La retorica della pena: quando le coincidenze fanno riflettere

This paper focuses on a couple of occurrences that foster penal debate which is the same as the retributive approach. The former is the release of the implementation decrees of the legge delega n. 103/2017 that have modified the Italian prison system in the matter of the convicts’ public utility job as a tool of their empowerment. The latter is the reprint, forty years later, of The prison and the factory. This famous book deals with the relationship between punishment and society thinking over the industrial organizational pattern typical of the penitentiary in the modern age. These circumstances point out the rhetoric of punishment as a compensation of damages caused to the community which stand for the criminal practices and policies in the present-day society.