From the debut of new crimes to the impact of reforms: open fronts for criminalists

On the one hand, the government's introduction of new crimes and the provision of higher penalties for existing ones. On the other hand, the day-to-day complexities relating to the use of telematics in criminal proceedings and the effects of the implementation of the Cartabia reform. In the background is the emergency of overcrowded prisons, witnessed by the dramatic increase in suicides. There are many fronts on which criminal lawyers are confronting and which invest the boundaries and the meaning of the criminal justice system and the role of lawyers.

Lastly, it was the Security Law Decree (48 of 2025) that triggered the reaction of criminalists. The measure - in force since 12 April and before Parliament for conversion into law - contains around 20 interventions, including new offences and increases in penalties. In the text has been transfused, almost in its entirety, the contents of the security bill that in the past had already gathered the protests of the penalists. The same lawyers, in recent weeks, have returned to express their dissent towards the decree law, with three days of abstention from hearings, culminating in a national demonstration. The 'no' of the criminal lawyers is due," reads the resolution proclaiming the abstention, "to the useless introduction of new offence hypotheses, to the many disproportionate and unjustified increases in penalties, to the introduction of aggravating circumstances without any rational basis, to the substantial criminalisation of marginality and dissent, and to the introduction of new obstacles to the application of alternative measures to detention," alongside "the abuse of the urgency decree".

'For some time,' observes the president of the Union of Criminal Chambers, Francesco Petrelli, 'the penal instrument has been used to reassure public opinion and seek consensus. Underlying this is the illusion that by resorting to the threat of imprisonment one can affect the level of security. But this is not the case: increasing sentences does not decrease the number of crimes; on the contrary, the risk of reoffending is only reduced if sentences are served outside prison. This is why we have opposed securitarian government initiatives, which have only a symbolic value and do not increase security, with the only result of imploding our already devastated penal system. In a liberal system, criminal repression should only be used as a last resort, especially for less serious crimes'.

The expansion of the penal area is also reflected in the prison population, which continues to increase: at the end of April, the number of inmates reached 62,445, against a regulatory capacity of 51,292. "Overcrowding," Petrelli reasoned, "is the direct and indirect cause of other degenerative phenomena: it makes it difficult to maintain security in the institutes, it prevents any serious form of treatment and adequate protection of the physical and psychological health of inmates, and it does not allow fragility to be intercepted, with the result of increasing suicides.

Then there are the data on proceedings, which the Ministry of Justice took a snapshot of in the latest statistical monitoring of Pnrr indicators. Unlike in the civil sector, in the criminal sector performance has already exceeded the targets agreed with the European Union. In fact, our country had committed to reducing by 30 June 2026 the time of criminal proceedings in the three levels of justice by 25% compared to 2019 (using the disposition time indicator, which measures the foreseeable duration). Well, by the end of last year, the time had already been reduced by 28%, to a total of 1,003 days, compared to 1,392 in 2019. A result to which different contributions were made by the Supreme Court (-51.5%), courts of appeal (-27.3%) and the courts (-19.4%).