Life Imprisonment and the Special Prison Regime (art. 41 bis Penitentiary Order) in Italy

The essay deals with two issues debated in criminal doctrine and jurisprudence in Italy: life imprisonment without review and the special prison regime, institutions united by the fact that in most cases they are applied to people convicted of organised crime offences, in particular mafia crimes. The work studies their historical genesis, their regulation, their apparent purposes and those that in practice these institutions have taken on, also scrutinising the jurisprudence of the Italian Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights. The conclusions highlight the fact that the real objective of life imprisonment and ‘hard prison’ in Italy is probably not so much and only that of preventing the offender from resuming or continuing relations with criminal organisations, but that of attempting to force the prisoner to cooperate with justice, which however poses problems of compatibility with many principles of the Italian Constitution and the ECHR.