Justice and Punishment: How to Break the Chain of Suffering

This article is a beautiful introductory text to the debate entitled “Truth and Reconciliation” that will take place in Rome on May 20, from 3 to 7 pm, at the Sala del Refettorio of the Chamber of Deputies, in Via del Seminario 76. It indicates a possible reform that preludes an idea of ​​justice that does not punish and separate, but reconciles and repairs.

With the installation of each new Government we have hoped that “Justice” would become the center of a revolutionary innovative project that would heal its unacceptable dysfunctions and that would start a path of efficiency, equity and modernity worthy of a democratic State inspired by the protection of fundamental rights and committed to defending the future of generations. With this Government too we have hoped that the reckless conflict between “castes of power ”, between now obsolete ideologies and cynical individualisms would end. In vain. No organic reform. A few repressive laws and a lot of confusion.

The level of civilization of a State is measured by judging the impartiality of its “Justice system” . The quality of democracy is expressed through the forms of guarantee of the fundamental rights of the person and the life of all its citizens, including those confined in prisons. Human society is not perfect. It never has been. Yet today we travel in space, between planets and stars, we penetrate the mysteries of the microcosm, between atoms and neutrinos, we generate “ technological monsters”, such as Artificial Intelligence . We are on the way to revolutionizing every social rule and every model of state organization, but we still live subjected to a “ system of injustices” that causes irreparable damage to individual and collective existence, that “produces” millions of poor people and locks up in inhuman prisons women and men who are too often innocent.

There is a dark world, made of darkness of the soul and mind, a desert of existence, a place of pain and segregation, where "organized society" , out of shame and fear, tries to hide the devastating causes of violence that arises from the squalor of its human peripheries by defining it, with conformist elegance and false modesty, " social deviance ". But if we really want to find effective cures to heal the " necessary evil" that torments the human path, it is essential to penetrate the sick heart of our communities and explore this arid borderland where a part of humanity lives abandoned and where the less noble aspects of conscience and existence are hidden. We must face without hypocrisy the hidden and obvious evils of our democracies and challenge the centuries-old inability of state bureaucracy if we want to find innovative solutions in the management of the judicial system and create unconventional paths in the formation and application of laws. Appropriate methods are needed to make the expiation of the sentence a real 'journey of redemption' of the prisoner through moral and civil recovery. Only the creation of a path that allows the personal redemption of the convicted person can pay off the social debt and compensate, at least in part, the damage caused.

Only the subsidiary action of a powerful reform movement will be able to awaken the numb consciences of political power and citizens by revealing the dark sides of an incomplete democracy and interpreting the 'revolutionary' prospects offered to the future generations by the nascent millennium. The sterile logic between guarantors and justicialists must be overcome and the silence on the evils hidden in the darkness of individual and collective conscience must be broken. An uninterrupted chain of judicial errors, unjust trials, prison violence and human suffering links different eras and different regimes, to the point of imprisoning the entire organized society in a system incapable of renewing itself and of guaranteeing everyone a just Justice and an inviolable Freedom.

We must penetrate the " prisons of man" , visible and invisible, studying and analyzing the darkness of the soul, the link between suffering and solidarity, between pain and asceticism, between lack of freedom and crime, between crime and repentance, between punishment and justice, never forgetting the defense of the rights of the person, the protection of dignity, attention and care for the victims and the families of those who have suffered violence. But to do this we need a "total conversion" ideological and cultural that guides politics and the entire ruling class to exercise "Justice" as the maximum defense of the sacredness of life, guarantee of social balance, protection of the weakest and of freedom.

FROM

Loris Facchinetti Rialta