Punishment and Politics in Contemporary Italy: A Dual Penality

Different nations punish differently, but how can we characterize this difference, and what accounts for it? Punishment and Politics in Contemporary Italy: A Dual Penality answers these questions by focusing on Italian penal policy between 1970 and 2019. It looks at a nation whose penality is neither solely punitive nor solely moderate, but both: a dual penality that challenges our assumptions on the shape and the causes of contemporary Western punishment. In so doing, this book provides an example of how Western punishment can be conceptualized in a manner sensitive to the multifarious, even contradictory, penal impulses within different nations.

Using a theoretical and historical approach, this book offers a systematic account of Italian penality that refuses to fall back on notions of "Italian exceptionalism" or simple "convergence" around a Western punitive paradigm. Placing the Italian case in conversation with key theories in the contemporary sociology of punishment, it also provides an innovative mid-level theorization that combines political economy, political sociology, and penology. Punishment and Politics in Contemporary Italy argues that politics-institutions, ideologies, and their dynamic interaction over time-are a crucial variable to understand Italian punishment. Seen through this lens, the nation's dual penality emerges as the penality of a polity characterized by stratified political membership, a contested state, and a hybrid political economy. This book makes the case that punishment scholarship should sharpen its focus on politics in order to better understand how conditions of political membership affect the shape and distribution of punishment across contexts.