Italians rarely show such unanimity: about 95% of the republic's citizens, according to opinion polls, find the new law outrageous. Even the mother of one of the prisoners who is now to be released is outraged. In response to a proposal by RAI TV reporters to embrace her prodigal son Filius, who had spent 30 years in prison for theft or drug trafficking, a 68-year-old resident of Rome said with tears in her eyes: "Since the government released him, let it now provide me with protection. Otherwise I will kill myself before that monster gets to me."
15 thousand thieves, bandits, hooligans, murderers and rapists are jubilant over the law on the removal of criminal records. In Milan alone, 358 participants in various robberies are being released. The law provides for the reduction of prison sentences to three years for almost everyone convicted before May 2006. The only exceptions are citizens involved in mafia affairs, terrorist activities, pedophile crimes, and money laundering.
The government claims that the law was adopted for humanitarian reasons: allegedly, this will relieve the two hundred overcrowded prisons, and those who remain in them will be able to serve their sentences if not in comfort, then at least in humane conditions. Currently, there are 60 thousand prisoners for 45 thousand places in Italian penitentiary institutions, and Italian courts are forced to delay sentencing because there is simply nowhere to put the convicts.
For ordinary Italians, these arguments are not particularly convincing. After all, they say, prison is not a sanatorium. Moreover, many journalists and even prosecutors in Italy suspect that the law was motivated by somewhat different considerations, not mentioned in the official version. The fact is that the law also covers cases involving corruption and economic crimes. So it benefits, for example, managers of some firms that defrauded their investors, as well as heads of football clubs involved in match-fixing scandals.
Employees of the Italian prosecutor's office believe that if the government wanted to help its financier friends and football bosses, it could have simply declared an amnesty on some official occasion. That is a long-standing tradition; it simply "erases" some crimes from the face of the earth and relieves not only prisons but also courts, where hearings on such cases sometimes drag on for up to ten years. Under the new law, a convicted criminal is still considered a criminal – he just no longer has to sit in prison. And that means all the work of investigators, prosecutors, and judges must be done.
"We will have to conduct investigations, hold lengthy and costly trials. And if the judge eventually sentences the accused to less than three years, then all the work has gone down the drain," police complain. Moreover, they note, many small-time mafiosi convicted of violent crimes will now be released, and the mafia will get its "army" back. And even some major mafia bosses, whom police, despairing of catching them for major crimes, send to prison for lesser ones – at least for a short time. Now that won't work either. Italy risks turning into a criminal paradise.
Investigators warn the government about another negative aspect of the new law: more and more law-abiding citizens, losing faith in the ability of law enforcement to protect them, are ready to take their own security measures, up to "lynch mobs" and "shooting on suspicion." "If the state capitulates, we will have to take up arms," threatens entrepreneur Dante Nardini in an interview with the newspaper Corriere della Sera, who was robbed last year at his own villa near Venice. He learned that the bandits who attacked him will now be released.
For "homemade justice" there may soon be many occasions. No sooner had the first prisoners left the walls of Italian prisons than some of them had already violated the law again: one tried to kill his own wife right on the doorstep, another broke into a cash register at a pizzeria, and two more beat a policeman unconscious by attacking him from behind in hopes of getting his service pistol. However, if the judge does not consider these crimes serious enough to give more than three years, they will not have to return to prison.
Boris ALTNER.
Rosbalt