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We have little time and I'm... I'm frightened,
there's a monitor down here showing the remaining time.
It's 18 minutes, and in eighteen minutes I have to dive
into a rather complicated topic.
I'm here because I've been invited.
At TED, I think, invitation depends
on my previous job. I've been a public prosecutor
for more than 33 years, and I left my job
14 years before the legal term,
and now I spend a lot of time
talking with kids about my new vision
of penalties, punishments and prison.
This TED event is mostly dedicated to love,
there's also space for forgiveness,
I think I will talk, I will surely talk
about forgiveness, not according
to that general way of dealing
with forgiveness, as in personal relationships,
especially very intimate relationships –
relating to betrayal
and making amend
of a broken relationship.
No, I talk about forgiveness
in a broader and “social” sense, so to say.
The question is: has forgiveness – and even love, if you will –
something to do with the way
our society is organized?
Can we organize society,
our relationships, the rules that shape
the way we live together,
around forgiveness,
taking social forgiveness into account?
You know, it's impossible to live together
without a given set of rules.
It's impossible to live in a community without rules,
not because someone said so but because it's inevitable.
In this very moment, we're following countless rules
without even knowing it: I have 18 minutes,
because that's the rule, and the fact
that a minutes is made of sixty seconds is also a rule.
We'll change the rule of measuring time
at the end of the month, when we shift from solar
to legal time. And by the way, we can only understand each other
because we express ourselves through mutually agreed codes.
We're talking in Italian now, we were talking in English
up to a few minutes ago,they asked me to talk in Italian
to remark that we are in Milan today,
to this event called TEDxNavigli.
By shifting from English to Italian,
we changed our set of rules. We wouldn't understand
each other if we spoke languages that listeners don't understand.
And that's another rule.
It's impossible to live without rules,
because we need to trust each other,
to predict each other's behavior,
that's what rules are meant for.
We must be confident that if I say, “Let's meet at 3 P.M.”,
at that given time we all meet here.
This kind of rules organize all society,
and if we think about it, if we look back at the past,
we see that society has generally
(I'd say, always) been organized by rules
that were centered,
inspired by discrimination.
Discrimination was in turn
centered around the differences
among people.
In other words, we always designed rules
to make us stay together starting from the idea
that people had a different value;
for instance, men were more worthwhile than women.
You certainly know that in Italy, up to 1946, only men could vote,
and not all of them anyway. But that was a global issue
up to only a little more than half a century before that.
As far as I remember, the first country that introduced
the universal right to vote was New Zealand, in 1893.
Before that time, there was a strong gender discrimination
and in Italy, I suspect, there still
is a strong discrimination, despite many rules have changed.
Well, in a pyramid-shaped,
discrimination-based society, where those on top can
and those down must, with a more or less strong hierarchy,
well, maybe the more we go back the more rigid the hierarchy is,
but it was still quite rigid
around the half of the past century, when nazism
and fascism were very keen to distinction,
discrimination among people.
Did forgiveness have some place,
in such a society?
I'd say no.
What does count in the social organization?
What matters there is exclusion, separation,
insisting on differences and diversity.
The past one is a society where there's no place,
no room for freely accepting the other,
no matter what benefit
one takes from it,
and no place for forgiveness. Or better, there can only be forgiveness
as an act of kindness from the prince,
who thus confirmed his power upon
the other discriminated ones.
But shortly before the middle of the past century,
after all those terrible events
that had just happened
(two world wars in slightly more than twenty years),
the first ends in 1918 and the other starts in 1939;
and not just two world wars,
because while the World War II is taking place, there's also the Shoah,
six million people deliberately eliminated:
jews, gypsies, handicapped, homosexuals, other wing's politicians,
all eliminated. The atomic bomb,
which may impress us
– I, for one, certainly hate it – but I have to say,
I was born shortly after
they dropped the first atomic bomb.
That bomb did not change the future to none of us, or almost none of us,
but for those who were living back then, the atomic bomb
did change the future.
Let's put all those events together: two world wars,
the nuke, the Shoah.
As soon as people had the chance to think again,
the first thing they asked themselves was,
how can we prevent all the tragedies,
the pain we had to go through,
from happening again?
And the choice was, let's change the way we live together.
In 1948, exactly on December 10th,
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was issued.
A few months before, eleven months and ten days before,
Italy had a Constitution.
Both acts – the first is a recommendation,
the latter is a law –
start from a statement that turn the way we live together
upside down. All people, all human beings
are born free and equal in dignity and rights,
says the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
all citizens have equal social dignity and are equal
before the law, says the Italian Constitution.
It's exactly the opposite.
While the leading principle used to be the discrimination,
from the 1948 onwards, the principle becomes –
though we're not sure it is always respected –
the acknowledgement of equal value,
inner positivity of all human beings.
So one could ask: what has our organizational system
to do with this new declared willingness to accept the other?
Does society still work through separation,
exclusion, prison, even death penalty,
or we must necessarily take a new way?
I think, the latter fits better
with this new way
of living together.
If suffering – because prison means suffering, no questions about it –
was OK in a discriminating society, maybe it's no longer OK
in a society of inclusion, more inclined
to include than reject.
This means being able, not to fix
a broken relationships,
as in strong, personal bonds;
but to be generally available
to make society work by recuperating
those who did wrong.
It's a big problem of public behavior, because in a vertical,
hierarchical, discriminating society,
what is education ultimately for?
The vertical pyramid-shaped society only works
if people are used to obey,
otherwise they wouldn't accept the discrimination.
Conversely, in a society based on the general acknowledgment,
what can the purpose of education be?
Even here, exactly the opposite: no longer educating people
to obedience, but to be able to be free.
Of course, once we state that people are born free,
then they have to be able to manage that freedom,
otherwise instead of having relationships,
acknowledging other people's freedom, we fall back
on the old system.
So we need people to be educated
in managing their freedom,
which means responsibility as well.
How can all that be done by putting people in jail?
Try doing a mental experiment by yourself.
Today, in Italy, once you're in prison
-there are some exception,
like working inmates,
some people work as cleaner –
but in general terms,
inmates are confined
-try imagine this on you-
in a 12 square meters room. And they're not alone,
there usually are at least three other people,
a double-decker bed on one side, another on the other.
They're stuck in there
22 hours a day, with no toilet at your disposal.
It's rather a hole in the ground
and a lavatory, which is also used
to make food.
They can see their loved ones
only 6 hours per month,
and if they're sick,
they can't see
their doctor, nor their dentist
if they have a toothache.
So, imagine yourself
going through all of this
not for a long time, let's say just six months.
Once you're out, would you be willing to love
the rest of humanity,
or you'd rather seek for revenge?
Would you think: “How happy I am to reconnect
with people!”, or rather “I'll make you pay for my pain!”
Try to experiment this idea on you.
It is not working anymore,
we need something else.
Well, in 1989 United Nations wrote
a recommendation when they talked about reparative justice.
And two, three years later the EU Council also wrote
another recommendation about reparative justice.
Actually, the EU didn't write a recommendation,
they took a framework decision, and bound
all the members of EU to implement
into their legal orders a reparative justice system
along with the traditional one.
What is reparative justice?
According to the definitions of these
international organs, it consists
in a procedure through which
the offender and the victim,
adequately trained
by a skilled mediator,
can meet each other
so that the offender
can realize
the harm he did without being overwhelmed
by the sense of guilty, getting a better understanding of good and evil;
on the other side, the victim of the crime,
who's basically left alone today,
could be “mended”, “fixed”,
and regain the dignity the crime have destroyed.
Of course, this path takes into account
how dangerous a given person is.
In the most serious cases,
the offender must rightfully be kept away,
but that doesn't mean that he/she should have
no fundamental rights like, for instance,
a vital space,
the possibility of a decent hygiene,
of keeping his intimate relationships,
having access
to informations and knowledge,
being cured by a trusted dentist.
All of this is part of reparative justice.
But can reparative justice be implemented
without a common understanding,
an openness and willingness to forgive?
I think it cannot happen.
And since love and forgiveness have the same origin and root,
that's why - I think - they invited me to talk here today.
Good night.