Restorative Justice in the Italian Criminal System: A Doctrinal Reading of the Cartabia Reform Three Years On

This article presents a doctrinal analysis of the way restorative justice has entered the Italian criminal system through Legislative Decree No. 150 of 10 October 2022, the so-called Cartabia reform, as later integrated by Legislative Decree No. 216 of 27 December 2024. The central theme of the paper is the model of complementarity between restorative programs and the ordinary criminal proceeding, considered in the light of Directive 2012/29/EU and Recommendation CM/Rec(2018)8 of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe. After reviewing the notion, the models and the application mechanisms of restorative justice, the article focuses, on the doctrinal plane, on three areas of friction within the new regulatory architecture. They concern the access of restorative programs to all stages of the proceeding, the question of safeguards in cases of intimate partner violence and gender-based crime, and the institutional design of the new Centres for restorative justice. For the third issue, the article keeps its claims at the level of the legislative text and treats any proposition on territorial variation, on the functioning of the Centres or on the implementation deficit as a hypothesis for future empirical research. On the whole, the Italian regulatory intervention looks relevant, albeit with some critical issues, and to be kept under observation for future application developments. In particular, it seems possible to assert that the reform has formally opened the doors to a relational paradigm of justice, but the cultural transition, from a criminal-centric system towards a model of relational justice, will depend, in fact, on the practical choices of judges, mediators and local authorities in the coming years.