In Italy the rate of imprisonment per 100,000 of the population increased from 45 in 1990 to more than 60 in 1993. As no prison construction program exists, overcrowding will be one of the main features of the future, and separation of the sentenced and remand populations will be impossible. Almost 60 percent of the inmates are on remand, 39.6 percent have been sentenced, and 0.5 percent are in correctional institutions for mentally ill offenders. More than 80 percent of the sentenced inmates are serving sentences of less than 2 years. The prison population increases have not resulted from changes in the numbers of offenses. Instead, a series of alarms and alarming offenders have influenced the public, legislators, and judges. In Italy, armed robbers, terrorists, drug users and drug dealers, mafia members, and finally politicians have acted as the separate emergencies that are vital for the very existence of prisons in Italy. The very existence of this process may be due to the inherent weaknesses of prisons; incarceration as a way of dealing with crime may need an incessant ideological nourishment in the form of new phenomena and individuals who are given the task of reestablishing its necessary. The intermittent nature of this process is illustrated by another development in the mid-1990s: the alarm about the soaring prison populations and the resulting legislation to allow house arrest, semi- detention, and deportation for specific groups of offenders. 57 references