Disregarding the matter of Amanda Knox’s guild or innocence, I’m curious if her experience in an Italian prison was as horrible as it would be in an American prison. From what I’ve read here & there, European prisons are all over the place, what with French prisons being little better than third world prisons, and Norwegian prisons being comparatively cushy.
Where do Italian prisons lie in this continuum?
Can’t answer, but wondering the same thing myself. Remembering Howard Marks, infamous drug lord, who said he much preferred Spanish prisons to US ones, but that was many years ago.
I know it’s hard to generalize, but I saw a “20-20” or “60 Minutes” segment about Norwegian (or maybe Swedish?) prisons once, and the whole set-up looked nicer to me than many American university dorms, and probably with better food and more physical recreation opportunities.
The biggest drawback was seemingly the lack of freedom to interact with society as a whole (especially the opposite sex) and the fact that you were forbidden to actually get up and leave when you felt like it. I may be mistaken, but I think that they even allowed the inmates to occasionally drink alcohol in limited quantities (which may not be too unusual in European prisons, as I once knew someone who was thrown in a Spanish jail for a few nights for drunkenly stealing a bouquet of flowers from a street vendor, and he said they gave him a bit of wine while he was locked up).
I know that in general Scandinavian countries are generally much more progressive than places in the former Eastern Europe, and I would bet Italy is somewhere between the two extremes.