Envisioning a New Society: Pietro Gori and the Problem of Criminal Justice

The chapter focuses on the figure of Pietro Gori, born in 1865 into a wealthy family of Tuscan origin. He enrolled at the University of Pisa, where he approached the principles of anarchist internationalism. He graduated in law in 1889 with a thesis entitled Poverty and Crimes , which was influenced by positivist culture. In it, he theorized that crime was merely the consequence of an unjust society. This critical approach to the question of punishment would, over time, lead him to increasingly denounce the penal system, which did not cure bad behaviour, but instead reinforced it. These denunciations were backed up by theoretical texts and editorial initiatives (such as the journal Modern Criminology, which he founded in Argentina in 1898 during his exile) inspired by the theses of the new sociology of crime of the time. In addition to texts intended for an academic audience, these ideas were also disseminated in more popular forms. Gori was a lawyer and a criminologist, but above all he was a very popular anarchist political leader who, through the use of literary genres such as poetry, theatre and song, was able to speak a language based on emotions. Thus, in a more indirect way, we can find echoes of his abolitionist ideas in poems, theatre sketches and political songs, in which visions of a society no longer dominated by exploitation and based on a new idea of justice resound.