Legal culture and professional cultures in the prison system

The contribution focuses, with reference to Italy, on the interplay between professional cultures in the field of the prison and tries to describe how the normative characteristics, typical of the professional cultures of teachers and health professionals, meet the total institution. The introduction presents the different sources from which the empirical material comes, collected by the authors in the course of different research and monitoring activities, which allowed them to access to the prison field. The second paragraph introduces the reader to the complexity of the Italian prison system, which has undergone a profound differentiation in recent years. The third paragraph analyzes, on the basis of the qualitative data collected, the encounter between the professional cultures of teachers and doctors and the specific prison culture. The conclusion enlightens the irreducible polymorphism that characterizes the institution and unavoidably interferes with a sociologist’s efforts at generalization.