This talk will consist of an insider and an outsider perspective on the function of work in prison in Italy, where the right to work is ratified by the Constitution (Art. 1) and as the principle of re-education of the penalty (Art. 27) so that prisoners can re-enter society successfully. 

Stefania Basilisco, as a legal-educational officer in the Department of Prison Administration of the Italian Ministry of Justice, whose main activity consists of the re-education of inmates during the execution of a prison sentence, will approach the flaws and strengths of prison work in Italy from two positionalities: the institutional penitentiary narrative of the emancipatory role of work in the trajectory of rehabilitation of the detained person, and the auto-narratives of two prisoners which offer case-studies on the transformative value of work as a means of empowerment of the self. 

Monica Jansen, from a cultural studies perspective, will start her considerations on the conditions of work in prisons in Italy from critical counternarratives that are mainly based on NGO Antigone’s pre- and post-Covid surveys, which signal how the unresolved issue of overcrowding also conditions the supply of job and training opportunities. Moreover, she analyses Italy’s exemplary role in the fabrication of products “made in prison” which enhance the prisoners’ self-esteem and wellbeing. Both narratives, one of crisis and one of redemption, will be contrasted with the auto-narratives that prisoners produced during creative writing laboratories, in which work seems to figure mainly as an escape from “doing time”.