ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with penal developments in Italy from the 1970s to the mid-1990s and addresses several themes. It examines the ideology of rehabilitation in Italy, notes important contradictions in Italian penal practice, law and judicial administration and it analyzes the institutional and material functions of imprisonment and the "carceral social zone" in Italy. It then suggests that punishment in Italy is the outcome of a rationalizing process in which the official myth of rehabilitation remains intact though penal practices keep contradicting it. The discussion of successive prison legislations is aimed to highlight such contradictions. The chapter discusses the analysis of flexibility and the coexistence of rehabilitation and " special" treatment. Criminal labor force, and the adjacent marginalized labor force, constitutes the " repository" of the prison population, the human reserve upon which custody, with its diverse degrees of harshness and rehabilitive rhetoric, projects its shadow.
