The penal management of inequalities : a research into punishment implementation in Milan prisons

Various authors have reported a strong connection between the fiscal and cultural crisis affecting the western democracies’ public welfare systems and the fast expansion in the punishment systems of these countries over the last twenty years. Their researches have disclosed the existence of pun-ishment selection systems leading to a more frequent and intense resort to detention with respect to social groups playing a marginal role in the labour market and in the framework of society. However, these surveys often have a supranational horizon and mostly make use of data produced by governmental agencies or by the penitentiary managements themselves. Also in Italy the social make-up of the convicted population is almost exclusively gathered from the statistics produced by the penitentiary management. However, these statistics hinge on the requirements of prisons’ bureaucracy and contain very limited data about the job, family, financial and social situation of inmates. In order to establish who the inmates are, and which features they share, a research has been carried out into the social composition of the population convicted in the Milanese penal institutions. The survey was conducted in 2006, shortly before the Italian pardon law, through the administration of a structured questionnaire, which was distributed to the whole population convicted in the three Milanese prisons. The chief results emerging from the survey show that the convicted population is to a great extent made up by people, most of them young and males, who also before detention displayed indigence and strong social and working vulnerability profiles. In the rich Milanese context, the people in jail are chiefly those who are prevented from benefiting from “social proprieties” which are the only ones that can grant access to social assets, in a context displaying a progressive and growing individualisation and contractual nature of welfare services. The filled-in questionnaires also displays a vicious cycle of social and work instability, as a result of which the detention punishment makes the social and financial situation worse, and ends up reproducing a population viewed as threatening, feeding the re-emerging record of dangerous classes. Starting from the data gathered through the inquiry conducted in Milan the paper is aimed to outline some hypotheses on the classificatory mechanisms and the “dispositives of truth” that govern the “making and moulding” of these populations described as dangerous and subject to penal control. As a matter of fact we are trying to establish the impact produced by the set of institutions, dispositives and knowings which Foucault labels “governamentality”, which operate both in the punishment and in the social system.