The relavance of indoor comfort in the process of prisoners' rehabilitation: a case study

The history of prisons is full of contradictions in every historical period and the evolution of prison buildings expresses many faces in the history of each country. The concept of punishment imposed on the offender has undergone several changes over the centuries, related to culture, politics, and to the evolution of the human thought. For centuries, tiny closed spaces have been adapted for the offenders' detention, without ever thinking to create an ad hoc functional distribution of spaces. The issue of the design of prisons has often been a reason of debate, and it is still an open field of discussion. From a legal point of view, in recent years there has been a rethinking of the problem. From a social point of view, detention should be seen as a time for change and transformation of the offender into a rehabilitated subject, and the EU is forcing the Countries to make important steps ahead. But, to achieve this goal, we all as a high level cultural society need a change in the way of thinking and approaching the problem and adequate structures, to support individuals by offering them the opportunity, 'which in civil life they did not have or have not been able to exploit'. The Smart Cities 'revolution' could represent the right opportunity to introduce a change of perspective and technical design thinking approach also in this kind of buildings. In this work, we describe a preliminary step of an emblematic case study of a recent prison building, which has many common characteristics to most Italian prison buildings. We propose a completely new approach to understand and deal with the prisons' environments and users.