Managing, surveying and assisting transgender people in prison: A comparative analysis of staff-members’ positioning toward transgender inmates among different correctional facilities in Italy

Abstract

Background

The present study intends to shed light on the (inter)subjective and professional modalities through which prison workers manage to cope with the presence of incarcerated transgender people in Italy.

Method

Fourteen semi structured interviews were undertaken with prison-workers in three Italian jails. The transcribed interviews were processed through text-mining-analysis, and an in-depth investigation of these discursive sources was performed to access the sociocultural representation of prison-workers concerning transgender related issues.

Results

Findings showed different discursive positionings, which vary significantly according to the professional role and gender identity of the interviewees. Although specialized training aimed at improving knowledge on transgender issues and interpersonal skills had been previously provided to all prison-workers, non-transgender affirming behaviors and attitudes continue to be observed. However, they may be the product of the persistence of cultural biases belonging to the more general societal context.

Conclusions

Specific training programs addressed to prison-workers are certainly necessary, but their real effectiveness should be constantly monitored and verified. At the same time, it seems that an effective improvement of the condition of transgender people within correctional facilities may only be obtained through paradigmatic changes concerning representations about gender nonconformity within the more general Italian culture and society.

Keywords:

• Diversity
• gender violence
• (inter)subjectivity
• italian carceral system
• prison workers
• transgender inmates

Disclosure statement

The present study has been partially realized as part of the Academic Project (PRAT) entitled “One jail, two sexes and three genders: the struggle concerning the gender binarism in Italian prisons” under the grant number CPDA147252, coordinated by Prof. Giuseppe Mosconi of the University of Padova with the 3rd, 6th and 7th coauthors being members of the executive board. The study foresaw data collection in the prisons of Belluno-Baldenich (entirely carried out and transcribed by the 1st author) and Napoli-Poggiorale (interviews with staff members were carried out and transcribed by the last author and those with inmates by the 1st author together with transgender activist Daniela Falanga). Data collection in the prison of Firenze-Sollicciano, instead, has been entirely realized by the 1st author as part of his Ph.D. thesis. The present paper reports the analysis of data collected with prison workers. Findings of the analysis with transgender inmates have been previously published as full papers in the International Journal of Transgenderism (specifically for the Italian context) and Frontiers in Psychology (as a cross-cultural comparison between Italy and Brazil).

Ethical approval

All research procedures were performed in accordance with the ethical standards set by the national and institutional committees responsible for empirical studies involving humans, following the principles of the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki, revised later in 1975 and 2008. We obtained approval for the study from the ethics committee of the University of Naples, School of Medicine (protocol number 2070). For all interviews appropriate permissions were given by the regional Departments of Prison Administration of Veneto (permission obtained by the 1^st author), Tuscany (permission obtained by the 1^st author) and Campania (permission obtained by the last author).

Informed consent

All participants chose to take part on their own free will. The participants were asked to complete an informed consent form immediately after being informed of the study’s aims and methods. Full anonymity, as far as possible, has been granted for all subjects interviewed in the present study.

Statement on the welfare of animals

This article does not contain any study with animals performed by any of the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by a postdoctoral scholarship, received by the first author from the Brazilian Ministry of Education, Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Educational Personnel (CAPES) under the grant number 88887.834340/2023-00, and received a restricted fund from the University of Padova under the grant number CPDA147252.