Conference Program

Over the past twenty-five years, access to university education in prisons has played an increasingly significant role in the Italian educational landscape, with 43 universities having established Prison University Centers (PUP). These spaces function as frontier zones, suspended between “inside” and “outside,” where disciplinary logics, security requirements, and educational practices oriented toward democratic participation, critical consciousness, and social justice meet—and often clash. This coexistence is marked by structural tensions: on the one hand, the tendency of the prison institution to frame education within categories such as treatment, re-education, or rewards; on the other, the potential to generate transformative processes that transcend the security-disciplinary paradigm, opening up spaces for agency and resistance.

This paper presents the results of a qualitative study conducted as part of the “Prison Project” at the University of Milan, one of the largest university-prison partnership programs in Italy, involving approximately 140 incarcerated students and 150 tutors. Through a questionnaire and two focus groups, the study explores the motivations, challenges, practices, and perspectives of the tutors, highlighting how initial curiosity about the prison context often evolves into a more conscious civic and political commitment. The tutoring experience thus appears as a process of co-evolution: not merely educational support, but a space for the construction of shared knowledge, critical reflection, and mutual transformation between students at liberty and those in confinement.

In light of the theoretical frameworks of Freire (2011) and hooks (1998), tutoring emerges as an educational practice capable of generating hybrid subjectivities through imagination and the implementation of alternative logics to those of the security state, which, inevitably, continue to exert pressure, imposing forms of negotiation. The research also shows how the university, through the active involvement of student tutors, can redefine its public role, opening channels of participation and social responsibility that transcend traditional institutional boundaries.

The university in prison thus emerges as a dynamic and far-from-neutral space, marked by contradictions and tensions yet capable of fostering democratic processes, critical learning, and mutual transformation. It serves as a social laboratory where new forms of democratic citizenship, social relations, and knowledge production are explored, helping to rethink the public role of the university and its responsibilities toward socially marginalized groups.