“Par In Parem Habet iudicium”: The role of restorative justice in the Italian juvenile justice panorama

In these decades a new perspective of “punishment” has emerged especially for young offenders. Indeed, utilitarian ideas about prison (understood as public safety) provide at least as strong reasons for imprisonment: «sending people to prison enhances public safety, through the incapacitating of the offenders, rehabilitating them, by deterring them and others, and by reinforcing basic social norms about right and wrong» (Tonry, 1999: 2). Almost all European countries adopted, with different timing, new measures on the juvenile criminal perspective, which ensure less rigid and inflexible legal treatment to children, taking into account the young age and the sketch of a balanced growth of the subject. One of these measures that ought to be considered is what we known as Restorative Justice. According to Braithwaite, «restorative justice is a process where all stakeholders affected by an injustice have an opportunity to discuss how they have been affected by the injustice and to decide what should be done to repair the harm» (2004: 28). Regarding crime there is the idea that because crime hurts, justice should heals (Ibidem). Restorative approach follows that conversations with those who have been hurt and with those who have afflicted the harm must be central to the process. This does not imply a waiver of the penal system, or a departure from the traditional legal doctrines, but an extension of the entire sphere that incorporates the two protagonists of the offense; the model represents an independent and alternative model to the “classic” one, designed by C. Beccaria and based on a “retributive function”, but also to the positive approach, which is oriented to general and special prevention, an issue that the XIX century Positivist School assumed as the focal point of its work.