Abstract

The psychiatric question, the history of insanity, and psychiatric power have historical connections to the construction of the state and society around the principles of inclusion and exclusion. Asylum is an institution whose dominant feature has been far more exclusion than care. In Italy, starting with the Italian experience led by Basaglia in Gorizia in the early 1960s, a radical critique of psychiatry as an ideology of social control has been structured. This cycle of anti-institutional struggles, and the following debate, culminated in the passing of Law 180. In this context, the discussion on overcoming the judicial asylum occupied a wide space. The paper examines some of the issues around which the critique of the criminal asylum has been developed and intertwined with the struggle against the asylum.