Significant changes in Italian political, socioeconomic, and institutional contexts since 1985 have led to markedly harsher policies and laws. Sentencing law and penal policies have changed substantially. In the late 1980s, the legislature embraced rehabilitation in corrections and enacted a new Code of Criminal Procedure modeled on principles and values typical of adversarial legal systems. The demise in the early 1990s of the so-called First Republic due to the massive bribery scandal known as Mani Pulite (“Clean Hands”) profoundly affected the structure and functioning of the political system, perceptions of crime, and shaping of penal policies. Despite stable and declining crime rates, over time governments have enacted policies overrelying on criminal sanctions. Particular categories of offenders, undocumented immigrants and drug offenders, have been hit especially hard. Rapidly growing imprisonment rates produced overcrowding that was tackled mostly with alternatives to implementation of cus...

Sentencing and Penal Policies in Italy, 1985–2015: The Tale of a Troubled Country

This review article investigates academic research about the debates surrounding prison crises that expose overcrowding and the bets on criminal policy reforms to address these situations. For this purpose, a documentary analysis as a qualitative research method is used based on the Scopus database review. Of the 393 results obtained, the following exclusion criteria were executed: disciplinary area, study period, and thematic relevance, which let us with 78 viable documents. The analysis was performed in VOSviewer, allowing us to group the papers into three categories: the crisis in the prison system, conflictive situations in prisons, and response options for criminal policy. The results and conclusions are obtained after the implementation of a content analysis, which allowed us to notice that there are three debates around the subject: Studies that indicate the challenges that prison systems present in reducing overcrowding, those that account for the endogenous situations that are evident by the crises, and finally the proposals for criminal policy reforms.

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Crisis en los sistemas penitenciarios: derechos humanos, hacinamiento y desafíos de las políticas criminales. Una aproximación desde la producción bibliográfica

Italian law only provides the general conditions for the institution of recall. It follows that significant discretionary powers are enjoyed by the surveillance judges (and in particular by the Surveillance Tribunal) who evaluate on a case-by-case basis whether the commission of another offence or the infringement of parole conditions demonstrate the offenders‟ negative attitude to reintegrate into society. However, especially with reference to the commission of serious crimes, the judges‟ discretionary assessment can result in a restrictive application of the law on recall with the consequence that parolees are returned to prison even when they commit minor violations. The Italian penitentiary system is currently undergoing a serious crisis mainly caused by prison overcrowding. This article argues that reform of the system is thus urgently needed. Such reform should be aimed, among other objectives, at strengthening the role of the bodies which are involved in the different phases of recall (e.g. social services, prison staff, etc.), in order to assist and support judges in their difficult task of decision making in an area – such that of recall – full of social implication.

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Chiara Mancuso

Papers

‘Back Door Sentencing’ in Italy: Common Reasons and Main Consequences for the Recall of Prisoners: