By Anita Bonfiglio (researcher at L’Altro Diritto), Maria Cristina Frosali (researcher at L’Altro Diritto) and Sofia Ciuffoletti (coordinator, L’Altro Diritto).
The Italian Constitutional Court declared unconstitutional amendments to the Prison Law that restricted prisoners’ ability to apply for sentence reductions, allowing standalone applications only upon demonstration of a “specific interest”. The Constitutional Court held that this undermined the rehabilitative purpose of imprisonment enshrined in the Constitution.
In a judgment published in December 2025, the Italian Constitutional Court declared unconstitutional amendments restricting access to sentence reductions (judgment no. 201/2025, published on 31 December 2025). The complaint concerned specifically amendments to Article 69-bis of the Prison Law (Ordinamento Penitenzario, O.P.), introduced by the Decree-Law of 4 July 2024, which changed the procedure for applying for sentence reductions.
Pursuant to Article 54 of the O.P., prisoners who have no disciplinary record and who have participated in rehabilitation programmes may be granted a sentence reduction of 45 days for each six-month period of sentence served, upon decision of the Supervisory Judge. While under the initial wording of Article 69-bis O.P., prisoners could apply to the Supervisory Judge at any time during the execution of the sentence, the amended version made the granting of sentence reductions an ex officio mechanism whereby the Supervisory Judge would ascertain whether the statutory requirements for sentence reduction were met within the context of specific procedures – application for an alternative measure or prison benefits – or 90 days before the anticipated end of the sentence, taking into account all sentence reductions that could theoretically be awarded.
Prisoners would be able to apply for sentence reductions, outside of these two procedures, only where they could demonstrate a “specific interest”. This amendment therefore deprived them in practice of periodic assessments (usually every six months), by the Supervisory Judge, of their rehabilitative process, and consequently weakened the incentive-based effect that sentence reductions is intended to produce.
The Constitutional Court held that the new procedure seriously undermined the functional role of sentence reduction in promoting the offender’s rehabilitation and was therefore inconsistent with Article 27(3) of the Constitution, according to which penalties “must aim at the re-education of the convicted person”. In the Court’s view, sentence reduction constitutes a “key mechanism” for achieving this constitutionally required aim of punishment. By removing the possibility of periodic, stand-alone applications during the execution of the sentence, the reform reduced the frequency of judicial review of the prisoner’s rehabilitative progress and thereby weakened the incentive-based function of the mechanism.
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