In the course of this study, I have argued that an approach to the criminal policy of the Italian fascist government from the standpoint of the international penal movement and, conversely, a perspective on the latter taking the former into account, sheds light onto significant aspects of both. This approach unveils, specifically, a shared history between penal Italy in the 1920s and the 1930s and institutional reform in other countries. In other words, there was a zone of intersection between the institutionalization of fascism in Italy and other processes of state reform in Europe. These processes involved various types of elements, ranging from political and juridical ideas to religious concepts, which formed both the perceptions of the socio-economic crisis of the period and the attempted responses. This configuration may be termed ‘transnational’, not merely in the sense of a perspective on a plurality of national scenes, but an actual zone of contact where agents from different national and institutional backgrounds interacted. Indeed, I argued that criminal policy under the rule of fascism, and the codification of the penal code in particular, form a relational configuration with the international penal movement and other national cases of penal reform.

For the actors involved in this process in interwar Italy, the First World War signified a rupture with a time past and imposed more vigorous, qualitatively different, means of repression. However, these means of repression were to be found within the Italian ‘tradition’.