Percezione ed autorappresentazione della paternità ed esperienze detentive: risultati di una ricerca negli istituti penitenziari della Puglia e della Emilia Romagna

The experience of detention often involves the affective, relational, cultural, narrow-minded isolation, contributing to eradicate family relationships, and making it particularly difficult to maintain affective relationships in an environment such as detention, characterized by great restrictions. Literature has not failed to detect the reflections of the execution of the punishment on fundamental rights of personality and, in particular, of parenting. In fact, detaining the state, preventing the exercise, practice and experience on which parenthood is based, leads parents to experience constantly a feeling of failure and inadequacy. Extremely complex relationships are created between family dynamics and phases of criminal execution of the subject. Execution of the prison sentence is, in fact, a very critical moment for the detainee, but also for his family. In our contribution we have focused only on the figure of inmate fathers, attempting with the help of a precise psychodynamic instrument recognized by the scientific literature on the perception and self-perception of parenthood, to measure and verify in some way the perception and representations that have themselves as fathers, narrow subjects. It is the opinion of the authors, in light of the results of the research carried out in prisons in two Italian regions, due to the availability of the operators and the sensibility of their leaders, that the exercise of parental care in the restricted subjects represents an added value in programs and projects for re-education and treatment of prisoners