Abstract

Law 81/2014 renewed Italian forensic psychiatry. The lawmaker’s goal aims at a collectivisation of care and an abandonment of the asylum logic in the handling of mentally ill offenders. However, legislative intentions find a tricky application at the local level where the multiplication of care tasks leads to an often conflicting fragmentation of care practices grounded on mechanisms for delegating therapeutic responsibility. My aim is to reflect ethnographically on how social actors succeed or fail in constructing local care policies to set up, in a context of systematic legal ambiguity, frameworks of therapeutic alliance for the benefit of patients