The punitive political choice confirms prison as an instrument of annihilation
Italian Minister of Justice Carlo Nordio has decided to renew 41bis for Alfredo Cospito. The measure, expected by 4 May, was notified to defence attorney Flavio Rossi Albertini and confirms the hardest possible line: no retreat, no review, no doubt. It is not a technicality. It is not administrative routine. It is a deliberate political choice that must be called by its name: revenge.
41bis is not a simple restrictive measure. It is prolonged isolation, deprivation of contact, restriction of speech, rarefaction of social life to the point of unbearable. It is a regime that depletes the person, that reduces existence to controlled survival. For this reason, for years, jurists, observers, and organisations have labelled it a form of torture. Not a metaphor: a description.
The case of Alfredo Cospito forced the country to look inside this system. Six months of hunger strike, between 2022 and 2023, broke the silence. They showed what it means to live under that regime: almost total isolation, minimal relationships, constant surveillance. They posed a simple and radical question: can a constitutional state inflict all this? Nordio’s answer was equally simple: yes, and again.
And yet the fact remains there, rooted in reality. Cospito is subjected to the maximum prison regime for an attack – the 2006 one in Fossano – that resulted in no deaths or injuries. The disproportion is not a detail: it is the heart of the problem. Because Article 41 bis, here, does not serve to prevent operational connections. It serves to send a message. To demonstrate that the state does not retreat. To use the body of a prisoner as a platform for asserting power.
This is not justice. It is punitive exemplary behaviour. In the 41-bis prison regime, release is not a re-educational process. It’s a surrender. It’s collaboration, dissociation, self-denial. This is the real mechanism: not correcting, but bending. Not re-integrating, but breaking.
And as this regime is renewed, further deprivations are added. Cospito is even denied the ability to read freely or listen to music. Even thought, imagination, and inner space become objects of control. It’s the logic of total annihilation.
All of this clashes head-on with Article 27 of the Italian Constitution. Not as an abstract formula, but as a concrete principle: punishment cannot consist of treatment contrary to the sense of humanity and must aim at re-education. It’s difficult to argue that a regime based on prolonged isolation and the systematic suppression of relationships can have a re-educational function.
The truth is that the Cospito case has become a test case. And the government has chosen its side. Nordio is defending and strengthening 41-bis prison. He’s saying that this prison model is not only legitimate, but necessary. It’s shifting the boundaries of what’s acceptable, making normal what shouldn’t be normal.
The issue is no longer just Cospito. The issue is the state that uses punishment to annihilate, that responds to dissent with extreme isolation, that confuses security and revenge, is already slipping outside the constitutional confines. And when this happens, it’s not the prisoner who’s on trial. It’s the system.
The renewal of Article 41 bis doesn’t close anything. It confirms everything. It confirms that harsh prison regimes in Italy are not exceptional tools. They have become political language. A message. A warning. And this, in a constitutional state, should be unacceptable.
Machine translation
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