RICERCA ITALIANA     

Research program

SECULARITY, VALUES AND CRIMINAL LAW

University Co-ordinator

Seconda Università degli Studi di NAPOLI - DISCIPLINE GIURIDICHE ED ECONOMICHE ITALIANE,EUROPEE E COMPARATE - ()

Research Unit Leader

Giuliano Balbi

Description

The research aims at analyzing the administrative and criminal regulation on drugs. It will evaluate the 2006 legislative reform with regard to constitutional values and international obligations. Furthermore, the research will also verify whether the reform can achieve its objectives.

The research will contribute to the wider reflection on whether the current configuration of criminal law still leaves it “secular”. Such reflection inspires the National Project “Valori, laicità e diritto penale.” The research will be carried out utilizing two methods:
a. A “static” assessment of the coherence of the 2006 reform with constitutional values and international obligations.
b. A “dynamic” assessment of the impact (ex ante) of the 2006 reform and the evaluation of the results produced by the previous legislation (ex post).

a. The first, “static,” part of the project will reconstruct the evolution of the legislation previous to the 2006 reform through a complete collection of scholarly doctrine and case-law developed in recent years. Then, researchers will analyse the 2006 reform in the light of general principles of law, of recent scientific achievements on drug treatment, and of the adequacy of criminal policy alone in combating drug utilization and trafficking, phenomena that are, in fact, deeply rooted in social factors. Seminars and meetings with experts are planned as well as missions abroad in order to collect data and documentation not available in Italy. Lastly, the research will focus on the trans-national dimension of drug abuse and trafficking: the research team will consider international tools and international obligations with regard to the obligations for the States. The researchers will utilize a comparative perspective in order to assess the reception of international inputs by each State.

b. The second, “dynamic”, part of the project will utilize an empirical approach, in order to assess both the impact of the previous legislations on the social context and the predictable outcome of the present discipline. The research team will collect and analyse data in order to answer questions such as: Was the sanction able to achieve its expected effects? What undesirable effects has the intervention produced? What has really happened? Which were the mechanisms through which the criminal law provisions have worked? Which results has the sanction produced? Has the sanction worked, for whom, and why? The research aims at understanding whether and through which mechanisms criminal sanctions have worked. An evaluation of a legislative act would be facilitated if it were a rational instrument for providing a direction to society and if it explicitly pursued specified objectives in terms of influence on people’s behaviours. Often, however, there is no rational strategy behind the legislator’s acts. Rather, they are the fortuitous result of political debates and bargains and they end up being mere symbolic acts devoid of any ambition to effectively influence the social structure. Nevertheless, evaluating how legislative acts have worked is crucial in order to improve the law itself, to provide information for public debate, and to influence future criminal policy decisions.
This part of the research will proceed along two directions:
1. First, the research team will map criminal proceedings started on the territory (Naples and Santa Maria Capua Vetere) as well as treatments for rehabilitation and therapeutic support.
2. Second, the team will monitor regional prisons, in order to estimate the results of the previous legislation regarding the treatment and recuperation of drug-addicts, with particular attention to follow-up programs developed in prisons “a regime attenuato”.
The empirical data collected will enable the research team to evaluate whether previous legislation has achieved its criminal policy targets. This will be the backdrop against which the research team will assess the likely results of the 2006 reform.

The results of the “static” (part a) and “dynamic” (part b) parts of the research will respectively provide theoretical and empirical results that the Unit of the Seconda Università di Napoli will synthesise in a comprehensive image of criminal policy options that constitute the assumptions of the current legislation on drugs.

The reflections so elaborated will be therefore appraised and discussed together to those developed by other research Units.