When the Left Wanted to Abolish Life Imprisonment, the PCI's Yes Vote in the Radical Referendum

The Senate's unanimous vote in favor of life imprisonment for femicide cases slipped by as a mere act of duty. Yet even this new crime, punished with an old penalty, illustrates how vast the gap has become between the cultures of the Italian Republic and the visions that have prevailed in the triumphant populist era of recent decades. In 1981, in the midst of political, mafia, and criminal violence, the PCI and PSI sided with the " Yes" vote in the referendum promoted by the Radicals aimed at abolishing life imprisonment. Even then, the Fascists exploited the public's most fervent passions and conceived of prison as a means of satisfying the instinct for revenge. To his traditional repertoire, death as the only certainty of eliminating the enemy from society, Meloni's maestro Almirante added the push for the proclamation of a "state of war," with the accompanying reinstatement of the death penalty.

Although aware of their defeat, the left-wing parties nevertheless fought against the survival of the remnants of the twenty-year period, which saw in extreme torture an indelible attribute of a strong state. For the PCI, the referendum test was a fundamental question of principle at stake, one that tolerated no short-term calculations. Indeed, it was Togliatti who , in the Constituent Assembly, in the session of December 10, 1946 (First Subcommittee of the Commission for the Constitution), threw down an intellectual challenge. Since Article 9 of the new Constitution—he argued—no longer allows for capital punishment, the inference is clear that "life imprisonment, being equally inhumane, should likewise be abolished." In the name of the equivalence between immediate physical death and slow civil agony, Umberto Terracini accepted the direction and relaunched Migliore's proposal with a further suggestion. At the Plenary Session of the Constitutional Commission (January 25, 1947), an amendment established that, once life imprisonment was banned, a maximum sentence of 15 years should also be established. Beyond this period, the restriction of the individual's freedom would lose any rehabilitative function of the sentence and would devolve into coercive treatment detrimental to personal dignity.

The Communists, who spoke the language of human rights—that is, of the dignity of the individual, to be protected against life imprisonment as a surrogate for death—were joined by the Socialist Mancini. For once, even the reactionary monarchist Lucifero joined the Reds in the Chamber, professing to be sensitive to their repeated appeals to the supreme value of humanity. The Christian Democrats, however, strenuously opposed the noble considerations of the labor movement's exponents, using a vocabulary that described the maximum punishment as an effective deterrent, within the framework of the goal of social defense, precisely by virtue of its perpetuity. Using rather crude imagery, Tupini, the DC president of the First Subcommittee, condemned the Communists' intention to establish a minimum level of criminal law, portraying such an objective as "an incentive to commit heinous crimes, given that the only penalty, the death penalty, capable of instilling fear in serious criminals has been abolished." The Venetian Christian Democrat Umberto Merlin renounced the feat of doctrine to kneel, brandishing his sword, before the popular conscience which, in his opinion, was still troubled by a news story which had occurred in Milan, where "a woman barbarically killed her lover's wife and her three little children".

Adopting a more technical and procedural approach, Aldo Moro suggested to his fellow constituents that the jurisdiction over this specific issue be granted to the criminal legislature, empowered to resolve it in a broader context within the framework of a general reform of the penal system. He did not, however, fail to preserve the core of the classical theory of punishment, understood as the inevitable price that follows judicial investigation. Imprisonment, Moro said, serves above all to satisfy "the need to defend human society, which is compromised by the proliferation of heinous acts. Life imprisonment remains the only reason for inhibiting crime." The left's ideological arguments were shelved in deference to the disciplinary nature of the penalty, whose exemplary nature was linked to the higher demands of deterrence and security. In the new republican system, however, a blatant contradiction remained between the constitutional criterion of the offender's rehabilitation (human dignity) and the possibility of an irreversible sentence to end one's life behind bars (disciplinary bias of punishment). The legal community, from Francesco Carnelutti to Luigi Ferrajoli, precisely emphasized the pressing need to remove this aporia. The Constitutional Court, when faced with this thorny issue, never resolved the knot of values in a coherent legal framework, instead taking refuge in extrinsic references to actual conditions.

It's hardly surprising that the right is stripping away any reference to lofty ethical and legal principles: it continually churns out new crimes like ideological manifestos to peddle in the political marketplace, and propagandistically constructs nearby penitentiaries and distant gulags to satisfy the base appetites that urge inveighing against convicts, especially if they're foreigners. Indifferent, by sincere vocation, to Filangieri's age-old appeal to Europe's ruling classes to respect the dignity of prisoners (" Come closer to these terrifying walls, where human freedom is surrounded by irons, and where innocence is confused with crime... Let a torch allow your eyes to see the pallor of death "), the prime minister clings to the spectre of prison to deny valid alternatives to confinement even for minor transgressions. Faced with overcrowding, the only imperative to obey, assures the stateswoman from Colle Oppio, is to "adapt prison capacity to need," that is, to " expand the facilities." What's causing a stir, rather, is that the distant echo of a positive humanism of socialist-communist origin has gone completely unheard in Palazzo Madama.

FROM

Michael Prospero