LA DEFLAZIONE PENALE IN ITALIA

Each penal system has a tendency to expand under the influence of a multiplicity of factors but always with the aim to protect some legal interests, either traditional or emerging, from the most intolerable aggressions. An excessive expansion of criminal law however, far from raising the level of prevention of the penal system, has the counterproductive effect of making it less governable and effective. Therefore, in order to remedy the dysfunctions deriving from the proliferation of criminal offences, several strategies are adopted to decongest the penal system. All these strategies fall under that complex phenomenon known as penal deflation. The present work, which is divided into two parts, actually reconstructs the essential features of this phenomenon. In the first part it provides a general description of the main mechanisms of penal deflation, which can operate on three different levels: law system, in the view of decriminalization and depenalization process (decriminalizzazione and depenalizzazione); trial, in the view of decreasing criminal courts overload (deprocessualizzazione); enforcement of penal sanctions, in the view of decreasing prison overcrowding (decarcerizzazione). On the other hand, in the second part specific attention is devoted to the phenomenon of depenalizzazione — namely the use of administrative sanctions to replace traditional criminal punishments — not only because it has been an important issue for about forty years in the history of the Italian penal system, but also because it has always been considered the main instrument to bring the criminal offence back to its traditional principles of legality, offensività, frammentarietà and subsidiarity. In particular, this work highlights the main steps of the process of depenalizzazione in Italy with its correlated problems, with special focus on those connected with the use of administrative sanctions, whose typologies and discipline are analysed.