The Manifesto

"Justice" and "revenge" are not synonyms. Revenge responds to harm with equivalent harm. It rebuilds nothing. Justice aspires to something harder: to repair what crime has broken, both in the relationship between individuals and within the community. Confusing the two is a cultural mistake with devastating consequences.

Crime is a tear in the social fabric that needs mending. A retributive, custodial response deepens the rupture rather than healing it. The tear can instead be mended by acknowledging the harm, taking responsibility for it, and actively working to repair it. This is the principle of restorative justice. It is not leniency — it is the most demanding and humane form of justice there is.

The Italian Constitution does not contain the word "prison." Those who wrote Article 27 — people who had experienced incarceration firsthand — deliberately chose the word "penalties," in the plural. Not a single response, not an inevitable cage: an open system, capable of imagining different forms of justice.

Incarceration should mean only the deprivation of personal liberty, not of human rights. People serving a sentence should retain their fundamental rights: to health, to dignity, to emotional ties, to information, to legal defense. These should not be concessions the State grants for good behavior, but rights the State has a duty to guarantee. Insisting they be respected is not compassion — it is demanding that the law apply to everyone, even in places where no one is watching.

Retributive justice does not work. A 70% recidivism rate is not bad luck: it is the predictable result of a system that isolates without holding accountable, punishes without accompanying, labels without leaving room for transformation.

Within the current system, alternative and non-punitive measures — work and education — are the only tools that genuinely work. They are not rewards or privileges: they are concrete proof that another kind of justice is possible. Every hour of training inside a cell, every contract signed after release, is a step beyond the retributive logic.

Prison can no longer be the welfare system for the forgotten. Most of the incarcerated population comes from contexts of poverty, psychiatric distress, addiction, and marginalization. Prison should not be performing the social containment role that belongs elsewhere — to mental health services, therapeutic communities, educational support, housing policy — and yet it does, without the tools to respond to people's real needs. The result, often, is that it makes things worse.

Access to information is access to power. Technology can do a great deal to simplify access to information, lower bureaucratic barriers, and connect those who need protection with those who can provide it. In the hands of the lawyers, volunteers, and activists already working alongside incarcerated people and their families, technology becomes a force multiplier.

You cannot build an alternative to retributive justice without those who have lived it firsthand. Movimento Italiano Diritti Detenuti chooses to co-build proposals, projects, and visions together with people who have experienced detention. Their presence is not symbolic: it is structural, because no reform is credible if it is conceived without the voice of those who have inhabited that reality.

We are calling for cultural change — only then can it become structural change. It cannot be reduced to a single law, tool, or reform. It asks each of us to look differently at those who have done wrong, to see in justice not the end of a story of punishment but the beginning of a path of repair.

The Italian Movement for Detainees' Rights (Movimento Italiano Diritti Detenuti) is a non-profit association founded to protect the rights of people deprived of their personal liberty. The name carries a double meaning: "diritti detenuti" refers both to the rights of people in detention and — above all — to rights held captive, denied in practice even when guaranteed on paper. It is precisely in this gap between norm and reality that Movimento Italiano Diritti Detenuti operates, working on two fronts: outreach, to raise public awareness of these issues, and the concrete promotion of pathways for education, reintegration, and employment.

This commitment is rooted in a vision of justice that moves beyond the retributive model to embrace a restorative one. This approach places at its center the mending of the rupture caused by crime, involving those who have offended, the victims, and the entire community in a process oriented toward accountability and, where possible, the concrete repair of harm.