Il doppio codice: fiducia e punizione

This research comes under the heading of the institutional processes triggered off by the phenomenon of juvenile deliquency. It focuses on considering those practices of intervention that are centred on control and security, together with those others that, on the contrary aim at increasing juvenile delinquents' sense of responsability as the expressions of a dual code that relies on mutually incompatible approaches and methods of action: the one is the expression of the institutions, while the others the spontaneous action that takes place in the community. The problem of the dual code has been elaborated theoretically and empirically using the legal institution of the suspension of the trial and the test of the juvenile (Art.28, DPR 448/88) as an example of application. The essay takes four examples of micro deliquency and describes how they fare in the course of the application of this legal instrument, as a means of analysing the relationship between the logical-argumentative institutional normative language of law and the community language of trust involved in sentiments and centred on a symmetry of relationships, highlighting the paradoxical effects caused when these two symbolic scenes meet