Italy’s Devil’s Island Prison Closing

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30688, 2 March 1965, Page 4

Italy’s Devil’s Island Prison Closing

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter) ROME. Cell doors of the 170-year-old prison on Santo Stefano, Italy’s “Devil’s Island,” will this month close for the last time behind the convicts serving their sentences there.

Santo Stefano lies midway between the islands of Ischia and Ponza, both more than 20 miles away. Its ancient prison, with accommodation for about 200 prisoners, is being closed by order of the Italian Ministry of Justice because of its relative inaccessibility, high operating costs and the psychological disadvantages of isolation.

Since the beginning of January, police have been bringing in 110 prisoners, mostly serving life sentences in small groups, to other prisons in the mainland.

Santo Stefano is a grim, windblown, rocky island about 83 yards in diameter and one and a quarter miles in circumference, situated some 30 miles from the mainland port of Gaeta.

It juts forbiddingly out of the sea near the larger island of Ventotene, which was used in ancient Roman Times as a place of banishment for members of the Imperial family. Under fascism, political opponents of Mussolini’s regime were detained on Ventotene. For more than 150 years, escape from Santo Stefano was considered impossible Several prisoners were reported to have committed suicide rather than face spending the

rest of their lives on the island. Then in 1938, a political prisoner did escape. Twenty years later, during a summer swim allowed by the authorities, a man sentenced to life imprisonment swam to the nearby island of Ventotene and remained in hiding there for two weeks. Eventually he reached Ischia in a stolen boat, though he was recaptured on arrival. In 1960, four more prisoners attempted escape. Two were never found.