Jean Monnet Guest Lecture, November 16, 2022

Presentation

The number of migrants in prison is very high in most European penal systems today whereas is quite low in the United States, and it has been that way for a long time. Criminological and historical reconstructions in the United States have advanced the thesis that the initial hostility toward migrants, expressed also in processes of criminalization, slowly turned into a process of assimilation and “whitening” of Southern and Eastern European migrants (however, things did not change that much when, more recently, non-European migrants became prevalent). Between the period of Reconstruction and the Great Migration, Americans of African origins became increasingly the target of processes of criminalization. Consequently, the number of migrants in prison became negligible, while the “overrepresentation” of African Americans became commonplace. Is there something to be learned today in Europe from such a story? Is there the danger that also in Europe there may be a possible shift from xenophobia to racism in processes of criminalization and prisonization? In lecture data will be presented taken from the recent Italian migration context in order to start thinking some of these issues through.

Programme

Wednesday November 16, 2022
Aula Buono, Palazzo Del Prete
Università degli Studi di Bari
2:30-4:30 pm

The lecturer

Dario Melossi is Alma Mater Professor of the University of Bologna and Distinguished Affiliated Scholar of the Center for the Study of Law and Society (UC Berkeley). He has published The Prison and the Factory (1977, with Massimo Pavarini), The State of Social Control:A Sociological Study of Concepts of State and Social Control in the Making of Democracy (1990), and Controlling Crime, Controlling Society:Thinking About Crime in Europe and America (2008), plus more than 200 other publications. He has been Editor-in-Chief of Punishment and Society,  and The European Journal of Criminology. In 2007 he received the “International Scholarship Prize” of the Law and Society Association and in 2014 the “European Criminology Award” of the European Society of Criminology. His most recent book is Crime,Punishment and Migration (2015). 

Contact

Dott.ssa Irene Paolino

Dipartimento di Scienze politiche
Università degli Studi di Bari “Aldo Moro”
Via Suppa 9, 70121 BARI

jmmodule.mbhr@uniba.it