Dipartimento di Giurisprudenza

Descrizione del progetto

• Abstract:

Various international recommendations on community sanctions and measures promote the use of alternatives to prison in order to reduce reoffending and prison population. Every member State within the EU area have implemented different alternative to imprisonment systems, with its own rules, organizational set up and procedures. The present proposal would intervene creating a functional network between the partner countries, in order to reduce the disharmony and the gaps among the various systems.

The main goal of the project is to provide, in a comparative way, a comprehensive picture of different alternatives to detention, which are in force within each partner country. These pictures would enable us to identify those alternative measures to detention that have determined:

• a decrease of recidivism rates;
• a decrease of detention rates.

To do so, starting from historical analysis, the general objective of the project is to compare the legal frame of the systems, their goals, the contents of the measures and their impact on the whole penitentiary system. The differences between the official objectives and the actual effects of the alternatives will be pointed out, in order to identify the conditions to reduce the prison population and the recidivism rates.

Building of this first step, one of the main goals of the project is to identify in every country best practices in relation to alternatives to custody, in order to innovate criminal policies and implement new measures.

Another objective of the present proposal is to make available to social workers, NGOs and human rights campaigners a set of multimedia tools and the strategy to launch a campaign to explain to the general public and to promote alternatives to imprisonment.

The main target groups are, on one side, practitioners, social workers, NGOs and human rights associations staff and, more in general, all the justice operators and, on the other side, decision makers and legislators.

• Consortium:

Coordinator of the project: Antigone Onlus Associazione

Beneficiaries:

• University of Torino (IT),
• Observatoire International des prisons – section française (FR),
• Special Account of Democritus University of Thrace Department of Social Administration and Political Science (EL DUTH - GR),
• Latvijas Cilvçktiesȋbu centrs (LV),
• Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights (PL),
• Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL - PT),
• Observatorio del Sistema Penal de los Derechos Humanos de la Universidad de Barcelona (ES),
• Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (ISTD - UK).