Editors' Introduction

Abstract

In the last century, Goffman defined prisons as places of residence and work for groups of people who share a common predicament, spending part of their lives under a closed regime, whose all-embracing nature is manifested in the blocking of social exchange and any relations with the outside world (Goffman 1961: 11). Comprehensive, all-encompassing institutions where, from a Foucauldian perspective, a strong bureaucratic organisation manages mass groups of individuals, exerting strict control over them to the point of shaping their actions, relationships and very identity; a disciplinary and punitive regime, structured to produce a specific kind of citizen (Foucault 1975: 135). This is a clear but far too rigid an analysis to reflect what is today the submerged, we might say hidden, reality of Italian and international prisons. In order to understand the experience of imprisonment today, it is more helpful to refer to places of confinement (Pandolfino 2022), where it is necessary to look not only at institutions or places, but also at the relations between sites, practices, social relations and subjective states of mind (Jefferson 2014: 49)...