Abstract

According to Michel Foucault, censorship and reading control in prison, as acts of breaking communication between the prisoner and the outside world, have been essential features of the functioning of the carceral regime ever since the modern prison was created and spatially built as a place of separation from the rest of society. This article aims to revise the historical operability of Foucault’s paradigm by investigating the specificity of the practices adopted during fascism to control the epistolary writing and reading of political prisoners. The study of the letters seized by prison directors and of the more traditional sources, such as the correspondence between prison and ministerial bodies, as well as memoirs, corroborates the thesis of the totalitarian matrix of fascist prison politics, but also reveals the gap between the regime’s propaganda and reality.