Sociology of deviance, of punishment and of penal control. Special attention will be devoted to socio-juridical analysis of the penal treatment of poverty and of the most recent developments of the system of crime control: alternative sanctions and restorative justice.
Students attending classes can use notes of the lessons and the material that will be made available by the teacher.
Non-attending students will be required to study the following texts:
E. SANTORO, Carcere e società liberale, II edizione, Giappichelli, Torino 2004 (pp. 372).
G. CAPUTO, Carcere senza fabbrica: Povertà, lavoro forzato e welfare, Quaderni dell'Altro diritto, Pisa, Pacini, 2020.
Learning Objectives
Understanding
Knowledge about the theory and sociology of punishment, deviance and of crime control, with special attention to the connections between social and criminal policies.
Skills: Ability to analyze critically the relationship between law and social reality. Through the study of the relation between penal and social control will learn to analyze the use of law as a way of managing social problems. Especially through the study of law as a ‘social question', students will be stimulated to historicize the offence-punishment link, to connect critically the problems of the political-social order with the theories of deviance and punishment.
Expected results.
Sociological researches on specific subjects will help students to get the ability to adopt a sociological perspective in the study of law.
Prerequisites
Students must have passed the exams of General Constitutional Law, Private Law I. It’s recommended to have passed the exams of Philosophy of law and Criminal Law.
Teaching Methods
Teaching through lectures, seminars, presentations and papers on topics of interest.
Active participation to the course will be stimulated through the reading of texts, socio-juridical researches, drafting of papers and their collective discussion.
The course material will be accessible via Moodle platform
Further information
Type of Assessment
Attending students.
Learning will be verified through oral and written presentations on topics chosen by students:
1) mid-term presentation about a theoretical topic and discussion in seminars;
2) final presentation of a socio-legal research and discussion in seminars.
3) Written test: final paper about the topics of the two oral presentations.
Final exam: for attending students, it will consist in a quick discussion on a paper.
The evaluation will be based on:
quality of the expositions, capacity of critical analysis, level of knowledge and in-depth study of the subject.
Non-attending students.
Oral exam with at least one question on each of the two recommended books. Students will be required to show knowledge of the main sociological theories of deviance and punishment, as well as the ability to critically relate them to socio-legal idealtypes.
Evaluation criteria of the oral test:
quality of the exposition, capacity of critical analysis, level of knowledge and in-depth study of the subject.
Course program
The course is divided into two parts.
In the first part the different legal-sociological theories about the evolution of the concepts of punishment, crime and deviance in modernity.
The second part will be devoted to the analysis of the Italian the relationship between the governance of poverty, labor and crime control in the Italian context. The various theoretical and normative models of punishment will be presented: from penal welfare to the most recent based on alternative punishments and restorative justice.
At the end of the first part of the course, students can choose to study some topics more in depth, including:
the sociology of prison life and ‘total institutions';
feminist criminology;
penal populism;
governance of urban safety;
deviance and social media;
the transition from the welfare state to the ‘penal state';
the relationship between poverty and crime;
the criminalization of migrants;
critical criminology;
restorative justice;
penal labor;
abolitionism.
Each student will present and discuss the selected topic during the mid-term seminar.
Afterwards, the students will be asked to conduct a socio-legal research – related to discussed theoretical topic - and to present its results during the seminar at the end of the course.
In order to attend seminars, a good knowledge of English is recommended.