Sovraffollamento carcerario e differimento dell'esecuzione penale (Opinioni a confronto)

The article presents the long series of tentative solutions devised by the Italian State to overcome prison overcrowding, especially after the European Court of Human Rights’ pilot judgment Torreggiani et al. vs. Italy in which ECHR has called Italy to put in place a set of remedies to structurally redress the situation violating art. 3 of the European Convention. The Author discusses the many laws passed in Italy from late 2010 until spring 2014 in the effort to reach a “controlled” reduction of prison population. An interesting novelty in Italian penal system is the 2014 reform introducing a pre-conviction probation for adult offenders of minor crimes, alongside with other measures such as home detention. The Author argues that, although prison population is in fact steadily decreasing, the remedies put in place so far lack of rationality, and mostly they are not framed into an urgent global and structural reform of the Italian sanction system, which is old, inadequate, and excessively punitive and needs to be reoriented towards less prison-centered, more restorative, types of sanctions.