Partial pardon can re-humanise prisons and reduce recidivism

Prisons in which, in a single year, 89 inmates take their own lives and 243 die become places where the objective of punishment is reversed into its opposite. Instead of compensating the victims and society, they fall into a cruelty that is only a simulacrum of justice, while deterrence is betrayed, turning detention into a school of crime.

Certainty of recidivism, in fact, exactly the opposite of the initial intention.

If one understands the meaning of this reversal, one can understand why the Constituent Fathers had the same far-sighted intention when they indicated in Article 27 the only function that the Charter attributes to punishment, namely the re-education of the convicted person. Which is not a principle of Christian indulgence, nor even a deresponsibilising sociologism that offloads the offender's guilt onto society, but rather the only criminal policy objective that the Charter recognises for justice. By rehabilitating the offender, justice compensates the victims and society, and averts the risk that he or she will re-offend and that evil will be replicated between one generation and the next, like a kind of uncivilised religion.

Thus punishment once again becomes an example, or rather 'exemplum', dare I say it with a term taken from medieval rhetoric, that is, a path leading to salvation for the benefit of all.

If one accepts this pragmatic approach, certainty of punishment becomes re-education, education, training and work, the reconstitution of a human capital that would seem to have been lost, but also compensation for the victims, since the proceeds of the productivity that this pathway develops can be used to support the families affected by the crimes.

But that is not enough.

The certainty of punishment is also prevention: it means investing in the most fragile social contexts. The intervention on Caivano is a feather in the cap of this government, but it must become the model of a wider and more capillary network, capable of offering protection and promoting social regeneration.

It does not end there. Because the certainty of punishment also has effects within the justice system. It means restoring punishment to its function as a means, i.e. it renounces the substitute function that punishment has come to assume, taking on other missing parts of the system, to the point of constituting a prison-centric justice, which seems to depend solely on its extreme remedy. Proof of this is the abuse of pre-trial detention in our system, which can only be explained by the overflowing and anticipatory function that punishment has come to play, losing its certainty, that is, its inescapable anchorage to the sentence.

It is with the same pragmatic approach that the CNEL, which I represent, in agreement with the Minister for the Guardianship of the Seals, Carlo Nordio, has undertaken to restore certainty to punishment, building a bridge between prison and society, placing work and education at the centre of a major social inclusion project involving businesses, trade unions, voluntary work, the school and university system, and local authorities. The aim is to transform the interests, of which the intermediate bodies are bearers, into civic responsibilities and virtues, that is, into added value for the community, through an operation beneficial to all the parties involved: the prisoners, who would be offered an authentic path of re-socialisation; society and the economy, which would see the expenditure of the prison system transformed into a productive investment; and the victims of crime, who would be given back the hope that the evil they have suffered will not be repeated, and into whose dedicated fund a share of the wealth produced would be channelled.

It is what is called a 'win-win' bet, to be won by three: prisoners, society and victims. The Ministry of Justice and the CNEL have decided to tackle it together and with an inter-institutional agreement have committed themselves to guaranteeing training and work paths to fight recidivism and to give full application to the constitutional principle of re-education of punishment. In May 2024, the Assembly of the CNEL unanimously approved the first Bill of the 11th Consiliatura, on 'Provisions for the social and labour inclusion and the abatement of recidivism of persons subjected to measures limiting or restricting their personal freedom issued by the judicial authorities', which was forwarded to the Chambers.

It set up a permanent Secretariat for the social and labour inclusion of prisoners, which pursues the goal of 'Zero Recidivism', involving all the social partners and intermediate bodies present in the CNEL.

From this point of view, the appeal by the vice-president of the CSM, Fabio Pinelli, is the part that was missing in the definition of a holistic project to return punishment to its specific function: the hypothesis of a partial pardon, involving prisoners for less serious offences, i.e. those whom work can recover for society and prison can chronically turn into criminal professionals, achieves at least four objectives: to humanise prisons, to help reduce recidivism, to compensate victims and society, and to produce wealth. Such a 'certain' punishment would realise its retributive, deterrent and, of course, re-educative effects, in an overall vision, the only winning one, by directing the State's punitive capacity towards an objective of social inclusion.

Most importantly, it would have no political downside.

* president of the Cnel