Social finance, pay by result and social impact bond. A potential tool to facilitate social and professional rehabilitation of prisoners. Analysis of a specific case in the European Community. The state of play in Italian context

This article analyzes the new paradigms of impact investing and the relationship with social experimentation contexts, specifically, the Criminal Justice sector, where Pay by Result (PbR) and Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) start to be used as potential tools to foster the social and labor reintegration of detainees, reducing the percentage of recidivism and overcrowding. A new paradigm of social finance and an ideological transformation model aimed at supporting specific social policies that leverage the relationship between the public and private sectors, capable of restoring potential socio-economic benefits for the State and society as a whole through the balanced involvement of economic, social and cultural capital. After a brief description of what is meant in the literature for SIBs and PbR, and after having drawn a general profile of some international contexts (British and US) in which the SIBs were introduced as instruments of social finance and possible means of solving the problem of the prison recurrence, we introduce the state of the art of the Italian case and the action plan that was decided to experiment in Italy in order to favor the social and working reintegration of the detained persons. In particular, after having brought as examples of experimentation the projects already started in Peterborough Prison, in the UK, and in the Rikers Island juvenile prison in the United States, the article illustrates, in general, the possibilities of feasibility and the state of play of the use of SIBs in the European context, specifically, in Italy, in the Lorusso-Cutugno prison in Turin. In this Italian prison, in fact, the Foundation Human Foundation with its collaborators has designed and launched a feasibility study since 2016, through an accurate work of analysis and experimental research, to test this new paradigm of social finance between potential limits, opportunities and risks.