How much does it cost politicians to keep the public in a constant state of alarm about their safety?

On the one hand, there is the demos, the deliberative people; on the other, the laos, the armed, clamouring people. Admittedly, these are, in a sense, two mythical images that do not exist in reality – in their pure form, so to speak – and yet they do exist. They are two projections of our idea of the people that also live on in the present day, operating all around us, pulsating and weighing heavily on our thoughts. In fact, they also represent two ways of understanding democracy. They often coexist, allowing one to prevail over the other, at times revealing the reflective face of a people mindful of their own destiny, or, at others, that of a tumultuous multitude. Both have their roots and a psycho-political explanation. The problem, however, arises when politics realises the potential for consensus that the laos unleashes, and the source of energy provided by a people kept in a state of constant alarm regarding their own security. How a community besieged by crime – and therefore in need of reassurance – hangs on the every word of the saviour-like legislator, that dispenser of ever harsher and more intimidating penalties, and of ever-new categories of offences, aggravating circumstances and impediments.

President Meloni, in justifying the draft bill on the criminal liability of minors, states that “those who rob, those who assault, those who wreak havoc must always pay, even if they are fifteen or sixteen years old”. The reform, she claims, serves to set straight that category of minors – evidently considered to be very large – “who think they can do as they please because they know nothing will happen to them”. Instilling the idea of impunity in public opinion serves to galvanise expectations of a security-focused response. We have already heard in the past, in the same vein of punitive rhetoric, Dr Davigo musing about ‘scarecrow codes’ and a country in which those acquitted are ‘guilty parties who have got away with it’. No mention is made of how many underage rapists, robbers or vandals have avoided trial because they were declared not criminally responsible due to immaturity under Article 98 of the Criminal Code. But it is just as well that the general public remains unaware of the statistics and data, and believes that the enemy against which we must defend ourselves today is the insidious army of minors.

This propaganda is working and spreading rapidly on social media. That prudent provision which entrusted judges with the task of assessing the maturity of minors – drafted in 1930 by the staunchly fascist Minister of Justice Rocco – has been swept aside by yet another flagship piece of legislation, which pays no heed to Article 31 of the Constitution, which ‘protects young people by promoting the institutions necessary for that purpose’. The very same provision that protected maternity rights – also enshrined in that deeply fascist code – has been swept aside by yet another ‘security’ package, with the result that the Rebibbia nursery, which had finally been emptied, now houses a baby girl just a few months old. The geography of security has drawn a map across our territories and our cities: the ‘red zones’ of the city centre, the abandoned suburban outskirts of the raves, the underground stations of the Roma, the streets of the Maranza. The constant updating of the ‘enemies of security’, anchored to daily news stories, is an extraordinary factory of consensus that never shuts down. It is a mechanism that is always effective and supposedly cost-free, given that human costs and the principles enshrined in our Constitution, Charters and Conventions do not contribute to GDP. Not only are the costs of imprisonment, overcrowding and suicides not calculated, but neither are the costs borne by society when a minor, an occasional drug dealer, is thrust into a stigmatising and purely punitive prison system, from which they are likely to emerge as an even more dangerous professional drug dealer.

But having a populace in a state of perpetual turmoil, susceptible to punitive populism and the rhetoric of retributive justice, is so advantageous that no one any longer calls for the return of that deliberative, reflective and constructive demos, wary of the immediate and capable of critical thinking. Unfortunately, however, it is often overlooked that, on closer inspection – as Giordano Bruno Guerri recently wrote – this daily feeding of the public’s most visceral impulses is neither a driving force nor conducive to democracy, but ‘becomes a ball and chain for the people’, nailing them to a perpetual emotional present devoid of any future.