An Italian Law of Suspects? Forced Residence in Liberal Italy, 1861–1914

Among the various practices of preventative policing in Liberal Italy (1861-1922), domicilio coatto (forced residence) was both the most unusual and the most severe. Defined in its simplest terms, it was a system of summary deportation administered by the Interior Ministry. It allowed police officials to deport ordinary citizens, usually for one to five years, to Italy’s vast network of island internment settlements. From Unification in 1861 to the Great War, up to 3,000 people were deported annually, even if they had committed no crime. Because domicilio coatto was formalized in public-security law rather than in the penal code, it functioned independently of normal judicial procedure. Governed instead by its own regulations, forced residence represented nothing less than a system of criminal justice parallel to that of the regular law courts. Domicilio coatto also enjoyed a long life: not only did it remain a permanent feature of the Liberal regime, but it also provided the blueprint for the Fascist measure of confino di polizia, a still more aggressive brand of police-administered exile introduced in 1926.
My paper is not the first to examine domicilio coatto, but it proposes to do so in new ways. Whereas previous scholarship has explored forced residence principally as a weapon of political policing brandished during episodes of acute social crisis, my paper will focus on the origins and long-term evolution of domicilio coatto as a routine instrument of preventative policing against common suspects and offenders. More specifically, it will investigate why Liberal jurists not only supported such an illiberal institution of crime prevention but also aimed repeatedly to expand and refine it. By reconstructing jurists’ debates and legislative proposals on forced residence, my paper will challenge longstanding assumptions about Liberal attitudes toward the institution’s legality, effectiveness and desirability.