Abstract

This paper aims to investigate not the causes, but the effects of the experience of imprisonment on immigrants' lives. Specifically, we are going to examine two main lines of interpretation, both included inside the internal current of Marxism, and we'll pay attention to the correlation between the labor market and the prison system. According to the literature, the prison is a main entrance to the Social Contract for the new working class, made up of immigrants now a days. In fact, inside prisons, they have a new opportunity to benefit from certain forms of welfare, accessing services and opportunities (education, regular employment and job training). A different approach has argued that the detention of immigrants performs a merely neutralizing a function aimed at their definitive exclusion from the social context. Inquiring to what "offers" the penitentiary to immigrants and migrant life stories collected from offenders in the Prison of Capanne (PG), this work aims to understand what function the prison plays today against immigrants, and especially if it represents today a first step in the process of inclusion of the new working class, which has become a place of neutralization, with the advent of Post-Fordist production system, a place of storage of excess workers.