The article 27 of the Italian Constitution affirms that “the punishment cannot consist in treatment contrary to human dignity and must aim at rehabilitating the offender”.
But in 2013, the European court of Human Rights condemned Italy for the inhuman and degrading conditions of prisons. This has been a consequence of an increase in oversize of the prison population, resulting in the enactment of laws that have greatly exacerbated the sanctions for immigration, drug consumption and recidivism, so much so that it is arisen a serious overcrowding. In June 2010, the DAP reported that despite the regulatory capacity that prisons were able to sustain it was estimated at 44,568 units, prisoners actually present in Italian prisons amounted to 68,258. Moreover the recidivism rate in Italy has esteemed at 70%.
This is why since 2014 due to a series of regulatory actions, we are seeing a process of cultural transformation of the penitentiary system in Italy, thanks to a renewed attention to the prison theme stressed by the European Court of Human Rights. Inmates have to be placed at the center of the system, recognizing a larger number of rights and building a path based on knowledge of the prisoners and a constant activity of listening.
If prisons are, at their most basic level, organizations which take on the societal function of separating those that the state’s public justice apparatus deems to be ‘criminal’ from the rest of the population (Andrew, 2007; Brakel, 1988) it’s through the rehabilitation of the inmates that prisons create public value. The rehabilitation of inmates and their eventual reintegration into society is a paramount objective of the penal system. Advocates of the rehabilitation perspective argue that crime rates can be reduced by ‘changing’ criminals (Cressey, 1968). Faugeron (1996), for example, argues for the restorative function of a prison, which requires, at the very least, offering opportunities for rehabilitation.
In recent years at international level, there has been growing pressure on policy makers and practitioners to identify and support programs to prepare inmates for reentry into their communities. In Italy these programs are mainly run by social enterprises, vounteers and public institutions in collaboration with prisons in form of partnerships or network where it is central the active engagement of the inmates.
The paper presents the preliminary results of a research conducted in the 3 prisons of Milan (San VIttore, Opera and Bollate) through focus groups, interviews and survey. The aim of the study is to measure the public value created by the art programs in these prison and mechanism of value co-creation.
Value co-creation, co-design and co-production in public services
