Si segnala il convegno internazionale
TOUTE PRISON EST-ELLE UNE ÎLE?
Isolement, exclusion et relégation dans les espaces d’enfermement XVe-XIXe siècle

4e rencontre internationale du réseau Em#C
Île de Ventotene, Italie
9-12 juin 2023

Si segnala il convegno internazionale
TOUTE PRISON EST-ELLE UNE ÎLE?
Isolement, exclusion et relégation dans les espaces d’enfermement XVe-XIXe siècle
4e rencontre internationale du réseau Em#C
Île de Ventotene, Italie
9-12 juin 2023
(Rome, 25th-27th September 2019)
Abstracts index:
Marcos Bretas (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro), Prison Models in Independent Brazil
26 September
2nd Session: Theories and Practices of Confinement at the End of the Ancien Régime
Keynote speech:
Mary Gibson (John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York), The Birth of the Italian Prison in International Perspective
Italy offers an important and instructive vantage point on prison history, where stimulus for the transition from corporal punishment to imprisonment derived successively from three indigenous sources: the Catholic Church, enlightenment philosophy, and positivist criminology. First, as the center of Catholicism, the peninsula harbored a long tradition of punishing clergy through enclosure and repentance rather than corporal punishment. In Rome, the papacy expanded this practice by erecting “convent” prisons for women and children in the early eighteenth century. These early penal institutions adopted the widespread Catholic model of disciplining and protecting marginal groups through prayer and work in a monastic setting. Secondly, Cesare Beccaria’s influential book of 1764, On Crimes and Punishments, laid out the major Enlightenment arguments against torture and capital punishment that are still employed today. While this Milanese economist and philosophe did not specifically address prisons, he enunciated fundamental principles, such as the proportionality of punishment to the crime and equality before the law, which became the hallmark of legal reform in Europe and the Americas during the age of revolutions. Beccaria’s ideas, however, sparked little immediate change in Italy, which was divided among old regime monarchs and dominated by the Catholic Church. In 1861, however, unification ushered in a secular, parliamentary state and fostered a third inspiration for prison reform, the new field of positivist criminology. Through his companion volumes, Criminal Man (1876) and Criminal Woman (1893), Cesare Lombroso challenged enlightenment universalism by classifying criminals into those exhibiting atavistic biological traits (“born criminals”) and those whose behavior was shaped by an impoverished environment (“occasional criminals”). Thus, Italy inspired the nineteenth-century movement to establish criminology as a new field of research, purportedly based on the scientific method, which preached the individualization of punishment.
Thus the emergence of confinement as the dominate form of punishment in Italy occurred in overlapping layers that reached back to the Catholic Reformation, was nurtured during the era of revolutions, and came to fruition during the age of positivism. This penal transition was not uniform but varied in timing and form according to gender, age, and race. This paper will explore how the Italian experience challenges the Foucauldian paradigm and offers an alternative periodization for the transnational birth of the prison in not only Europe but also the Americas, Asia, and Africa.
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Marcos Bretas (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro), Prison Models in Independent Brazil
This paper aims at discussing connections between Europe and Brazil in the Nineteenth Century, focusing on the debates on prison building and possible models. Prisons were not unfamiliar in colonial times, and such prisons survived long after Independence was achieved in 1822. But the debate on prison models allowed the new ruling groups to establish a connection with Europe while, at the same time, affirming themselves as “modern” The Court established in Rio de Janeiro condemned the old ecclesiastical prison, the “Aljube”, which was the main prison in the city for a century and started debates about the modern forms of punishment brought from liberal Europe. Prison reform was a part of liberal thought that circulated freely around the world and was discussed in the blooming Brazilian press. The new House of Correction – along with the asylum for the mentally ill – was the first public building to be offered in the city. Its construction began in 1835 and its first buildings would be inaugurated in 1850. Other cities in imperial Brazil discussed the idea of building their own prisons but few were really able to do it. This is not very different from what happened in other Latin American countries in the Nineteenth Century. Brazil is a large country and moving in the countryside still difficult. Local prisons remained untouched and other forms of imprisonment thrived, especially the prison island of Fernando de Noronha. The House of Correction in Rio and the prison island were overcrowded due to demands from all over the country to receive their inmates. The architectural design that suggested many buildings in panoptical form, remained incomplete and until the end of the century there were many complaints that the reality of prison was much diverse from the theories of reform embraced by modern prisons.
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Ludovic Maugué (Université de Genève), La maison centrale d’Embrun (1800-1815) : la naissance d’un modèle carcéral français ?
Au mois de décembre 1804, dans la petite ville fortifiée d’Embrun aux contreforts des Alpes franco-italiennes, une manufacture carcérale ouvre ses portes dans ce qui était avant la Révolution Française un séminaire et un collège jésuites. Économie, industrie, hygiène, ordre public, sédentarisation des populations flottantes : pour son principal promoteur le jeune préfet des Hautes Alpes le baron Ladoucette, la première maison centrale de détention créée sur sol français doit permettre de remédier aux maux sociaux du département.
Cette mission civilisatrice qui incombe à la prison ne peut être comprise qu’à l’aune des grandes réformes judiciaires intervenues en France à la charnière des 18e et 19e siècles. En effet, produit de la combinaison entre un ensemble de pratiques d’enfermement pluriséculaires et un dispositif théorique élaboré par la doctrine et consacré par le code pénal de 1791, la privation de liberté fait désormais système en France. Au surplus, conditionnée par l’utilitarisme correctif, l’institution pénitentiaire est dorénavant investie de fonctions sociales bien définie, puisque le nouveau paradigme punitif vise idéalement à corriger le condamné et préparer sa réinsertion par l’enfermement et le travail.
Néanmoins, au lendemain de la Révolution, faute de moyens et de volonté politique, l’immense majorité des établissements ne parviennent pas à concrétiser les plus élémentaires exigences du nouveau système carcéral : absence de distinction des détenus en fonction du sexe, de l’âge et du type de condamnation, insalubrité et promiscuité caractérisent ainsi les prisons départementales. Surtout, l’exiguïté et la vétusté des locaux ne permettent pas d’y établir des ateliers de travail. Fruits de diverses influences dont celle notable de la prison modèle de Gand, les maisons centrales de détention doivent précisément y remédier en centralisant les détenus de plusieurs départements et en confiant l’organisation comme la gestion du travail à des entrepreneurs privés.
C’est ce programme que le préfet Ladoucette va tenter de réaliser à Embrun en faisant ouvrer par les détenus la grande quantité de laine produite dans le département. Cependant, pourvu d’un budget famélique et livré à lui-même en raison du désengagement du gouvernement, l’établissement pionnier est confronté à d’innombrables difficultés qui portent en germe les dérives du système carcéral contemporain. Nous verrons qu’en dépit de sa finalité, pendant longtemps, Embrun demeure en pratique un lieu privatif de liberté hybride – entre dépôt de mendicité, hôpital général, maison de correction et prison d’État – que les pouvoirs publics utilisent sans véritable discernement pour neutraliser les individus susceptibles de menacer la stabilité sociale. Rationalité économique, carcérale ou sécuritaire : la première maison centrale française est ainsi traversée par des logiques concurrentes et contradictoires qui révèlent toutes les difficultés inhérentes à la spécialisation des lieux d’enfermement au début du 19e siècle.
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Francesco Saggiorato (Università di Roma “Tor Vergata” – Université Paris 1), Prisons, détentions « provisoires » et mesures de haute police dans la Toscane napoléonienne
Cette communication vise à étudier l’impact que les détentions ordonnées par la haute police napoléonienne ont eu sur l’ensemble des prisons de la Toscane entre 1809 et 1814. En effet, à la suite de l’annexion du Royaume d’Étrurie à l’Empire napoléonien, en 1808, l’implantation du système judiciaire impérial, ainsi que le durcissement des mesures policières contre les révoltes et les brigandages dans les trois départements toscans (de l’Arno, de la Méditerranée, de l’Ombrone), contribuèrent à exacerber le phénomène du surpeuplement des espaces de réclusion. Par ailleurs, la croissance non négligeable du nombre des détenus par mesure administrative (même si apparemment pour des brèves périodes) comporta, à la fois, la dégradation des conditions de vie à l’intérieur des espaces de réclusion et des conséquences qui affectèrent les finances départementales allouées pour la nourriture et l’entretien de l’ensemble des prisonniers.
Le but de cette communication sera de réfléchir sur la réglementation autour de cette forme spécifique d’enfermement. Comme l’a souligné Emmanuel Berger, le flou juridique entournant les détentions par mesure de haute police a empêché les historiens de circonscrire avec précision les dimensions du phénomène (Berger, 2011). Du point de vue normatif, on analysera alors la distinction, établie par les ministères de la Police générale et de l’Intérieur, entre les détentions que l’on peut appeler « par mesure de haute police » (décidées par le ministre de la Police) et les détentions qu’on appelle « provisoires », ordonnées à la discrétion du directeur général de police en Toscane. C’est autour de cette question que va s’articuler, depuis 1811, un débat animé entre les deux ministères de la Police et de l’Intérieur, alors qu’à l’échelle locale ce débat se manifeste sous la forme d’un conflit entre la direction générale et, quoique dans des mesures différentes, les trois préfets des départements toscans.
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26 September
3rd Session: Rome, Ecclesiastical Institutions and the “Catholic Model”
Maria Romana Caforio (Archivio di Stato di Chieti), Lo Stato Pontificio nel quadro delle riforme carcerarie europee: protagonisti, visitatori e reciproche influenze (1816-1857)
Studies on the emergence of theories and practices of prison reform during the nineteenth century seldom include an analysis of the situation in the Papal States.
While the studies on the Papal States mostly focus on the period between the seventeenth and eighteenth century or on individual penitentiaries, the nineteenth century has always been examined summarily and research has only highlighted its isolation, backwardness and the absence of established doctrinal and penal theories until the advent of Italian Unity.
This study distances itself from this posture, criticised by many but still widely shared, and rather aims to bring the Papal States into the international debate, shedding light on the ways in which prison management schemes and disciplinary systems were redefined from the early years of the Restoration to the pontificate of Pius IX.
Far from remaining on the margins, the papacy actively participated in the circulation of ideas that characterised the prison debate occurring in many countries in the first half of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, it brought about a tradition of imprisonment based on charity and the use of rehabilitation, which drew from the monastic culture; on the other hand, it embraced solutions that had been developed elsewhere, especially in Catholic countries, which sought the moral betterment of prisoners.
The innovations introduced in the Papal States as a result of the fruitful exchange with key players involved in the European reforms will be analysed with a special focus on the creation or reorganisation of penal institutions for women and children, in which rehabilitation was made a priority.
By turning the spotlight on two study cases, namely the cities of Bologna and Rome, the multiple influences and key players of these complex prison reforms will be identified, along with their social and cultural implications, and the impact these reforms had on the relationships between prison institutions and their urban environments.
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Alessio Collacchi (Università di Roma “Tor Vergata”), “Il diavolo alle Tre Fontane” e la “santa opera”. Colonizzazione penale agricola nella Roma post-unitaria (1880-1895)
After the unification was completed in 1870, two of the emergencies that most threatened the health of the italian national ecosystem were condensed in Rome and were a source of embarrassment for the ruling class: the inadequacy of prison facilities, subject of a rising debate and considered a deposit of corruption and idleness, on the other the hygienic-sanitary and socio-economic conditions of the Roman Agro, crystallization of those depopulated lands labeled as “africans” concentrated in some areas of the Kingdom and populated by “primitive” human in need of a paternalistic tutoring towards modernity.
In the Roman reality, both pathologies were progressively involved in an experiment of agricultural penal colonization at the Tre Fontane Abbey in 1880. The experiment was inspired by the construction of an anthropology of “healthy” and morally upright workers who, inserted in a controlled environment and “aseptically” separated from the healthy body of society, would have more easily introjected the fundamental rules of the associated life, of the ethics of production and hygiene through a daily exercise of agricultural work in place of real settlers. Open-air laboratory for the observation and correction of deviance, the agricultural penal colonization aimed both at the redemption of the condemned and at that of the rural populations of the Agro. The latter, «miserable and tumultuous people», would have benefited from the reclamation works by creating small rural communities equipped with all the services necessary to lead a civilized life: health stations, agricultural schools, parishes etc. The research I am conducting, still in an embryonic and developing phase, intends to present the establishment of the agricultural penal colony as a provision for sanitation and overall sanitation of the peasant society, from those condemned to the free population (often subjected to semi-servile conditions) who lived in the agricultural suburbs within national borders. The penal colonization project therefore set itself as the perfect incubation machine destined overall for the “orthopedic” correction of a heterogeneous set of potentially disturbing elements for the established order (convicts close to leaving and free farmers).
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Francesca Di Pasquale (Soprintendenza archivistica per la Sicilia – Archivio di Stato di Palermo), Devianza minorile e opere pie. La colonia agricola di S. Martino delle Scale (Palermo) nella seconda metà dell’Ottocento
In 1862, Luigi Castelli, abbot of San Martino delle Scale, Palermo, founded a “rural school for reforming idle and abandoned boys”, set within the vast expanses of the Benedictine monastery’s lands. Just a year later, the Ministry of the Interior came to an agreement with the monastic administration for the establishment of an agricultural colony for juvenile ‘deviants’. At the time, minors affected by laws against “idleness and vagrancy” and juvenile delinquency could be sent to a penal labour camp of this kind. Following the agreement with the Ministry, Luigi Castelli continued as the colony’s director.
The monastery of San Martino was an institution of great importance, founded by Pope Gregory the Great in 590 CE. Over the centuries, it had acquired a sizeable amount of landed properties as well as an important artistic estate. The establishment of the ‘rural school’, an activity aimed at fulfilling a social service, took place within a particularly complicated context for religious corporations in Italy more generally. In 1866, with the so-called Siccardi Law (Royal Decree n. 3036, issued on the 7th of July 1866), Italy abolished religious corporations and seized their goods. However, Article 33 of the same decree exempted churches evaluated “monuments” from this suppression, including the monastery of San Martino. Even though this rule was abrogated in 1869 by a successive decree, the agricultural colony had in the meantime been established as an official penal institute for minors, allowing the monastery to maintain control over its sizeable estate.
In the new Savoy state, public security issues lay at the center of a heated debate that brought together tensions at home and abroad. Juvenile deviance was considered one of the most serious of social plagues, raising alarm throughout different parts of public opinion. As with all aspects of the penal system, the issue of state intervention for the correction of ‘deviants’ was part and parcel of a broader concern for constructing the nation’s body, with what it meant to be ‘Italian’ and therefore with the nation’s internal borders. As a matter of fact, the process of reforming ‘misdirected’ youths – i.e. their ‘moral’ education – was composed of labour education and, still more importantly, their employment in agriculture and industry.
This paper analyses the history of the agricultural colony for minors in San Martino delle Scale from Italian Unification to the end of the nineteenth century, with a particular focus on the debate surroundingjuvenile ‘deviance’, projects for ‘reforming’ minors and the monastery’s own execution of these projects. My investigation considers the broader framework of institutions in which forced labour was implemented and focuses on the minors’ living and working conditions, their own mobility and the circulation of such practices within the national setting.
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27 September
4th Session: Round Table: New Perspectives on the History of Confinement
Vincent Milliot (Université Paris 8), Une nouvelle histoire de la prison et de l’enfermement ? Présentation du projet et du réseau de recherche « Enfermements modernes/Early Modern Confinement »
Em#C (Enfermements modernes / Early Modern Confinement) est un réseau de recherche international dédié à l’étude des différentes formes, pratiques, techniques et savoirs de l’enfermement à l’époque moderne dans une compréhension large (XVe-XIXe siècle).
Projet : Le chantier de l’histoire de la prison et de l’enfermement se situe au carrefour de plusieurs historiographies : histoire de la justice et de la criminalité, histoire des polices, histoire de l’administration et de l’État, histoire de l’Église et des religions, histoire du travail et de la marginalité/pauvreté. Ces histoires croisent toutes les enjeux carcéraux, de près ou de loin. C’est précisément en tant que phénomène pluriel qu’Em#C se propose d’envisager, d’explorer et de repenser l’enfermement moderne et ses dérivés.
Longtemps adossée à un ensemble de travaux et de controverses illustrés notamment par les ouvrages de Michel Foucault, Yves et Nicole Castan, Jacques-Guy Petit et Michelle Perrot en France, Michael Ignatieff ou David J. Rothman dans l’espace anglophone, Robert Roth en Suisse et d’autres, l’historiographie sur le sujet s’est largement internationalisée dans les dernières décennies et profite aujourd’hui de nombreux apports venant d’autres aires culturelles (espace germanique, Espagne, Italie, Asie). Cette ouverture internationale s’accompagne d’un renouveau épistémologique, en l’espèce le refus de considérer la prison sous l’angle exclusif d’un droit de punir reformulé par les réformateurs des Lumières et les juristes de la Révolution française. L’historiographie récente conteste toute approche téléologique, en termes de modernisation nécessaire ou de genèse de la prison, au profit d’une interrogation plus complexe, fondée sur les comparaisons dans le temps long des singularités « carcérales », mais aussi sur l’étude des circulations et des réinterprétations des expériences de l’enfermement.
Em#C s’inscrit dans ce renouveau historiographique qui bouscule les cadres traditionnels d’analyse en mettant l’accent sur la « multifonctionnalité » des pratiques de l’enfermement. À travers une approche qui s’intéresse en premier lieu aux usages et aux modes d’organisation des espaces clos, l’objectif est de saisir les caractéristiques propres de ces institutions en y incluant les prisons « traditionnelles », les monastères, les hôpitaux et les maisons de discipline et de travail. Ces enjeux sont envisagés au-delà des historiographies nationales et de la prise en compte d’institutions spécifiques.
Em#C se donne pour but de croiser et de débattre de ces nouvelles perspectives sur l’histoire de l’enfermement dans un cadre international.
Manifestations : Le réseau s’est constitué à Paris en 2018 autour de chercheur-e-s de France, de Belgique, de Suisse, d’Allemagne, de Russie et du Canada. Suite à l’organisation à Paris, en novembre 2018, des journées d’études internationales Une nouvelle histoire de la prison et de l’enfermement ?, les participant-e-s ainsi que les organisateurs ont décidé de mettre sur pied des rendez-vous scientifiques annuels. En septembre 2019 se tiendra ainsi à Moscou le prochain workshop de l’Em#C, intitulé Les lieux d’enfermement, espaces multifonctionnels en Europe occidentale et en Russie (16e-19esiècle).
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Marco Cicchini (Université de Genève), Interner le fou criminel, entre prison et hôpital (Genève – Vaud, 1760-1815)
Durant les années 1760-1815, selon des modalités et des chronologies variées, le modèle de l’hôpital général d’Ancien Régime comme lieu de réclusion indistincte s’effondre progressivement au profit de la prison pénale, d’une part, et de l’asile, d’autre part. Le discours philanthropique notamment, entre révolution du droit de punir et nouveaux rapports à la folie, préconise de ne pas mêler les fous, en tant que malades d’esprit, avec les prisonniers jugés pour des crimes ou des délits. Mais que se passe-t-il avec les fous criminels qui ont mis et qui mettent en péril la vie d’autrui ? Comment et où neutraliser les individus auteurs de violences parfois meurtrières que les tribunaux reconnaissent, en tout ou en partie, irresponsables de leurs actes en vertu de leur « fureur », « démence » ou « aliénation d’esprit », ceux qui seront qualifiés plus tard, au milieu du XIXe siècle, d’« aliénés criminels » ?
Pendant longtemps, l’internement de cette catégorie particulière d’individus, proche du « fou dangereux », est resté un problème essentiellement d’ordre pratique, privé de tout cadre normatif ou réglementaire, voire négligé par les traités de médecine. Ces cas se rencontrent au croisement des archives judiciaires, hospitalières et administratives. En l’occurrence, les « fous criminels » dont il sera question ici ressortent des archives de Genève et de Vaud, espaces politiques voisins, mais qui connaissent chacun des développements spécifiques dans le domaine de la prison et de l’asile.
En comparant les deux situations, on verra comment les mesures d’internement des fous criminels relèvent avant tout de solutions isolées, décidées au cas par cas, comme un effort continuel d’adaptation à des situations particulières. Elles soulignent de manière exemplaire, peut-être inaugurale, comment la montée en puissance du savoir médical autour des fous criminels et/ou dangereux exacerbe la tension entre assistance et coercition, traitement et contention.
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Chiara Lucrezio Monticelli (Università di Roma “Tor Vergata”), The “Roman” and “Catholic” Models of Prison Treatment in a Historical Perspective
The distinction between Roman and Catholic models in a comparative and transnational perspective has been the research topic of the group composed by modern historians and historians of Christianity of the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” . The research focus on what the group defined as ‘prison treatment’ represents, in our understanding, a crucial change from the rhetoric about prisons as well as from the actual practices of detention in the nineteenth century. Within this framework, Catholic and Roman experiences each played a relevant but differentiated role whose importance, however, went well beyond the limits of Italy.
Besides the better-known models of Anglo-Saxon and French prisons, it is important to take into account a plurality of other experiences hovering between punishment and rehabilitation. Such is the landscape that includes Rome in collaboration with other Catholic countries. The dynamic interaction entails not merely a diffusion from the centre, but a network of reciprocal influences.
Since the early eighteenth century, the Roman detention houses – especially the ‘houses of correction’ for minors and women’s within the Apostolic Hospice of Saint Michael, built in 1703 and 1734 respectively – concentrated on experimenting with prisoners’ treatment so as to include activities impacting on both the soul and the body of the inmates. What it particularly demonstrates is the choice of applying this combined method only to minors and, soon after that, to women.
The absence of a strong theoretical framework has left the Roman experience in the margins of the great European debates about prisons. We have endeavored to retrace the definition of the Roman and Catholic models that were developed both in Rome and elsewhere on the wave of such debates.
A counter-narrative of the birth of the prison in the Papal States was proposed by some Catholic supporters and was structured around the mid-nineteenth century as an ideological counterpoint to the apparent continuity between Enlightenment and Liberalism in the conception of a modern prison. It is thus in the political context defined by the ideological battle against the “inhumanity” of the Philadelphian model, considered anti-Catholic, that the Roman model gains ground.
However, this political controversy does not take into account the main element of novelty that precisely during these years impacted on a major change in Catholic countries, namely the intervention of religious congregations in the direction and management of the penal institutes themselves. Such transformation pinpoints the characteristics of the eighteenth-century Catholic model of prison that differentiates itself from the Roman model, centred around the experience at Saint Michael as the culmination of its autoctonous tradition.
The Roman model would lose in fact its driving force in the eighteenth century, despite playing a role a posteriori in the political debates on the reforms of prisons in the middle of the nineteenth century. Rather, a Catholic model is defined elsewhere, away from Rome, in the practical management of prisons, at an international level, culminating in the generalized entry on the scene of the religious congregations at the same time.
Our proposal aims at overcoming an exclusively National dimension in order to focalize the complex geography of Catholic countries manifested at this conference, where Italian experiences could be compared with those from Latin-America or Ireland, through the mediation of France and the Protestant context such as that at Geneva
International conference in Rome, 25th – 27th September 2019
Conference program:
25th September
Casa di reclusione di Roma Rebibbia
Via Bartolo Longo n. 72
3.00 p.m.
Chiara Lucrezio Monticelli (Università di Roma “Tor Vergata”), Conference Presentation
1st Session
Round Table: Representations of Roman Prisons
Chair: Marina Formica (Università di Roma “Tor Vergata” – Coordinator of “Roma 800”)
Fabrizio Natalini (Università di Roma “Tor Vergata”), Carceri romane nel cinema: da Magni a Citti e Pasolini
Matteo Morandini (historian, teacher in Rebibbia prison), Le carceri del papa nei romanzi del Risorgimento italiano
Edoardo Albinati (writer), Marco Delogu (photographer), Biografie e fotografie a Rebibbia
Bruno Oliviero (film director), Il carcere tra realtà e finzione
Fabio Pierangeli (Università di Roma “Tor Vergata” – Coordinator of “Corso di Laurea in Lettere”), Introduzione agli interventi e testimonianze degli studenti di Rebibbia
26th September
Archivio di Stato di Roma
Corso Rinascimento n. 40
9.30 a.m.
2nd Session
Theories and Practices of Confinement at the End of the Ancien Régime
Paolo Buonora (Direttore dell’Archivio di Stato di Roma), Welcome adresses
Michele Di Sivo (Vicedirettore dell’Archivio di Stato di Roma), The State Archive of Rome and its Documentation on Prison and Confinement: Projects in Progress
Introduction
Alessandro Serra (Università di Perugia), Le traitement carcéral au XIXe siècle entre réformes d’État et initiatives ecclésiastiques: une hypothèse de travail
Chair: Marco Cicchini (Université de Genève)
Keynote speech
Mary Gibson (John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York), The Birth of the Italian Prison in International Perspective
Coffee Break
Marcos Bretas (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro), Prison models in Independent Brazil
Ludovic Maugué (Université de Genève), La maison centrale d’Embrun (1800-1815) : la naissance d’un modèle carcéral français ?
Francesco Saggiorato (Università di Roma “Tor Vergata” – Université Paris 1), Prisons, détentions « provisoires » et mesures de haute police dans la Toscane napoléonienne
Discussion
Lunch
3.00 p.m.
3rd Session
Rome, Ecclesiastical Institutions and the Catholic Model
Chair: Tommaso Caliò (Università di Roma “Tor Vergata”)
Maria Romana Caforio (Archivio di Stato di Chieti), Lo Stato Pontificio nel quadro delle riforme carcerarie europee: protagonisti, visitatori, reciproche influenze (1816-1857)
Alessandro Serra (Università di Perugia), Congregazioni religiose e gestione delle carceri: il caso di S. Balbina (Roma, 1854-1878)
Alessio Collacchi (Università di Roma “Tor Vergata”), “Il diavolo alle Tre Fontane” e la “santa opera”. Colonizzazione penale agricola nella Roma postunitaria (1880-1895)
Coffee Break
Francesca Di Pasquale (Soprintendenza archivistica per la Sicilia – Archivio di Stato di Palermo), Devianza minorile e opere pie. La colonia agricola di S. Martino delle Scale (Palermo) nella seconda metà dell’Ottocento
Discussion
27th September
Biblioteca delle Arti
Via San Michele n. 22
9.30 a.m.
4th Session
Round Table: New Perspectives on the History of Confinement
Chair: Livio Antonielli (Università di Milano)
Vincent Milliot (Université Paris 8), Une nouvelle histoire de la prison et de l’enfermement ? Présentation du projet et réseau de recherche “Enfermements modernes / Early Modern Confinement”
Marco Cicchini (Université de Genève), Interner le fou criminel, entre prison et hôpital (Genève et Vaud, 1760-1815)
Catherine Cox (Dublin University), Tending to unsettle the Belief of a Catholic Prisoner’: Chaplains, Prison Regimes, and Mental Disorder in Mid Nineteenth-Century Ireland
Coffee Break
Chiara Lucrezio Monticelli (Università di Roma “Tor Vergata”), The Roman and Catholic Models of Prison Treatment in a Historical Perspective
Piero Vereni (Università di Roma “Tor Vergata”), Prison and Social Sciences: Introduction to the Final Discussion
General discussion
12.30 a.m.
Guided tour of the historical prisons for minors and women in S. Michele a Ripa
The conference is organised in the frame of the “Mission Sustainability” research project The International Debate on the Prisoners Treatment.
The “Roman Model” in a Historical Perspective, supported by University of Rome “Tor Vergata”.
Scientific committee:
Livio Antonielli (Università di Milano), Luigi
Cajani (Sapienza Università di Roma), Tommaso
Caliò (Università di Roma “Tor Vergata”), Marco
Cicchini (Université de Genève), Christian De
Vito (University of Bonn), Francesca Di Pasquale
(Soprintendenza archivistica per la Sicilia-Archivio
di Stato di Palermo), Michele Di Sivo (Archivio di
Stato di Roma), Marina Formica (Università di Roma
“Tor Vergata”), Mary Gibson (John Jay College, New
York), Raffaele Laudani (Università di Bologna),
Chiara Lucrezio Monticelli (Università di Roma
“Tor Vergata”), Vincent Milliot (Université Paris 8),
Michel Porret (Université de Genève), Alessandro
Serra (Università di Perugia)
Organising Committee:
Tommaso Caliò, Marco Cicchini, Chiara Lucrezio
Monticelli, Alessandro Serra
Organising Secretariat:
Alessio Collacchi (alessio.collacchi@libero.it)
Francesco Saggiorato (francescosaggiorato@gmail.com)
The research project
The conference represents the concluding step of a research project supported by the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” entitled The international debate on the treatment of prisoners. The “roman model” in a historical perspective.
The project focused on the “roman/catholic model” in the context of theories and practices of the treatment of prisoners, with particular attention on 19th century reforms. During the 18th century, the Ancien Régime catholic forms of detention underwent a major innovation process that culminated in the establishment of cellular confinement for children and women in the ‘San Michele a Ripa’ prison in Rome. As a result of the discussion raised even in the ecclesiastical milieu by Cesare Beccaria’s work (censored in 1766), further models of imprisonment were tested during French presence in Rome (namely the 1798-99 Roman Republic and the annexation to the Napoleonic Empire in 1809-1814).
This complex legacy was at the core of the debate on prison reform in mid-19th century both in the Papal States and at the international level. The role played in this debate by the American models of prison (Philadelphia’s ‘solitary confinement’ and Auburn’s ‘silent system’) has been studied extensively. By contrast, the papal system of detention as a model – combining work and religious practice in the treatment and rehabilitation of prisoners (ora et labora) – has been poorly investigated by scholars, in spite of its relevance in the opinion of the observers of that time.
The features of the roman penitentiary system were noted by key figures of the reform movement in the Papal States (Morichini, 1835; Moroni, 1840-1873) and by foreign experts (Cerfbeer, 1839; Petitti di Roreto, 1837-1840-1843), either from similar or opposite perspectives.
The aspects related to the treatment of prisoners and the role of religion in rehabilitation were perceived as the most noteworthy features of the roman model. Those key aspects of rehabilitation were by contrast strongly criticised by an isolationist and anti-productivist view of punishment that was put forward by some liberal intellectuals (Tocqueville 1833; Cattaneo, 1840).
Aims of the Conference
In this interpretative framework, the conference aims to put forward the conceptual tool of ‘limit’ as useful notion in order to analyze urban spaces and forms of treatment in roman institutions of confinement, with regard to a more general comparative perspective of the ‘triumph’ of 19th-century prison.
The typical catholic combination between the hybridization of penal and non-penal confinement and the roman displacement of the prisons from the centre to the periphery can be considered a key aspect of the development of 19th century prison in Rome and abroad. Hence, the case-study of Papal States can significantly contribute to investigate the establishment of prison as the pivot of Western penal systems and its implications in the urban renewal of bourgeois cities by combining the field of studies on penal prison with an urban history approach. Even in a global historical perspective, the Christian vision of confinement and rehabilitation may provide suggestions for further research on the relationship between religions and non-Western origins of prison.
During the conference, selected professors, research groups and PhD students are asked to better conceptualize what the “catholic model” was and the role it played in the context of prison reforms that, starting with 19th century debates, represented one major challenge to modern societies. In particular, scholars are invited to discuss the key words of ‘limit’ and ‘border’ as a way to put in question too static paradigms of how total institutions work, in light of recent conceptual and historical debates.
Conference programme
An introducing session (held in Rebibbia prison and involving students detainees) will be devoted to cultural representations of roman prisons in a historical perspective, from the 19th century until recent attempts to represent life in prison (especially in Rebibbia prison) undertaken by literature, photography, music and fiction. By focusing on the characteristics of the storytelling about confinement as a literary genre, the aim is to evaluate the connections between these narratives and the public debate on prison reform in order to point out topics, clichés and rhetoric that had their origins in the 19th century.
A second session (held in the ancient prison of San Michele a Ripa), entitled New perspectives on the history of confinement, will provide an overview of recent approaches to the history of modern kinds of confinement, with regard to experiences that have some connection with catholic rehabilitation treatment based on work and religious practice (Enfermements project from France and Belgium, “Prisoners, Medical Care and Entitlement to Health” project in Ireland, “The Carceral Archipelago” project from England, are particularly interesting in a comparative perspective with roman-case).
In the third session, entitled The limits of punishment: theories and practices of confinement at the end of the Ancien Régime, the focus will be on the persistence of non-penal forms of confinement during the rise of penal prison as a privileged form of punishment. The cases of hybridization of the different treatments in the confinement institutions (judicial madhouses, depôt de mendicité, penal colonies) will be examined in this perspective by taking into account casestudies from Italian States, Switzerland, French Empire, British Empire.
The final session, entitled Rome as a urban-model and catholic-model of treatment ?, the case-study of 19th-century Rome will be analyzed from the point of view of urban renewal interconnected with the circulation of catholic models of detention. The management of Roman prisons (public or private actors, professional bodies, religious or lay staff, gender distinction) and the impact on living conditions will be taken into account in a comparative perspective with other catholic countries in European and non-European contexts in terms of circulations of models, ideas
and experts (special attention will be devoted to case-studies from Ireland, Spain, Latin America).
PI of the research project:
Chiara Lucrezio Monticelli (Università di Roma “Tor Vergata”)
Organizational committee:
Tommaso Caliò (Università di Roma “Tor Vergata”)
Marco Cicchini (Université de Genève)
Chiara Lucrezio Monticelli (Università di Roma “Tor Vergata”)
Alessandro Serra (Università di Perugia)
Organising Secretariat:
Alessio Collacchi (Università di Roma “Tor Vergata)
Francesco Saggiorato (Università di Roma “Tor Vergata”-Université Paris 1-IHMC