Suchergebnisse

Foreign Immigration and Crime in Italy The migration-crime link has become a major social and political issue in European countries. In Italy, it has generated a hot debate, based, however, on emotions and ideological biases, rather than scientific studies. This situation is the result of both the lack of interest of the Italian public institutions in a scientific analysis of crime problems and the diffusion of an anti-quantitative approach to the issue of social control. The present paper addresses this issue by means of a relative index of incrimination, which generates a more intuitive measure of the immigrant contribution to crime. The index output shows that this contribution is in Italy much larger than the immigrant share of the resident population and concerns all the most common and serious crimes. Immigrants' contribution to crime, concurrently, does not seem to be independent of their legal and socio-economic conditions, since it is not the same for immigrants and foreigners, nor is it constant over time and under different circumstances. Moreover, the large contribution to crime made by immigrants in Italy suggests a relationship with the host country's structural features, such as its high level of unemployment, inequality, corruption and labour market rigidities, and its limited economic freedom.

Italy's 2016 referendum represents an opportunity to discuss the main hypotheses posited by current literature as to the determinants of referendums. The issue-voting of this constitutional referendum was too technical to arouse great passions in the voters. This provided room for second-order determinants, and the referendum campaign became a competition between Government and Opposition. In such a scenario, political partisanship is expected to play a significant role in the voter's choice. This paper intends to test the impact of partisanship on the vote, versus that of further possible determinants: intra-party dissent, the voters' dissatisfaction with the government, as well as the referendum turnout. Particular attention has been paid to the latter, also because the impact of turnout on referendums is understudied. Correlations and linear regression models, based on data of all the Italian provinces, revealed that, apart from partisanship, other second-order features impacted on the referendum outcome: in particular, it emerged that, where the turnout had been higher, the "No" share was lower. However, the turnout was intertwined with other determinants, first of all, partisanship. To disentangle the turnout from its correlates, a lagged instrument, namely the turnout of the previous referendum held in 2006, was introduced. The Two-Stage Least Squares model proved the instrument to be a robust predictor of the 2016 referendum vote. The result of a mediation model further supported these findings, which suggest that the turnout—as an expression of civic commitment—is not independent of the voters' decision.

The democratic society of ancient Greece did not distinguish between community and society, and between community and state. Ancient Greeks could not imagine a separation between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft and even less a separation between community and state. Therefore, ancient Greece accepted foreign immigrants only if they had proved their integration in the host community. Contrariwise, in modern Western countries, the State, not the community, is in charge of granting permit of stay and citizenship to foreign immigrants. And the granting of permit of stay and citizenship is based substantially on formal requisites, not on the social integration of the foreigner. As a consequence, natives are increasingly criticizing the State - and Governments - for their immigration policies, since the latter do not consider the problem of the immigrant integration in the local community, increasing the risk of cultural conflict, deviance and crime.

The control of mental illness has undergone a drastic change over the last decades, as a consequence of new theoretical approaches. The result has been a process of de‐institutionalisation of psychiatric services in all the Western countries. This change has been often extolled, but its dynamics present aspects that still remain obscure; and some studies have suggested that de‐institutionalisation may produce unforeseen negative side effects, particularly as regards mentally disordered offenders. The case of Italy is of particular importance, since it underwent the most radical change in this field in the Western world. This article analyses what happened at the social and legislative level, as well as the qualitative and quantitative consequences. It is also shown that the intervention on mentally disordered offenders underwent much less remarkable changes than those regarding psychiatric subjects in general; and that – while the number of patients treated by the psychiatric institutions fell – the criminal courts and the prison system treated an increasing number of psychiatric subjects. Lastly, some critical considerations about the theoretical concepts underlying the de‐institutionalisation policy are presented.