Contenuti «informativi» della sanzione penale e coerenza del «sistema»

This essay looks at criminal sanctions (and sentences which inflict them) as possible sources of a specific kind of (negative) information about individuals, information which can influence other people’s decisions about whether, how, and how much to interact with them. The effect of punishment is thus regarded from the perspective of ‘social capital’ as defined by Coleman: a criminal sentence may diminish the convict’s reputation, and therefore people’s willingness to trust them and enter into social and economic relationships with them, provided that the information about the conviction is available to the interested ‘players’; this might be particularly true in case of white-collar crimes, which can be described also as offences committed by people misusing their position of trust (Sutherland; Shapiro). Reasons to limit the availability of this kind of ‘stigmatizing’ information are briefly taken into account, namely the need to protect convicts’ basic human dignity, as well as their possibility to get rehabilitated and go back to normal social interactions. Italian Criminal Law system is then analyzed, in order, on one hand, to exemplify the current interest (or lack of it) on lawmakers’ part for adverse publicity as a criminal policy tool; and, on the other, to briefly illustrate the kind of reputation which is protected under current Criminal Law provisions: this latter being a basically formal one (i.e., a reputation indifferently based upon true or false assumptions), the whole legal system doesn’t appear particularly fit to support a greater use of criminal sentences’ ‘informational potential’.