In this innovative and stimulating book Mary Gibson offers a very clear and attentive sketch of the evolution and transformation of the Italian penitentiary system during the half century between Italian Unification and the First World War. By studying the way in which the new Italian state modified the prison system, adapting it to the ideal of rehabilitation through work in humanitarian conditions, Gibson's findings raise four important points.
The first is the longstanding existence, during this period, of another model of incarceration, deeply rooted in Italian society, which could be called the convent-prison system. Born in the Counter-Reformation era, it was an attempt by the Catholic Church to simultaneously discipline and protect marginal groups, mainly females and children, through prayer and work in a monastic setting. In liberal Italy, prison reform was directed towards transforming penal institutions for men and boys into crucibles of secular citizenship, while women and girls remained confined in an older system managed by religious orders, especially by nuns. These findings, parallel to those of Pieter Spierenburg (Reference Spierenburg1991) on the prison workhouses of seventeenth-century Netherlands and North Germany, inspired by Protestant religious values, show the inadequacy of the celebrated Foucauldian model that situates the ‘birth of the prison’ at the dawn of modernity during the so called ‘Age of Revolutions’ from the end of the eighteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Gibson shows that the principal aim of the modern penitentiary, the transition from bodily mutilation to incarceration as punishment, and the reform of inmates through labour, predated the Foucauldian moment: pre-modern forms of internment continued to coexist with new penitentiary networks not only in Italy but also in the pioneering nations of the ‘first wave’ of modern prisons: France, the United Kingdom and the USA.
The second innovative finding of Gibson's book is the attempt to expand the field of investigation. Under scrutiny here are not only prisons but all the institutions devoted to social control, a large spectrum which encompasses foundling homes and hospitals, orphanages, refuges for unmarried women and homes for the aged, as well as prisons. This expanded field of analysis sheds greater light on the composite underworld that populated these places: not only convicted criminals but also people awaiting trials, suspects, debtors, prostitutes, vagabonds and so on. This enlarged perspective is made possible by a great attention to gender and to the study of liminal social groups: the book is full of detailed analyses of institutions where ‘disturbing’ people were held, with an emphasis on those in Rome. These in-depth studies complement the national statistical data: this is not only a book about Italian prisons in general, but also, and perhaps mainly, a book about a group of Roman prisons (famous buildings such as Castel Sant'Angelo, San Michele, and the new prison of Regina Coeli, whose radial design was intended to symbolise a progressive modernity).
The third important point is that the volume analyses the creation of a modern national prison system without conforming to the traditional pessimistic view of the Italian judicial and penal system before the First World War as stagnant, provincial, and backward. On the contrary, while not concealing the slowness of the reform process – the general prison reorganisation, inspired by the Irish system, happened only in 1891 – the book emphasises the Crispi push for social innovation, the reformist impulses of two general managers of the penitentiary system, Martino Beltrami Scalia and Alessandro Doria, and the importance of the Italian school of criminal anthropology, headed by Cesare Lombroso, of whom Gibson has written a biography. Reformers, doctors and criminal anthropologists met in the new internment structures, such as insane asylums, but more generally in prisons, which became a sort of laboratory of the new science. From there the Italian school of positivistic criminology created the basis for its ambiguous worldwide impact (progressive in theory, racist in practice).
The fourth and last point is the analysis of what is generally considered a specifically Italian phenomenon: the practice of domicilio coatto (internal exile) and more generally the transportation to Italian island prisons of suspected criminals and political opponents, people never convicted by the courts. Here Gibson easily demonstrates the similarities between this Italian system and colonial internment, for example the British prison on the Andaman islands in the Bay of Bengal, or more generally the transportation of undesirable people to colonial dominions such as Australia.
Ultimately, however, this rich research, touched on here, is rather suffocated by the structure of the book. To develop the first point, for instance, the chronology should have been enlarged, including the ‘premodern’ prison world, whereas on the other hand the problems emerging through the detailed analysis of the Roman case could be enhanced only through a specific monograph. The discussion of the hybridisation between the new criminal anthropology and the positivistic cultural vision that inspired prison reforms is not fully developed and ends inconclusively. Above all, the section relating to forced entry and police prevention practices is embryonic and not fully developed. A more detailed analysis of the role of prison in the Romantic imaginary is necessary, taking into account the transformation of the criminal underworld into the so-called classes dangereuses. At this point it would have been important to go a step further, as yet a step not generally taken by crime studies, and include in the narrative the longstanding political aim of security measures and public order – the defence of the existing regime. The very richness of information in this book also contributes to its limitations: it could be said that it sows more than it reaps. But this is a compliment, not a criticism.
