Beyond Confinement: Bodies, Spaces and the Challenge of Social Reintegration

The issue of prison overcrowding in Italy highlights a critical tension between confinement and the rehabilitative goals of detention. Beyond the quantitative issue, overcrowding reflects more profound challenges related to modifying spaces and their management methods, directly impacting the well-being of both inmates and staff. This article retraces the decade-long experience of the Laboratorio Carcere research group at Politecnico di Milano, exploring how architectural design can transform prisons from containment structures into places promoting dignity and social reintegration. The group's approach involves "transition prototypes", experimental interventions focused on interactions between individuals and their spaces. These interventions aim to create opportunities for relationships both within institutions and between prisons and external society. These interventions conceptualised not as solutions but as catalysts for novel design inquiries, enable researchers to directly observe the characteristics of spaces hidden behind prison walls. A significant development in this regard was the establishment of Off-Campus San Vittore, a research and teaching space of the Politecnico di Milano located in the historic prison of Milan. Weekly visits to these spaces allow researchers to observe, measure, and understand the comfort conditions in various prison places throughout different periods of the year. This offers a more comprehensive and nuanced perspective on detention spaces. The reflections, rooted in the Milanese context, aim to stimulate a broader dialogue with European contexts, addressing the urgent issue of living quality in detention spaces.