Migration, Imprisonment, and ‘Race’: Between the US and Europe

Friday, October 20th, 2023

Dario Melossi, Department of Sociology (University of Bologna) 

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).

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 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)

Sponsor(s): Center for Study of International Migration, Center for European and Russian Studies