Il demone meridiano: il carcere, la democrazia

Abstract

Precisely in those decades of violence and terror, with prisons filled with political enemies and no longer and not just common criminals, the theme of what imprisonment was and what purpose it should have took on a new and also revolutionary meaning. to. The requisition of the convents and their transformation into places of detention irreversibly changed the meaning of prison. No longer the large rooms of the ancient regime that welcomed and crowded together all criminals, of every type, and where only a large possibility of money guaranteed only wealthy prisoners access to goods or services. Now the prison system differed based on the type of crime, political or common. The cell became the place of imprisonment within an architectural complex already designed to experience penance, silence and meditation. It was a debate, the one on the new prison, which arrived, with the dense exchanges of ideas and men of the Enlightenment, from the other side of the Atlantic, from the United States.