For prisoners with addictions serving time outside prison
The bill under discussion in the Senate provides for alternative measures and agreed sentences for offences up to 8 years imprisonment. The knot of funds for beds remains
Key points
Avoiding prison time for convicted persons with substance or alcohol addictions. By intervening both to strengthen home detention and by introducing an unprecedented form of early trial definition. It is with this objective and these two instruments in mind that a bill has begun to be discussed in the Senate's Justice Committee, a measure on which there is a great deal of attention, also on the part of the oppositions, and which suffers more from a lack of funds than from legal fragility.
The alternative measure
More specifically, by intervening on the Consolidated Law on Narcotic Drugs, the bill provides that home detention is applicable with regard to drug addicts or alcoholics who have to serve a prison sentence not exceeding eight years or four years if the sentence includes hostile offences, such as mafia or terrorism (Article 4a of the Prison Ordinance).
The request
The person concerned may then ask, at any time, to be admitted to home detention at a private facility authorised under the same Consolidated Text, on the basis of a social rehabilitation therapeutic residential programme. However, the benefit may not be granted more than once.
A central commission is also set up at the Presidency of the Council of Ministers-Department for Policies against Drugs and Other Addictions to draw up guidelines on the ascertainment of addiction conditions, the assessment of their actual and current character, and the suitability of the therapeutic residential programme.
The agreed penalty
The other measure is a form of early termination of the proceedings based on the application of the penalty on request for drug- or alcohol-addicted defendants, linked to the recognition of the possibility of home detention in authorised private facilities for the implementation of recovery programmes. A new procedure modelled on the institute of bargaining. The sentence concerned must not be more than eight years, four if the offence is hostile, or two if the offence falls within the jurisdiction of the District Anti-Mafia Prosecutor's Office.
