Journalist Jacopo Ottaviani has been investigating deaths of Italian prisoners, from January 2002 to May 2012. What do his results tell us about the Italian justice system?
There are some important indicators for how well prisons protect and care for their prisoners. Two of these indicators must be the number of deaths of prisoners and the causes of those deaths.
Using data released by the Ministry of Justice of Italy and the Centro Studi Ristretti Orizzonti, a no-profit association working for prisoners' rights, I have been able to peice together the deaths of Italian prisons from January 2002 to May 2012.
Almost one thousand deaths were registered in ten years in Italy. The figures show that 56% of prisoners died as a result of suicide and 22% of sickness.
To produce these figures involved cross-referencing the two sources. The Ministry of Justice data provided a list of prisons in Italy, including their geographical addresses and contacts. The second source from Ristretti Orizzonti consisted of an independent bullettin containing data on deaths in custody. Such bullettins report information about prisoners who deceased, including names, dates and prisons where they died.
Each step of the development process involved a different, free-of-charge technology. Data was scraped using ScraperWiki and refined with Google Refine; the resultant tables were merged using Google Fusion and finally visualised through Batchgeo.
The biggest challenge was making the data consistent, mostly because the sources did not follow an open data standard. However, free tools such as Google Refine and Batchgeo reduced the workload and speeded up the development process, which took about one month in total (with only me working on it).
Each marker on the map represents a death, coloured on the basis of the cause (suicide, sickness, overdose, homicide and unclear circumstances). By clicking on the details about the deaths, further information is shown: name, surname, age of the detainee, along with date and cause of his or her death. Markers are clustered in pie charts to better view the issue at various zoom levels.
Many stories can be found by viewing the map. Most of them did not find coverage in the mainstream media. For instance, almost nobody was fully aware about the almost forty deaths of those detained in mental hospitals; or about prisoners who took a drug overdose behind bars.
Some stories clash with our perceived stereotypes of prisoners: nobody normally imagines that those who die in jail may be women, like Francesca Caponnetto, deceased in Messina in 2004 - or very young, such as a 17-year old boy, who committed suicide in Firenze, in 2009. No one knows about 50 young prisoners who died and were younger than 23 years old. Stories like these emerge from the map.
While anonymous statistics do not give rise to costernation, stories are supposed to shake the public opinion. Besides giving an overview of deaths in custody in the last 10 years, this data journalism project is intended to give numbers a place, an identity and a story.
Data and visualisation are available on Google Fusion and on the website of Il Fatto Quotidiano, respectively. An English version is also available.
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