Reflections on political populism tend to consider the penal system as a more or less rhetorical basin that can be used for political purposes. This article gives account on the potential uses that the criminal «impure matter» can offer to gov- ernments in office. However, it goes further by wondering more radically whether criminal law as such is immanently populist, both in its permanent features and in its recent variations. So, the question is reversed: what if instead of coming first a politi- cal populism that uses criminal justice, it was the penal system that had an «intimate» populist nature of its own? We, therefore, examine criminal practices to historically situate the recent restructuring of intrinsically «populist» characteristics – which, limited to the Italian case, we identify in the period of the emergency (1970-90) – and finally find out that the long-lived model of political justice accounted for similar fig- ures and tactics. If there is a novelty in the recent populist use of criminal justice, this lies in the tendency towards the open declaration of warlike objectives and suitable enemies, and yet this piece intended to enhance the longue durée of the political use of criminal justice, a much older feature than its contemporary populist declinations.