‘They would throw you into a room…’: a study of abandonment and ethical loneliness in an Italian prison during the pandemic

Abstract

Drawing on prisoners’ accounts, this article explores how mitigation strategies adopted to contain the spread of the virus in prison shaped their everyday prison life. The article, using Stauffer’s concept of ethical loneliness, sheds light on the different ways in which a sense of abandonment was experienced by 26 detained individuals interviewed in a prison in Northern Italy, with a focus on the role of the State regarding the measures implemented (and not implemented) and, on an everyday basis, those of the prison staff. Participants’ narratives tell us how, even during the dramatic emergency of the pandemic, prisoners were conceived as stigmatised and otherised individuals where the issue of security, far from being understood in terms of health protection, continued to take on repressive connotations.