Autori
Melossi, Dario
Crocitti, Stefania

Titolo
Incarcerazione degli stranieri e processi di “razzializzazione”: uno sguardo comparato tra Stati Uniti ed Italia
Periodico
Studi sulla questione criminale
Anno: 2025 - Fascicolo: 2 - Pagina iniziale: 33 - Pagina finale: 60

The number of immigrants (“foreigners”) in prison is very high today in most European penal systems, among which Italy, while it is quite low in the United States, and has been so for a long time. Criminological and historical accounts in the United States have advanced the thesis that the initial hostility toward immigrants, also expressed in criminalization processes, slowly transformed into a process of assimilation and “whitening” of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. Meanwhile, between the period of Reconstruction and the Great Migration, Americans of African descent increasingly became the target of criminalization processes. As a result, the number of immigrants (in the sense of “foreigners”) in prison became negligible, while the “overrepresentation” of African Americans in prison became very common. Is there anything to learn from this history in Europe, and particularly in Italy, today? Is there a risk that Italy too, could shift from xenophobia to racism in the processes of criminalization and incarceration? In this initial analysis, we present data from the recent Italian migration context to begin reflecting on some of these issues. Our main, provisional, result is that rates of overincarceration for prisoners of African descent are comparable in Italy and the United States, despite general imprisonment rates in Italy being much, much lower than in the United States.



SICI: 1828-4973(2025)2<33:IDSEPD>2.0.ZU;2-W
Testo completo: https://www.rivisteweb.it/download/article/10.7383/119415
Testo completo alternativo: https://www.rivisteweb.it/doi/10.7383/119415

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