The assessment of juvenile offender personality in criminal procedure in Italy

Abstract

In the first part of the paper author criticizes positivistic orientation which, although surpassed in Criminology, still has a foothold in the criminal procedures against juvenile offenders and the reason for that lies in historical, social and cultural circumstances. Instead of detecting defects of socio-psychological nature and asserting that criminal act is not a result of the free will, theories of social reaction, symbolic interactionism and labeling, which treat the offender as the creator of his/her own destiny, should be promoted. The author suggests the use of multifactorial approach in determining the genesis of juvenile delinquency that is equally applicable to other perpetrators. It includes both the risk assessment of future criminal behavior and recidivism, expressed by the existence of factors that are correlated and but not causally connected to criminal behavior, and assessment of protective factors that inhibit commission of crimes. Consideration of risk factors should be set in three-dimensional framework embodied in the personality, the environment and social behavior. The author proposes the use of scientific paradigm of interactionism in criminal proceedings in order to provide the offender with opportunity to reconstruct his/her own criminal act and to try to present it as socially acceptable. This perspective gives the possibility to offender to offer his version of criminal offence. In this way the offense is viewed not as a pathological symptom but as an event that is recorded in the biography of the person who has performed it and which characterizes his/her way of knowing reality.