The Italian criminal justice system necessitates, that for an intervention of a penal nature to be imposed on a subject that has committed an illegal act, the offence must be referable to a person of sufficient discretion and intelligence, able to distinguish right and wrong. A minor of 14 years of age can not be considered responsible by our judicial system, since it presumes that he/she has not fully evolved psychologically. In the case of an adolescent between 14 and 18 years old the capacity to distinguish right and wrong must "be demonstrated step by step by the judge, with every evidence at his/her disposal". There exists, however, a substantial difference in the evaluation of the criminal responsibility between adolescents and adults. The adult can be held not responsible only in the case of insanity or in specific conditions of invalidity (art. 85 of the penal code and subsequent articles). The criminal responsibility of minor is not necessarily due to a state of insanity but is instead recognised as an imprecise state of immaturity connected to the age of the subject, that, at the moment of the offence, impedes his/her intention.

The interpretation of the penal codes’ article 98 has therefore led to the development of the maturity concept (Supreme Court of Appeal, I, Sentence n. 6979, 14.7.82). This definitely represents a verging of the law towards psychological concepts. The concept of maturity being however metaphoric, is as intuitively understandable as vague in its definition and psychological connotations. Such non-definition has not only induced judges, on the most part, to make reference to sociological and biological concepts, but has, over the years, led to an indiscriminate and de-responsiblised use of acquittal for reasons of immaturity, as well as an exploitation of acquittal for reasons of immaturity by the current criminal policy (more or less repressive).

The aim of my research has been to pass from a figurative language (maturity) that has substituted the judicial language (the ability to distinguish right and wrong) to an operational definition, which is therefore falsifiable. For this goal I have used the social-cognitively oriented social intelligence model (suggested by Gulotta & Boi, 1994). This has been subsequently processed on a wide basis of literature, (in particular on social intelligence, Doise and Mugny, Ceci, Thorndike, Cantor and Kilhstrom, Read and Miller, to mention some of the authors), of the modern social-cognitive theory, whose main exponent is Bandura, and of a wide number of articles on social skills, published in English and North American journals of psychology.

Social intelligence is concerned with a set of skills (cognitive, emotional and behavioural) that the individual uses, or can use, to interpret events, plan his own life, achieve personal goals and resolve personal and interpersonal problems (Gulotta & Boi, 1994). Social intelligence is "personality in action": it is understood as all of the necessary skills in a social context. It can not therefore, be assessed "by itself" but only in relation to the actions carried out and in the context which the individual lives (subject - action - context).

Maturity therefore finds a working definition in the model of social intelligence: the juvenile who has not acquired skills in cognitive, emotional and behavioural areas (ability to abstract thinking, to understand the consequences of an action; social and temporal perspective; ability to plan in the medium or long term; decisional skills, ability to control impulses; social and affective autonomy; ability to express and regulate emotions in oneself and in others; presence of valid ethic parameters of reference; communicative skills; interpersonal negotiation strategies) as emerges in tables 1 and 2, which represents the sub-competence’s of "to understand" and "to want", will be immature.

The social intelligence framework shows its real importance when seen in the light of the new Italian juvenile process and its specific demands and requirements in relation to the assessments of the juvenile delinquents personality. The legislator, referring (in the article 9 of the DPR 448 of 1998) to the assessment of "personal, family, social and environmental resources", does not seem to make reference to profound aspects of personality or to unconscious dimensions linked to a remote past, but it refers instead to active conditions (or conditions that could become activated) from the most recent phase of the juveniles life.

Adopting the social intelligence perspective it has been possible to construct a framework with the intention of providing judges, lawyers and psychologists with a useful instrument to select the most relevant information from the psychosocial reports made by Social Services (full of data) and to assess the resources of the juvenile delinquents: in this way they will be able not only to decide on the criminal responsibility of minor, but also to predispose the most adequate penal or civil action, whenever they deem it necessary.

With the aim of improving our model and determining its practical use, we conducted an exploratory research analysing the judicial files of 90 juveniles, not guilty by reasons of immaturity, at the Juvenile Court in Milan between the 1st of January 1998 and the 9th of April 1999. From a total of 253 penal sentences we analysed all the sentences determined by trial (8 sentences) as well as more than a third of the sentences available in the archives of the Juvenile Court in Milan that were settled by the preliminary hearing.

Our work on the sentences which highlighted more directly the problem of assessing the maturity of a juvenile, consisted firstly in an analysis of the reasons for the decisions that induced the judges in Milan to pass a sentence of acquittal for reasons of immaturity.

It emerged that, in the reason for the decision sighted at the time of sentence not all referred to the juvenile’s personality, despite the presence (in the judicial files) of reports by the Social Services analysing the psychological aspects.

On the basis of these types of motivations one can, in order to simplify the analysis, split the sentences into two groups. In the first group there are, for the most part, juvenile delinquents with a clean record, that commit minor offences described as "expression of thoughtlessness and lack of awareness, typical of adolescence, not symptoms of deviant nature". The magistrates dwell on age, family and social situation, the type of offence the manner in which it was committed and previous offences. For psychological explanations it is necessary to consult reports, not highlighted in the sentence: the only explanation given is "substantial immaturity", never becoming farther developed. The sentences are very different when the crime committed is serious and the juvenile demonstrates a complex personal and family situation or he has perhaps previous convictions and has already been predisposed to interventions. These sentences are much richer in reasons for the decision (paying particular attention to the psychological aspects), much more complex and articulate in the reasoning. Between the psychological aspects taken into consideration for this second type of sentence, we can find: motivation behind the offence, cognitive abilities, critical reasoning skills, capacity to value events, ability to control impulses and plan actions, to manage emotions, all of which are criteria included in the social intelligence framework proposed by us.

In the case of a juvenile delinquents accused of numerous offences, such as mugging, attempted theft, aggravated theft, handling stolen goods, for which civil or penal measures have already been taken, but for whom "nothing has worked", the sentence (Juvenile Court in Milan, September 1999) is richer in psychological explanations. "Serious deficiencies at psychological and intellectual levels", "notable affective and behavioural immaturity", "extreme lack of critical ability", "inability to place events in sequence correctly», lack of autonomy ("he is under the influence of others"), "weakness" and absence of "planning", his relationships appear defective of "trust and collaboration" and his bond with his girlfriends that seems "pathological", are all sighted as reasons.

Reading the psychological relationships through the social intelligence perspective would allow a systematic and detailed assessment of the psychological resources for every juvenile delinquent in accordance with that provided for by law. We have applied our framework to the psychological reports regarding the juveniles coming from the sample and as an example we will report one of the cases analysed that illustrates well the advantage of our model in light of the trends shared with the actual juvenile justice system.

SENTENCE "[...] the offence appears to be determined by thoughtlessness and lack of knowledge concerning the seriousness of the consequences of their actions", furthermore given their age, their social and family conditions and "the picture of substantial immaturity of the two boys, with problematic life histories" (Juvenile Court Milan 09/1998)

As emerges from Table 1, thanks to the social intelligence model it is possible to assess, not only some of the sub-competencies of the ability to distinguish right and wrong, but a wide range of resources that allow better diagnostic sensitivity and makes a greater possibility of motivations for judicial decisions available. This makes the decisions more complete, and at the same time more falsifiable (with regard to the models of maturity inferred to at the judgement). We mustn’t forget that the sentences where the judge has not sited the reasons for the decision, that have instigated him to confirm or to exclude the existence of the criminal responsibility of the minor, are invalid.

A similar assessment of a juveniles psychological resources is even more useful in the light of the educational conclusion of the juvenile’s penal process, in which maturity does not only go measured (with the aim of emitting a judgement of criminal responsibility) but "stimulated" with the instruments and the different possibilities of intervention that the magistrates have at their disposal. The personality characteristics must be included, in the picture, not as data, but as challenges, questions and risks, for the judges and the Social Services.

The same judges at the Juvenile Court in Milan, Maria Cristina Canziani, Anna Poli and Maria Grazia Domanico define the penal process as