7 THE ITALIAN LAW JOURNAL NO. 1 (2021) The Mith of Re-Education by Patrizio Gonnella The prison model has won, as it has developed from the sixteenth-century workhouses to the ten million detainees currently imprisoned in the world. Despite these huge numbers, our penal and penitentiary legal framework is all about the myth of re-educational treatment. The treatment model is progressively overflowing, as was inevitable, towards a disciplinary model. Everything in prison is treatment and everything is discipline. Shifting the spotlight from the re-educational utopia to human dignity and the rights deriving from it helps to read the aporia of prison, helps to reestablish the foundation of the prison system in a clearer way, imposing ethical limits that cannot be crossed and making it compatible with the rules of the welfare state and the rule of law. DOI 10.23815/2421-2156.ITALJ ISSN 2421-2156
