ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the early years of Italy's first-ever juvenile courts (tribunali per i minorenni), implemented by Mussolini's dictatorship in 1934. The courts represented the final piece of the juvenile-justice system that the Fascist government had gradually introduced in penal, civil, and police legislation over the previous decade. In the enabling legislation of July 1934, the tribunals were granted full jurisdiction over juvenile affairs in their respective districts. In penal matters, the juvenile courts administered a separate track of criminal justice in which youth offenders were tried according to flexible rules and procedures and disciplined with an array of correctional measures. They also served as the judicial nexus for civil and child-welfare institutions designed to protect and “re-educate” wayward, abandoned, and otherwise “endangered” minors and to sanction unfit parents and guardians. Previous scholarship has long identified Cesare Lombroso and his “school” of positivist criminology as both the original source and the subsequent catalyst of Italian juvenile-justice reform dating back to the late nineteenth century. Consequently, the tribunali per i minorenni have been construed—especially in the English-language historiography—as the outgrowth of positivist theories on the causes of and remedies for juvenile delinquency.
This essay seeks to challenge these scholarly presumptions in two ways. First, by investigating the complex lineage of the Italian juvenile courts in a wider chronological and geographic context, it identifies their origins, evolution, and anatomy in a pastiche of homegrown and foreign precedents and penal-reform ideas, many of which predated Lombroso. Second, this chapter takes a new approach to measuring the influence of positivist criminology on the Fascist-era tribunali: it assesses 71 cases, adjudicated in late 1934 and 1935 at the juvenile court in Rome, in which youth offenders were declared “socially dangerous” and sentenced to indefinite “security measures” in a state reformatory. Through an examination of how, why, and against whom Roman juvenile judges pronounced social dangerousness and prescribed misure di sicurezza—concepts long assumed to be invented and trademarked by Lombrosian criminologists—it finds scant evidence that Italian positivist theory informed and guided their rulings. While acknowledging the limited sample of archived cases and the preliminary nature of the findings, this chapter nevertheless complicates the existing historiography by questioning the long-presumed dominance of the scuola positiva in and beyond the Fascist juvenile courtroom.
