Traces of black soot still mark the facade of the Regina Coeli jail, a reminder of the latest riots in Rome's infamous lock-up -- now emblematic of long-standing troubles plaguing Italy's prison system.

A steady stream of women, some with eyes swollen from crying, pass through the visitor's entrance of the crumbling edifice, where on any one day more than 1,150 men are crammed into a facility designed for just 628.

A short walk from tourist-thronged bars and restaurants in the leafy Trastevere district, Veronica Giuffrida, 31, sits on a steel bench holding her toddler, awaiting the weekly visit with her incarcerated father, the child's grandad.

"They lack everything. The hot water doesn't work. The electricity doesn't work. They're just abandoned," she told AFP.

"It's a jungle inside," she said.

A guard emerges from inside for a quick break. While not authorised to talk, he confirms: "No-one who's not inside could ever understand. It's indescribable."

Festering, worsening

Regina Coeli is a teeming microcosm of the major problems plaguing Italy's prison system today -- severe, systemic overcrowding and rising suicide rates.

They've festered for decades as past governments -- both left and right -- have resorted to ad hoc measures without tackling tough structural problems.

Similar challenges are seen elsewhere in Europe.

The Council of Europe placing Italy sixth last year for overcrowding behind Cyprus, Romania, France, Belgium and Hungary.

But despite far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni vowing to fix Italy's prisons, observers say they've got worse.

Court delays and slow procedures nationwide mean too many suspects linger in pre-trial detention, and hamper early release efforts.

Inmates with mental illnesses or drug addictions -- or both -- pack prisons because facilities to treat them lack space.

So far this year, 77 inmates and seven guards have taken their lives. 

Foreigners represent about a third of inmates -- and half at Regina Coeli -- many of them in precarious social circumstances that make them ineligible for house arrest.

"Today prisons are a large container where everything ends up... a sort of welfare system for society," Gennarino De Fazio, head of the UILPA prison guards' union, told AFP. 

"When you don't know how to treat an individual or where, he ends up in prison, in one way or another."

'Queen of Heaven'

That's the case in Regina Coeli ("Queen of Heaven"), a former 17th-century convent converted into a jail in the late 1800s.

It housed Resistance heroes during the Fascist era along with countless ordinary Romans, whose wives in years past would yell down to them from the Janiculum Hill above.

Although the jail is intended for short-term stays, 20 percent of inmates today have been convicted and should be in prisons better equipped for long incarcerations.

That has contributed to an occupancy rate of over 183 percent, Italy's fifth worst, official data shows. 

Regina Coeli has the highest number of suicides within correctional facilities -- five in 2023 and three this year. 

The latest was in September in the new arrivals wing, where two or three men spend 23 hours a day in each cell with no direct natural light. 

During riots in August and September, inmates set cooking gas cannisters alight, tore down railings and flung tiles from the roof.

The burning jail, wrote La Stampa daily, emblemised prisoners and guards "trapped in a powder keg ready to explode out of anger, hatred, humiliation, abandonment".

System in crisis

Regina Coeli's director, Claudia Clementi, told a regional health hearing last month she saw no way of reducing the overcrowding. 

The jail is obliged to accept all incoming people arrested and yet has nowhere else to transfer existing prisoners to, her hands were tied.

It was "not just a question of beds", she said.

"The entire system goes into crisis, because if 1,150 people take a shower instead of 700-800, the heating system may not work anymore." 

"I honestly don't know how this problem could be solved."

The justice ministry denied AFP's request to enter Regina Coeli and interview Clementi.

When she became prime minister in October 2022, Meloni told parliament the suicides and work conditions for guards were "unworthy of a civilised nation".

But suicides have continued since, while Italy's incarcerated population has grown by 5,885 to 62,110 people.

Prison experts warn things stand to get worse.

Meloni's government has created dozens of new crimes carrying jail sentences that will pack prisons further -- from assaulting doctors to organising illegal raves to "nautical" homicide -- while increasing penalties on existing offences.

Critics say some moves are draconian, such as scrapping the automatic deferral of sentences for pregnant women and mothers with babies. 

A controversial security decree passing through parliament introduces a prison rioting crime, with even passive resistance punishable by one to five years.

Getting out

Justice Minister Carlo Nordio has said measures will simplify early release while improving conditions, and has promised 1,000 more guards in the next two years.

But that won't make up for a national shortfall of 18,000, says the guards' union. 

Observers say reducing the strain requires far bolder government reform, while Italy's defence lawyers' association accuses the government of "twisting the entire penal system in a radically illiberal and authoritarian direction". 

Back at Regina Coeli, the region's prison watchdog, Stefano Anastasia, said he had met young men "who have served two, three, five years of their sentence" in the cramped jail.

"Someone who's treated that way for five years -- then when he gets out, what does he do?" he said.