Abstract

Today, on all of the national territory, there are only four female institutions for adult women and only one for minors: therefore the majority of women of all ages is forced to live detention in subsections of prisons «conceived» for men, demonstrating the longstanding idea which interpreted female criminality along the lines of «vulnerability», when not of inferiority. Starting from the workers’ professional actions and from projects of excellence, considering the gender view as a perspective to adopt so as to respect differences, but also to think about models of atonement of the sentence, this paper thus proposes paradigms and styles of intervention to subtract women from a subordinate plan. What emerges from this analysis is the need for a renovation of the cultures and relations among those who live prison on a daily basis and the necessity to arrange educational settings which are able to succumb more on the resources than on the shortages, making the derisory number of females not an alibi for carelessness, but an occasion to experiment new approaches and methodologies.