Il trattamento delle donne in esecuzione penale

Abstract

This contribution is an opportunity to reflect on the women's condition while in prison, with the aim of highlighting the issues around the gender and detention combination. Infantilization and marginalisation of detained women are topics that didn't receive enough attention by academia so far. Once again, the legislator focused more on the role of the mother prisoner than the woman as a person, considering only motherhood as the unique female dimension to be taken into account in the elaboration of prison treat-ment. The working table “Donne e carcere” sponsored by the “Stati Generali dell’Esecuzione Penale” transposed the theme outside motherhood, addressing the relationship with prison life, professional trai-ning, physical and psychiatric health, overcoming the concept of treatment as "cure” or "correction", with a decisive shift from the medical-therapeutic angle to the empowerment. Despite those and international indications, the wide range of interests and specific needs that characterize the female universe, even in the prison microcosm, relayed in the background of a differentiated punitive system, often influenced by the perception of the stereotypical women role in society, that projects the women and gender’s issues even in the justice and punishment model.