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The establishment of criminal asylums
The heated debate that had begun with the emergence of criminal anthropology and involved the major exponents of the new science, the influence of the experiments being carried out in northern Europe, the dramatic conditions in the prisons in the Kingdom of Italy, exacerbated by promiscuity and overcrowding, had made increasingly urgent the need to draw up a law that would authorize the opening of criminal asylums also in Italy. Criminal anthropologists saw these institutions as the solution to the problem of crime and the means of protecting society. The establishment of criminal asylums marked the victory of the Positivist School over the Traditional School, and was to establish the concept of crime as a disease and the sentence as a cure. The criminal is nearly always a deviant or sick person, was the guiding principle of anthropologists, doctors and psychiatrists at the end of the century and, as such, the criminal was considered someone who had to be protected and cured and not simply repressed.
Aversa 1876
In 1876, the director general of the Institutions of Prevention and Punishment, Martino Beltrani Scalia, with the collaboration of Gaspare Virgilio (who had been the surgeon of the penitentiaries for those of unsound mind in Aversa since 1867), in order to make up for the legislative delay with regard to establishing asylums for the criminally insane, with a simple administrative act opened the section for the insane at the old penitentiary for those of unsound mind in Aversa, housed in the sixteenth-century Monastery of S. Fran-cesco di Paola, used as a church until 1808. The section for the insane, for which Gaspare Virgilio was made responsible, was the first example of such institutions that some years later were called criminal asylums, and an experiment in those “special establishments for inveterate criminals”. The section received the first group of nineteen criminally insane persons.
Initially, and for some time, the section for the insane not only housed those who had been acquitted due to insanity who were a danger to society, but, above all, individuals who had gone mad during imprisonment or detainees awaiting a medical examination.
In 1907, Filippo Saporito, psychiatrist and former pupil of Virgilio, became the director of the Aversa asylum, while the original core of the institution expanded to incorporate some of the surrounding buildings.
Montelupo Fiorentino 1886
In 1878 the second conference of the Società Freniatrica Italiana was held in Aversa, during which the establishment of criminal asylums was urged, this was insisted on also in the subsequent conference held in Reggio Emilia in September 1881, whose participants asked for a special bill to be drawn up, which was, in fact, presented in April 1884. Since the section for the insane in Aversa was not capable of housing all of Italy’s criminally insane, and it was very costly to transfer prisoners from the central and northern regions, it was suggested that another institution should be opened in a healthy location in the centre of the country that was sufficiently isolated not to disturb the inhabitants of the area. The building chosen for the new institution was the old Villa Granducale dell’Ambrogiana at Montelupo Fiorentino (twenty-five kilometres from Florence), built in the sixteenth century to a design by Buontalenti. Situated a short distance from a station on the main railway line, this had the advantage of permitting the rapid transportation of prisoners from every jail in the country. This old Medici Villa was converted to suit its new purpose. The work was carried out economically by using prisoners as the labour force. The new criminal asylum at Montelupo Fiorentino was opened on 12 June 1886.
Reggio Emilia 1882
In 1892 a third criminal asylum was established. Housed in an old monastery built
between the sixteenth and seventeenth century, a massive square edifice called
La Casa delle Missioni, situated in the old centre of the city, it was first
used as a prison for the partially insane and then as a criminal asylum. In 1925,
four rooms laid out in a square were built on an upper floor destined to be used
as the section for the insane. By 1991 the building had become so dilapidated
that the criminal asylum was transferred to new premises.
Naples 1923
Situated in the centre of Naples, the fourth criminal asylum was a former Capuchin
monastery that had already been used as a prison for adults until 1920 and later
became the first reformatory. Its promoter and first director was Professor G.
De Crecchio. He came to S. Eframo Prison in 1912, with the job of analyzing the
mental state of those inmates who had psychiatric or nervous disorders, in order
to ascertain whether their pathology was real or fake. De Crecchio set up an
Anthropological and Forensic Medicine Section where prisoners from all over the
country were sent. In 1921, the Anthropological and Forensic Medicine Section
became the Psychiatric Infirmary of the Naples Prisons and finally, the criminal
asylum of S. Eframo was established by ministerial decree on 1 July 1923.
Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto (Messina) 1925
The criminal asylum at Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto, in the province of Messina,
was established by the law of 13 March 1907. It was opened on 6 May 1925, in
the presence of the Minister of Justice, Alfredo Rocco, and numerous authorities.
Subsequently, through the ministerial decree of 10 June 1945, a further section
for those suffering from psychiatric disorders was annexed to the asylum and
later the ministerial decree of 1 February 1969 also added a Clinic and Detention
Centre. In 1952, a ministerial decree established a clinical diagnostic centre
for prisoners from Sicily and Calabria.
