Fighting crime through non-criminal sanctions or hybrid measures? What may seem to be an intellectual challenge is rather an acknowledgement of the proliferation of measures, throughout our punitive legislation, which have in common that they represent many examples of hybridisation of the fight against crime.
The common thread of these legal instruments may be found in the close link with criminal law, insofar as they integrate/strengthen, replace or prevent the use of criminal law.
The horizon is wide: it goes from confiscation in its various declinations, to the measures provided for by the Anti-Mafia Code, to the powers of interdiction or surveillance conferred on district governors (Prefetti), up to civil punitive offences and compliance obligations imposed on organisations, enforced through the provision of specific sanctions.
The project will focus on the study of such crime-fighting measures, on the basis of three interrelated lines of research, categorised according to the ultimate purposes of the measures under investigation (as anticipated, integration/strengthening, replacement or prevention of the use of criminal law).
First, the research aims at carrying out a systematic and comprehensive review of the various existing measures, trying to restore “order” in a grid of provisions belonging to many sanction systems, thus resulting in an extremely fragmented, if not chaotic, overall picture, with unavoidable overlaps and uncertainties for legal operators.
The ultimate aim of the investigation is, on the one hand, to address the basic issues – especially in terms of legal nature and corresponding regulatory framework – that remain unanswered in the various sectors, and, on the other hand, to carry out a cost-benefit analysis of the use of these instruments in the fight against crime. From this last point of view, both the opportunities in terms of effectiveness and efficiency of the enforcement activity and the risks in terms of compliance with the fundamental principles, linked to the use of these measures, will be assessed.
Finally, the project intends to examine how these different trends and forms of “hybridization” affect the legitimacy of criminal law, given that we are observing the progressive return of a disciplinary or regulatory aim of the punitive intervention, used by the legislator as a tool for the governance of conducts and organisational structures in different risky sectors.
The expected result is, on the one hand, the collection and dissemination, by means of the final volume of the research, of the main best practices in the investigated sectors; on the other hand, the definition of detailed policy recommendations, in a de iure condendo perspective, for decision-makers and public and private organisations, with the aim to proposing sustainable solutions to the various issues examined within the project.
Conference organised with the support of the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR) within the framework of the PRIN 2022 call, published with D.D. no. 104 of 02-02-2022, project ‘BORDERLINE’, Cineca Code 20227C3F48, National Coordinator Prof. Antonio Gullo.
