Words against walls: Prisoners’ letters, lay penology and exceptional confinement

Abstract

This article argues that exceptional detention functions as an epistemic regime that governs punishment by restricting prisoners’ capacity to interpret, communicate and contest the conditions and justification of their confinement. Drawing on letters written by political prisoners held in Italian special detention facilities between 1975 and 1986, the study treats correspondence as epistemic artefacts in which testimony becomes a form of analytical reasoning, showing how incarcerated individuals diagnose and theorise the rationalities of punishment under censorship and isolation, both individually and collectively through correspondence. By foregrounding the epistemic dimensions of punishment, the analysis reframes exceptional detention as a struggle over interpretation and credibility, with implications for understanding contemporary forms of emergency penality (the use of exceptional legal measures to govern crime and political dissent) in democratic legal orders.