From: Statewatch

June 2009

The anti-prohibitionist association Fuoriluogo, in cooperation with Associazione
Antigone (which works on the penal system and prisons) and La società della
ragione, has published a “white book on the Fini-Giovanardi law”, to illustrate and
comment the effects of law 49/2006 on drugs on the penal system, administrative
punishment and on the administration of justice and the prison system. The law was
introduced in a wide-ranging decree on the Turin winter Olympics towards the end of
the Berlusconi government’s term in power in 2006, and contained extracts from a
draft law drawn up by Gianfranco Fini (now president of the chamber of deputies,
Italy’s lower house of parliament) that promised to revolutionise the treatment of
drug offences, heralding the mass criminalisation of drug users in spite of the success
of a 1993 referendum to de-penalise the personal use of drugs. Some of its contents
included the lessening of distinctions between soft and hard drugs, and between
dealing, trafficking and personal use, with extremely high sentences applicable to the
latter, and an expansion in the use of administrative sanctions.

The “white book” notes that drug confiscation figures have fallen, the number of
people reported to the judicial authority has risen (particularly as regards foreigners),
the amount of administrative sanctions meted out, the percentage of drug addicts in
prison out of the total number of detainees and the percentage of drug addicts out
of the number of imprisoned people, have all increased. Access to alternative
measures to detention appears very limited while the number of pending judicial
cases is increasing enormously, social and health service interventions are decreasing
and pharmacological ones are on the rise, while the number of people admitted into
specialised communities for rehabilitation purposes are decreasing.

Although available data is limited and partial, the authors deem it possible to draw a
balance and some assessments. They criticise the “ideological choice” not to conduct
a reflection on proximity support services and to apply “censorship” to discussion on
harm reduction. Refusing pragmatic approaches entails a reduction of social
resources made available for guidance and social inclusion activities; almost
symmetrically, this goes hand-in-hand with an increase in the use of imprisonment
and penal/punitive legislation. There is a recrudescence of repression in squares,
places where youths gather and leisure settings alongside an intensification of
“controls” through drug testing, as opposed to pre-emptive measures. This has led to
the criminalisation of users (particularly of marijuana), with nearly 600,000 young
people reported to the police for mere consumption since 1990. Prison overcrowding
has reached record levels, passing the 60,000 mark, while their capacity is of 43,000.
Imprisoning drug users is described as a “gross mistake” from a social, educational
and therapeutic perspective, as well as a great injustice that illustrates the shift from
a social to an authoritarian state. They conclude that drugs could be the field from
which it could be possible to start anew and test different kinds of policies based on
reason and solidarity.

Interior ministry data for the 2004-2007 period concerning activity to counter drugs
shows a substantial increase (particularly between 2006 and 2007) in people reported
to the judicial authorities (+7.5%), especially foreigners (+12.1%). Meanwhile,
always comparing 2006 and 2007, the confiscation of drugs has fallen by 10.5%. The
authors offer some hypotheses for explaining this conflicting data, as both would be
presumed to be indicators of criminal activity in this field. The first, described as
“worrying”, is that criminalisation is growing in spite of a decrease in criminal activity.
A second, is a focus of repressive activity that has shifted from confiscation of illegal
substances to the criminalisation of people, in which arrests and guilty verdicts are
more important than interception and confiscation. Finally, as is often the case when
“zero tolerance” policies are advocated, lower-profile offenders are criminalised, with
small-scale and street dealers becoming the prevalent targets of operations by police
forces, leading to a decrease in the amounts of drugs confiscated and a considerable
increase in short prison sentences in this field. The imposition of administrative
sanctions on drug offenders, which is sometimes crippling in terms of employment
and personal relations (for example, by withdrawing one’s driving license, passport,
license to bear weapons, residence permit for foreign students, or temporarily
confiscating one’s vehicle, as well as informing the questore -police chief- in cases
involving foreigners, with possible effects on the renewal of their residence permit),
has risen by as much as 62.6% from 2004 to 2007, and the law has also provided for
them to last longer than in the past. Meanwhile, formal invitations and requests to
attend programmes, as well as the shelving of judicial proceedings, have decreased
considerably.

As regards the presence of drug addicts in prisons and the portion of the prison
population that is imprisoned for offences that include breaching the drugs law,
following the indulto (a pardon for people who had less than three years left to serve,
that was intended to lessen the problem of prison overcrowding, and also had
decreasing the number of drug addicts in prison as one of its purposes) in mid-2006
which effectively lowered the proportion of drug addicts in prisons considerably as
many of its beneficiaries were drug addicts who had committed petty crimes, it took
less than two years to return to the previous (or even higher) levels in terms of
percentage of the overall prison population. They were 26.4% before the indulto
(16,145 out of 61,264 on 30.6.2006), 21.4% soon afterwards (8,363 out of 39,005 on
31.12.2006), only to shoot well above the original level to 27.6% a year later (13,424
out of 48,693 on 31.12.2007) before steadying at 26.8% (14,743 out of 55,057 on
30.6.2008). As for the number of people imprisoned as a result of drug offences out
of the overall prison population, the figures appear to be steady between 2004 and
2007, with slightly under 38.2% of the total number of prisoners and 49.5% of
foreign ones imprisoned as a result of drug offences on 30 June 2008 (21,037 and
10,213 out of 55,057, respectively). The figures on drug offenders and drug addicts
imprisoned from freedom between 2006 and mid-2008 show an increase -from
27.1% and 27.6% respectively in the first half of 2006, to 30.7% of drug offenders
and 36% of drug addicts, whose proportion had briefly decreased in late 2006 and
early 2007, in the first semester of 2008.

The “[Libro bianco sulla Fini-Giovanardi. Tre anni di applicazione della legge 49/2006
sulle droghe->http://www.fuoriluogo.it/scarica.php?id=6135]”, published in March 2009, also provides a wealth of further data,
analysis and a collection of articles written between July 2005 and February 2008. (pdf, in Italian)

Republish