It is never easy to talk about the problems surrounding prison, and it is even less so when the one speaking is a former inmate who has finished serving his 5-year sentence and is still waiting for a response from a slow and in some ways retrograde justice system.

Five long years spent in various penitentiary institutions across Italy due to my eye problems: I suffer from bilateral keratoconus and during my imprisonment I underwent my 2 cornea transplants.

So in 4 years — yes, because I benefited from early release days, 45 days every 6 months, all taken for a total of 1 year — I found myself going back and forth from the prison of Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto (ME) to Rome Rebibbia no less than 4 times, with everything that entering a new institution entails: permits for phone calls, visits, family parcel delivery, all as if I had come from freedom.

On top of all this, add the much-talked-about "prison overcrowding", going from 8 people in a cell that could only hold 4 with a single shower (CC Barcellona) to 6 people in a 3-person cell with a shower in the common area or in the cell depending on the wing (CC Rebibbia).

Arrested and taken to CC Termini Imerese, I began my prison journey in a room with 4 people, no windows, and a visiting room with floor-to-ceiling glass panels and an intercom to speak through.

I immediately understood it would not be a walk in the park, but I did not yet know that when fate strikes, it strikes hard. After less than a year in prison, my parents died within 5 months of each other.

With great courage and immense pain I faced the already-mentioned overcrowding in solitude: I felt alone in a room with 8 people. Although I had been authorized by the judge to attend my father's funeral at the cemetery, I was not transferred due to "lack of staff". That is what the officer in charge told me, as if my last goodbye to my father were tied to the shift of a poor and honest citizen who chose to serve the state through the prison police.

Fortunately I had already experienced the meaning of the word "transferred" inside a prison when I was moved from Termini Imerese to Barcellona P.G., otherwise on top of the pain I would have had to add the inability to understand the individual words spoken by the officer.

This is because, in prison, if you are uneducated, you pay the sentence twice — but on the flip side, many times not understanding saves you from many misunderstandings of a justice system too often made up of legal inconsistencies. Overcrowding itself is one of them.

Detention administered by the penitentiary system confirms this: for example, "you cannot cook in the cell, but we sell you pasta" — inconsistencies made for the sake of a quiet life that only those who have been in prison can understand.

My mother's funeral I experienced by attending the church service and then being immediately taken back to my cell, matter-of-factly, as if nothing had happened. And the same was true for my two eye surgeries: general anesthesia and back to the common cell, as if everything were normal — because in the end it is, if you adapt to the spaces, if you shower when possible, if when you move you watch where you walk, if you decide not to live but to survive.

This is prison overcrowding: the survival that every inmate must live through daily.

But the most remarkable thing is that I, like many, believe in justice and filed a claim under Art. 35-ter (former Torreggiani law), but I finished my sentence and the trial has been postponed to yet another hearing to decide on a possible compensation.

Because, despite everyone talking about it, the European Court of Human Rights having sanctioned Italy, even today every inmate must go through a trial to have their rights recognized and hope that the judge on duty accepts their request.

I do not believe that overcrowding will ever end in Italy, because unfortunately there is still too great a difference between the various penitentiary institutions from north to south, and as long as there is no equality of facilities, there can never be a fair sentence to serve.