La proporzionalità nel diritto penale. Natura e attuazione

[Machine translation] The idea of proportion has been established in criminal law not only as a function of limiting sanctioning measures (punishment and security measure) and to graduate them but also to establish a necessary appropriateness between crime and punishment. The principle of proportionality does not find, in Italy, an express constitutional recognition, although it is often linked to the principle of guilt and to the rehabilitation prescription. However, this is a reductive perspective of the phenomenon that, in the present work, extends, embracing the rationale of the criminal norm, from the opportunity to punish, to the modulation of the injury to the choice of the type of sanction. The proportion also constitutes a prohibition for the legislator to punish behavior devoid of a real offensive content, as well as to create legal assets that are unlikely to be harmed or endangered. The judgment of proportionality is also addressed to the judge in the application of the criminal law, both in the imputation phase of the crime and at the moment of commencement of the sentence. The proportion is also the basis of the judgment of balance between rights, a criterion that has become an overwhelming part of the decision-making process of many national, foreign and supranational courts. Through it, additional personalistic notes of the offense, such as human dignity, characterize the current evolutionary stage of criminal law, enter the criminal case.