The Italian reform of treatment of people not guilty by reason of insanity: The closure of forensic institutions

Abstract

After the closure of Psychiatric hospitals in 1978, in 2014 the Italian government approved a law to definitively close the prisons (OPG) that were used to host and treat psychiatric patients who had committed crimes and were considered Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity. New facilities, the REMS, were built for the patients who were discharged by the forensic hospitals and the new patients who were sentenced to a security measure by the penal code. This paper describes the critical items of the reform and new scenarios about the future.