The effects of the spread of Covid-19 have had important consequences on everybody’s life but also had a dramatic impact for the population inside correctional centers in Italy; these issuses have finally received great attention over the last few months. This paper is primarily focused on the analysis of the critical aspects of overcrowding in Italian correctional centers, a cyclical issue which has become even more critical during the current pandemic emergency. Our research aims at describing the development of the number of prisoners before and after government legislative actions taken in early 2020 to reduce overcrowding of prisoners; furthermore we study these effects in combination with the main features of some Italian correctional centers. There is some evidence that the number of prisoners first decreased but then started increasing again, as it had always happened after similar governative decrees adopted in other cases in the past; moreover, it is also clear that the available capacity of jails is not homogeneous in Italy and that the situation is different between the different regions. The main difficulty encountered in preparing the research analysis for this contribution has been the access to data related to the dissemination of the pandemic inside correctional centers; in fact, in some frameworks such as prisons, this kind of information is not often available or completely updated.
