Abstract
This article explores the gendered nature of the Italian prison system after unification in 1860. Despite its liberal and secular principles, the new Italian parliamentary state left penal institutions for women and girls in the control of religious orders of nuns. While the state instituted a series of reforms for male prisons during the first fifty years after unification, it ignored the deplorable conditions for female inmates. This failure to secularize female prisons denied women the “negative right” to equal punishment and constituted one of the many ways in which women were denied full citizenship in united Italy.
