Justice Minister Andrea Orlando
said Tuesday the government was working to "incentivise the use
of alternative penalties to jail for drug addicts," after the
Council of Europe put Italy top of its 47 members for the
proportion of drug offenders in prison. "We have to think
whether prison is the best solution to fight the drug
phenomenon," Orlando said. Italy was the country with
the highest proportion of prisoners in jail for drug offences in
2015, according to the Council of Europe's SPACE study, which
was released on Tuesday. It said almost a third of inmates,
31.1%, who had been handed definitive sentences were in jail for
drugs crimes. The data in the annual report photographed the
situation in 2015 in the Council of Europe's 47 member countries
up to September 1 of that year.
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