Deep dives · Outside prison
Outside prison
A sentence is not only served in a cell. How many people are on probation, in home detention or in semi-liberty, how many on probation before trial, and how this has changed in ten years.
People serving their sentence outside prison
Year by year
Who enters prison from freedom
Where more sentences are served outside prison
The decisions of the supervision courts
Alternatives to prison are granted by the supervision court, at the request of the convicted person, and can be revoked if the conditions are not respected.
What we don’t know
How many people reoffend after an alternative to prison, compared with those who serve their sentence in prison: no official statistics are published. How many people sentenced to short terms wait, free, for the supervision court to decide, and for how long. Which crimes the people in alternatives to prison were convicted of.
How the figures are built, and the sources
Why this page
The rest of the atlas stops at the crime report or at prison; this page looks at sentences served outside. The approach is that of The Marshall Project: official data read to the end, the method next to the numbers, words that do not reduce people to their sentence.
People supervised by the UEPE
These are the people supervised by the probation offices (Uffici di esecuzione penale esterna) on 31 December of each year, by measure (Ministry of Justice, Department for Juvenile and Community Justice). Nationally each person is counted once; by region they count in every office that supervises them, so the regions add up to a few dozen more than Italy. Until 2016 Valle d’Aosta is counted with Piemonte. The tables are only in PDF: they were extracted with a program and checked row by row, so that the measures in each row add up to the total.
Where they come from
The share of people who started the measure from freedom comes from table 2 of the Ministry's report on the data at 31 December 2025, copied by hand: both the rows with their printed totals and the total with the annual series add up.
Prison, entries, supervision
People in prison are those in adult prisons on 31 December (ISTAT on prison administration data), the same as in Before the verdict. Entries from freedom are those published by the Ministry, with the parts adding up to the totals. Supervision decisions come from the open data of the Statistics Directorate: alternatives granted and revoked by the courts (probation, home detention, semi-liberty) and expulsions ordered by the supervision offices; the two half-years add up to the year.
How the data were built
The script scripts/build_esecuzione.py brings the sources together and stops if a sum does not add up. Every figure on the page is in data/esecuzione.json. The Ministry's data may be used for non-commercial purposes, citing the source and without altering them.
Sources
The statistics: giustizia.it («Adulti in area penale esterna», «Ingressi in carcere dalla libertà») and datiestatistiche.giustizia.it. For the method of the whole atlas: Method and sources.
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