"The Tombs of the Living": Prisons and Prison Reform in Liberal Italy.

"The Tombs of the Living": Prisons and Prison Reform in Liberal Italy. By Susan B. Carrafiello (New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc., 1998. l38pp. $38.95).

True to its title, this book focuses rather narrowly on the various attempts and the overall failure of the liberal regime to reform Italy's notorious prison system. Inherited from the pre-unitary states, this "system" consisted of a hodgepodge of some fifteen hundred jails (custodial prisons) and thirty plus penitentiaries, the majority of which lacked even the most primitive facilities, especially with regard to the health and welfare of the prisoners. Usually converted from convents, forts, and barracks, these "tombs of the living" generally lumped prisoners together in large, but overcrowded rooms, with little or no concern for the age, crime, or even sex of the inmates. Indeed, prisoners awaiting trial often shared facilities with those already convicted, and in conditions that promoted high rates of corruption, escape, and mortality.

Such conditions ran completely counter to prevailing theories (often imported from abroad) of punishment, prevention, and rehabilitation, and thus occasioned a seemingly endless series of commissions, studies, tracts, projects, and debates, most of which had little impact. As in other western countries, much of this discourse focused on the comparative merits of two American systems: the Auburn, which combined communal work with cellular isolation, and the Philadelphia, which stressed constant isolation, albeit with some work carried out within the cell. However, despite all the ink spilled in their defense or derision, both of these systems demanded a massive number of individualized prison cells, which the government was simply incapable of providing given the country's finances. Thus as early as 1864, the new regime legislated the construction of "cellular" jails in all major cities, but virtually nothing happened because the government could not find the necessary funds, and this would only be the first in a series of "dead letter" laws in which reformers' plans were hamstrung by fiscal constraints.

These constraints were compounded by the continuing inability of the liberal government to create a uniform penal code for Italy because, it was argued, the nature of the punishments would determine the nature of the prisons. But attempts to legislate such a uniform code had long foundered over the issue of the death penalty (which the surviving Tuscan code had rejected) and were further complicated by the rise of Lombroso and Ferri's criminal anthropology in the 1870s and 1880s, which called the assumptions of classical criminology into question. Rather than punishment fitting the crime, they argued it should fit the individual criminal according to his or her "natural" proclivity to deviance and resulting danger to society. Thus "social defense" rather than punishment became the goal of the prison, and the experts argued against ubiquitous cellular prisons or even a uniform code for the widely different regions of Italy, pushing instead for a variety of alternatives including the death penalty, monetary fi nes, and indeterminate sentences, all to be decided by judges trained in the new "science."

Finally, after years of stalemate, the government eventually adopted a unified penal code in 1889, which immediately opened the door to uniform prison legislation designed to eliminate the worst problems of Italy's prisons. Based on the "Irish" or progressive system (which combined elements of both Auburn and Philadelphia) the new laws dictated that prisoners begin their sentences with set periods of cellular isolation and then be granted increasing contact with others as they showed signs of rehabilitation. They segregated prisoners according to severity of offense and mental responsibility while keeping the guilty separate from those awaiting trial. Likewise, they attempted to standardize proper treatment of prisoners, improve the quality of guards, and provide an effective chain of oversight and discipline for the entire system. Once again, however, legislative theory ran into financial reality. The new system was dependent on a vastly increased number of cellular prisons and a sophisticated infrastructur e designed to provide work to the prisoners. But the funds were simply not there for such improvements, and free market forces of both labor and capital militated against using prisoners as industrial or even artisanal workers. By the turn of the century, Italian legislators had to admit that the new laws had essentially failed, and they began to look for alternatives, particularly the large-scale use of prisoners in land reclamation projects, which flew in the face of the idea of cellular rehabilitation. Thus by World War I Italy's prisons were "only marginally better" than they had been in 1861.

Overall, this story of reform and failure is informative, and the book is at its best in its discussion of the interplay of parliamentary, administrative, and professional forces as they impinged on the prison problem. However, the author never really finds a larger theme to tie it all together and misses an opportunity to test her own formulation of Guido Neppi Modona's 1973 theses that "the immobilism' that characterized Italian prison reform was a deliberate ploy on the part of the ruling class to separate and destroy Italy's criminal population" and that "the brutal nature of the Italian prison system actually made it easier to govern and thus inhibited change." (p.3) Instead the author muddles about and offers the somewhat fuzzy notion that Italy "created a permanent 'prison class' not so much because the disciplinary regime was established but because it was never actually realized, except on paper." (p. 5) Similarly, her conclusion that Italy "was ultimately unsuited to any attempt to create a homogen eous prison system" (p. 121) because of its disparities of North and South seems to run counter to the logic of the rest of the text which often implies that uniform, comprehensive reform was both necessary and feasible.

There are other problems as well. Although the author contends that one could trace the roots of reform back to the eighteenth-century and Beccaria, we hear nothing about the Napoleonic intervention and occupation, which one could argue had the greatest single impact on Italy's systems of policing and punishment in the nineteenth century. Likewise, we learn that the desire for reform was occasioned by a fear of increasing crime rates, but we hear little or nothing about that increase, nor do we have any sense of the historical dimension of law and order, the crisis of which both John Davis and myself have argued was critical to understanding the process of unification itself.

Just as telling is a certain lack of numeracy which detracts from overall analysis of the prison system. We never get a clear baseline picture against which to measure change, and lacking any tables or graphs we are left to cobble together isolated figures about prisons, prisoners, escapes, or mortality rates. We don't know if there were more prisons of one kind or another in the North or the South; we have no sense of recidivism rates, which were critical to reformers' notions of rehabilitation; and we are left to wonder how major political events such as brigandage in the South, the Fasci Siciliani, or the Fatti di Maggio might have affected prison populations. When numbers do appear, they sometimes get ill treatment, as when the author affirms that "lack of education caused people to turn to a life of crime" based on a 1867 report showing 58 percent of male prisoners and 62 percent of female prisoners could neither read nor write. (p. 30) But a glance at the closest census (1871) shows that 73% of Italian s were deemed illiterate, and thus one could argue that the prison population was actually better educated than the norm. The specific statistics here, however, are less important than the fact that the appropriate questions regarding the relevant population were never asked.

These faults do not deprive the study of all merit. It is an important topic, and the author has brought to light some interesting material. On the other hand, one is left feeling that for all the obvious effort, this could have been a better book.