ABSTRACT: Highlights of the referendum to abolish life imprisonment.
(NOTIZIE RADICALI, January 3, 1981)
NORMS TO BE ABOLISHED
The Penal Code:
Art. 17 - Life imprisonment (first paragraph, 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).
MAIN POINTS ABOUT LIFE IMPRISONMENT
The crimes for which the Penal Code foresees life imprisonment are many and range from attacks on state security (e.g., art. 243, intelligence contacts with foreigners for the purpose of war against the Italian state, if hostilities should take place. Art. 244 hostile acts against a foreign state which expose the Italian state to the danger of war, if war should take place) to espionage (e.g., art. 258, the passing of information whose divulgence has been prohibited, if this fact has compromised the state's efficiency in matters of war) to terrorist attacks (against the President of the Republic, armed insurrection against the powers of the state) to kidnapping (when the kidnap victim dies), to massacres, epidemics, the poisoning of water and food (if someone dies as a result), to wilful homicide under aggravating circumstances. It is easy to see how, in effect, life imprisonment is a punishment which by now in Italy is inflicted for only a small number of the cases in which it is foreseen, and how so
me times (in the case of Seveso when ICMESA [a chemical manufacturer, ed.] caused the pollution of a large stretch of territory) it is completely left aside.
In 1977 (at this date we have the exact figures) 356 of 12,265 convicts have been condemned to life imprisonment, which is 2.90% of the total, and it is interesting to see the difference from 1946. In that year there were 18,418 convicts of whom 1,068 were condemned to life imprisonment, or 5.79% of the total. This means that since 1946 to 1977 there has been a constant decrease in convicts condemned to life imprisonment. With regard to the figures for the the years from 1977 to 1980 only the figures referring to those condemned to life imprisonment. To be precise those condemned to life imprisonment as of December 31, 1978 were 333, 289 of them final sentences. As of December 31, 1979 there were 319, 249 of them final sentences. As of October 30, 1980 there were 305, 232 of them final sentences.
It is interesting to know that art. 176 of the penal code relating to life imprisonment provides that those condemned to this punishment can be allowed conditional liberty after having completed at least 28 years of their sentence.
From 1946 to 1964 there have been 397 people condemned to life imprisonment of whom 80 were pardoned, 132 allowed conditional liberty, 60 who died in prison, and 125 still serving their terms. From 1964 until 1980 the only figures available regard pardons and conditional liberty granted to the convicts: 183 were pardoned and 360 given conditional liberty.
ABOLISHING LIFE IMPRISONMENT
The abolishing of life imprisonment has already been proposed in one of the past legislatures in a bill for reforming the penal code that was presented in the Senate and approved. 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.
And even worse. It is a torture that deprives the prisoner of even the hope of ever returning to civil society.
Certain horrors, such as the recent double homicide in the prison of Novara can only be explained in this context.
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. Punishment has the power of prevention when it is fast and certain. Anyone about to commit a crime may be dissuaded from it if he knows for
certain that he will be arrested and immediately convicted. 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 has 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 d
ecisions 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 and to peaceful citizens that of circulating armed transformed into caricatures of "pistoleros", 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)
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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.
