Italian Prisons in the Age of Positivism 1861–1914 by Mary Gibson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Italian Prisons in the Age of Positivism 1861–1914 by Mary Gibson Chiara Lucrezio Monticelli Gibson, Mary – Italian Prisons in the Age of Positivism 1861–1914. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 336 p. Mary Gibson’s Italian Prisons in the Age of Positivism 1861–1914 aims to emphasize the connections between the Italian experience and the broader cultural trends of that era. Such contextualization marks the first important challenge in the book: that of rethinking, through the Italian case study, some general assumptions in the history of modern prison. By going beyond the study of those countries (France, the United Kingdom, and the United States) that led the “first wave of reform” at the end of the eighteenth-century, new perspectives emerge in the analysis of the relation between prisons and modern society. The wider perspective generates two notable methodological choices: that of treating gender and age as important factors in the study of systems of punishment and that of combining small-scale, local realities with large-scale national and global ones. Gibson’s first contribution is to start a discussion about the chronology and geographical mapping of the accepted narrative concerning “the birth of the prison,” starting from an apparently peripheral viewpoint, that of late nineteenth-century Italy. Her introduction includes some short but pointed remarks on prison historiography (pp. 4–7), beginning with the so-called revisionist historians David Rothman, Michel Foucault, and Michael Ignatieff. Though fundamental, the work of these pioneers has been later criticized as presenting an oversimplified evolution from corporal punishment to penal incarceration based on the average adult-male prisoner. Gibson underlines the positive effect of Gender Studies in turning the attention towards prisons for women, as well as the usefulness of a broader approach to confinement practices during the Ancien Régime. From this perspective, the history of prisons in Italy appears much less isolated from the international landscape than could be thought at first. The book’s persuasive argument revolves around presenting the convergence on the Italian scene of three cultural currents that are crucial to understanding the success of the prison in modern penal systems. These aspects include the following: the traditional forms of confinement imposed by Catholics during the counterreformation; the revolutionary influence of Cesare Beccaria’s penal Enlightenment; and the interpretation of Positivism transpiring from the works on criminal anthropology by Cesare Lombroso. Following the Unification of Italy in 1861, such complex inheritance influenced the development of a “second wave of reform,” a phase that has been less intensely researched in previous scholarship, but that comes to the fore as central in Gibson’s book. During such a process of nation-building, Rome provides a case study within the larger Italian case study. Rome, being capital first of the Papal States and then of the Kingdom of Italy, is taken as a “laboratory” (p. 11) wherein the author retraces the politics of the liberal ruling class and party. The first chapter, “Punishment before Italian Unification,” deals with the Roman models of “proto-prison,” among which are the well-known examples of the Carceri nuove (1658) and of the Houses of Correction of San Michele a Ripa for children (1703) and women (1735) respectively. These new solutions supported by the popes received attention [End Page 708] from many contemporary observers and have been studied as early examples of cellular structures reflecting the internal activities of work and religious practice. Keeping in mind these significant beginnings, Gibson considers that the process of national unification marks a pivotal point in the passage from Rome’s leading role to that of other Italian regions that were more deeply imbued with the spirit of the Enlightenment. During the Risorgimento, in fact, experts, reformers, and Italian philanthropists participated in a European debate concerning the Auburnian and Philadelphian models of confinement, while both the Roman and the Neapolitan models were fiercely opposed. William Gladstone’s letters are one example of such open criticism (p. 43). Italian patriots considered prisons as an emblem of oppression by the Restauration’s rulers, while Liberals inherited the role of Enlightenment thinkers from the previous century in leading the fight for reform. Nonetheless, these nationalist movements met with failure...