Constitutional theory and the limits to the punitive power: the Italian case of prisoners’ right to judicial protection

The growing attention of the Italian Constitutional Court and the European Court of human rights for the judicial protection of prisoners’ rights has placed the prison problem at the centre of the theoretical debate on penalty, after it has always been relegated to an administrative problem. The article, starting from the analysis of the complex hermeneutical operation carried out by the Courts, proposes a theory of the relationship between punitive power and the individual based on a new balance between the opposite paradigms of social defence and the protection of individual rights. Initially this balance was identified by the Courts in the theory of re-education, interpreted reductively as a doctrine of humanization of the punitive power. In more recent years, in response to the re-emergence of neoliberal retributive doctrines, this approach has been integrated with an articulated constitutional theory which invokes the constitutional fundamental rights of the individual as a limit to the punitive power. What emerges is a constitutional theory of punitive power that attempts, partially succeeding, to resolve some theoretical limits of liberal utilitarianism.