ABSTRACT: Highlights of the referendum to abolish life imprisonment.
("STOP THEM WITH A SIGNATURE. SIGN AT ONCE FOR THE 10 REFERENDUMS", a PR pamphlet published in 1980)
Harsher and harsher punishments only express the spirit of social vengeance but cannot take the place of certain and quick justice which can only be realised through the reform of the codes and the reorganisation of the judiciary and the police, which has been neglected for thirty years.
NORMS TO BE ABOLISHED
The Penal Code
Art. 17 - Life Imprisonment (paragraph 1, no.2)
Art. 22 - Life Imprisonment. (Life imprisonment is perpetual and is spent in one of the establishments destined for that punishment. Work and isolation at night are obligatory. Lifers can be allowed to do work out of doors).
THE JURIDICAL FORMULATION
The undersigned Italian citizens request an abrogative popular referendum - according to art. 75 of the Constitution and in application of the Law of May 25, 1970, no. 352 - on the following question: "Are you in favour of abolishing articles 17, first paragraph, no.2 (life imprisonment) and 22 of the penal code approved by royal decree on October 19, 1930 and its subsequent modifications?"
THE ABOLITION OF LIFE IMPRISONMENT
The abolition of life imprisonment has already been proposed in one of the past legislatures with a bill presented to the Senate where it was approved along with the reform of the Penal Code. The Chamber [of Deputies] did not pass it mainly because of the change in the political climate and the different attitude of public opinion - more and more aggressive and ferocious - towards criminality. How can you ask to abolish life imprisonment when the death penalty is being called for?
This is a fundamental matter. And we believe in any case that we must reaffirm in terms of the debate that it is just in the moments of disorder, the difficult moments, and not when everything is going well and calmly, that the principles are put to the test which one believes, or claims to believe in. Because behind the demand for the death penalty there is not only the immediate, unthinking reaction to the barbarous and bloody slaughters, there is also a whole culture, and not merely a retrograde reaction, that has its roots in a certain kind of left which was the inspiration during their lifetimes of men like Crispi (1) and Mussolini whose origins are in the left. And then it was necessary to be aware that Cesare Beccaria (2) or Pietro Calamandrei (3) must not be forgotten. Certainly in this referendum two juridical cultures, two conceptions of society and the state are confronting each other: the one of enlightened reason which by now is concerned only with the development of conscience and collecti
ve consciousness; and the other of power and its structures, its philosophy, those who justify it on the basis of misunderstood realism - that is, those who say that in principle, certainly... the constitution, life imprisonment no; but the people would not understand...
Those who ask for the abolition of the death sentence are inspired and motivated by the desire to overcome the conception of sanctions as retribution, as social vengeance: this desire is clearly enunciated in Article 27 of the Constitution which states that sanctions must not conflict with a sense of humanity and must tend to rehabilitate the convict.
These are dispositions that have no moralistic content. The law does not consider the guilty person's moral nature but his asocial nature. Punishment thus rehabilitates when it works towards reinserting the convict in social life. And life imprisonment excludes this possibility, it ignores the whole problem. The sense of humanity mentioned in the Constitution then is not that pietistic one of securing good conditions of life, but requires that the convict be considered a man and not a "morally" lost animal that by now can only be slaughtered. The logic of life imprisonment is always that of the death sentence.
But the choice of this moment for presenting to the whole country by way of a referendum the abolishment of life in prison is a choice motivated not by ideological or juridical reasons but by political ones. It is, in fact, the timely continuation of the denunciation by those who believe that the methods used up to now by the governments that have followed upon each other in ruling the country have been completely erroneous, inadequate and counterproductive in their way of dealing with the problems of public order. It is not with harsher sentences that one fights criminality, but with the restructuring of the public apparatuses in a way to make them capable of confronting the problems of convulsive industrial development, of the great internal migrations, of chaotic urban development, of severing large sections of the population from their traditional ways of life. Justice, politics, codes, trials that are held years and years after the crime was committed, a police force that was reorganised in 1947 on
a military basis for dealing with feared popular uprisings, a judicial organisation still bound to structures, even physical ones, that are decades old. The road of reinforcing punishments and police methods have been pursued for many years by now with the only result that at recurring intervals new and always more freedom-restricting measures become part of our regulations without any results in the fight against crime and with the tragic consequences that the list of the dead grows longer, in part because of the oversights, the lack of attention and the stupid convergence of circumstances under the lead of the police forces. But indications of an always more frequent and serious nature also show how a powerful criminal organisation has no lack of connections within the public structures themselves, of whose decisions and actions it has shown that it was informed in advance.
Therefore it is just in order to impose on the public a general discussion of real observations towards which it is indispensable to direct the action of Parliament and the government in the fight against crime, it is just in order to oppose the very dangerous tendency to believe that the problems of public order can be solved by harshening punishment or conceding to the police the license to kill, that we propose this referendum today along with the one on the recent norms regarding public order, as in its own time we proposed the one on the Reale law. (4)
Only strong public pressure can impose a change of direction, only the thrust of public opinion which has been informed of the true terms of the problem. A referendum to abolish life imprisonment, just because it is so "scandalous", is the correct tool to use.
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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES
1) Crispi, Francesco - (Ribera 1818 - Naples 1901) Follower of Giuseppe Mazzini, he participated in the Sicilian revolution of 1848. In 1860 he joined the expedition of Garibaldi and the Thousand to liberate Sicily from the Bourbons. From 1861 on he was a Deputy in the Italian Parliament, a minister, and prime minister (1887-91, 1893-96). Authoritarian in his tendencies, he promoted the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria and Italian colonial expansion. He fell from power after the defeat at Adua by the Abyssinian army.
2) Beccaria, Cesare - (Milan 1738 - 1794) Essayist, economist, exponent of the Italian Enlightenment. Author of the famous essay »On Crimes and Punishments in which he supports the abolition of the death penalty and of torture.
3) Calamandrei, Piero - (Florence 1889 - 1956) Italian jurist, free-lance journalist and statesman. Drafter of codes even during the Fascist period (as a "technical" consultant), later exponent of the anti-Fascist viewpoint of a progressive tendency. Founder of the review »Il Ponte . Constitutionalist.
4) Reale law - Refers to Reale, Oronzo (Lecce 1902), PRI secretary from 1949 - 1964, at various times Minister of Justice and author of a severe public order giving emergency powers to the police. The law intended to fight terrorism during the Red Brigades period (1975). In a referendum (1988) promoted by the Radical Party for abrogating the Reale Law, 76% of the voters were in favour of retaining it.
