incarceration to ease jail overcrowding. 

“Gianni Alemanno has always been a political adversary for me. But for sure, the message that comes from his letters and his story is a strong one because it comes from a politician from the right who is experiencing first-hand the effect of the illegality of the Italian prison system,” Magi said.

Alemanno’s appeal is at least having some effect on some of Meloni’s allies such as the president of the Italian Senate, Ignazio La Russa.

La Russa, also a post-fascist and a friend of Alemanno, is backing the idea of an emergency bill that would allow some prisoners to serve the last part of their sentences out of prison, a measure that was previously taken during the coronavirus pandemic. 

But for now, despite Alemanno’s letters, the government is taking no urgent action to reduce overcrowding.

“It is not a matter of left or right,” said Albertario, Alemanno’s lawyer. “Caring about prisoners doesn’t bring political consensus.”