Human rights are an effective tool in the fight against the injustices of the prison system in our contemporary societies. Yet, they can only become so if they are extended not only to the rights of liberty, within which the neoliberal discourse would like to restrict them, but also to social rights. Without this extension, the distance between the human rights discourse and the pre-dominantrepressive paradigm narrows dangerously, as shown by the way in which legitimate concern for victims has fueled this paradigm, and as also shown by the paradoxical resistance that this paradigm opposes to certain extensions of the power to punish, such as the introduc-tion, in Italy, of the offence of torture, and the strengthening of criminal policies against sexist and sexual violence.
