Italy has opened its first so-called sex room inside a prison following a landmark Constitutional Court ruling recognising the right of inmates to hold private and intimate meetings with their spouses or long-term partners.
The inaugural visit took place on Friday at a correctional facility in the central Umbria region, where a male inmate received his female partner in a specially designed room furnished with a bed and a toilet. The meeting lasted up to two hours, in accordance with new justice ministry guidelines issued earlier this month.
The guidelines state that “inmates granted intimate meetings should have access to a room with a bed and a toilet for up to two hours,” and that the room’s door must remain unlocked to permit prison guards to intervene if necessary.
The move follows a Constitutional Court judgement published in January 2024, which affirmed that prisoners should be allowed “private meetings with spouses or long-term partners, with no prison guards watching over them.”
Giuseppe Caforio, Umbria’s ombudsman for prisoners’ rights, told the ANSA news agency: “We are happy because everything went smoothly but it is necessary to maintain the maximum privacy to protect the people involved.” He further added, “We can say that a sort of experiment went well and in the next few days there will be other meetings.”
Such conjugal visits are already permitted in several European nations, including France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, and the Netherlands. Italy’s initiative now brings it in line with these countries, where prisoners’ rights to intimacy are more widely recognised.
Despite the progressive move, Italy continues to grapple with a major prison overcrowding crisis. According to official data, more than 62,000 people are currently held in the country’s prisons—over 21 per cent above the system’s official maximum capacity.
The overcrowding issue has also been linked to a recent spike in inmate suicides.
