ABSTRACT
The importation of sociological treatments of deviance and social control is a recent phenomenon in Italy and comes up against two well-established traditions: jurisprudence and clinical criminology. If the object of study of the former is more the system of criminal law and procedure than the criminal justice system,1 the object of the latter is the ‘criminal’. Italian criminology is rather in fact forensic psychiatry, or investigation aimed at the reconstruction of the psychological dynamics of the individual offender (that is, obviously, individuals who have been arrested, tried and sentenced). I am aware that this excessive simplification does not do justice to criminological studies in Italy. It is indeed true that, within its specific orientations, Italian criminology has also, in recent years, taken account of tendencies in the criminology of other countries largely of a sociological orientation (see for example the last fifteen years of the journal Rassegna di Criminologia). Let us then say that sociological, clinical and psychiatric approaches have co-existed with alternating results, in a situation, however, characterised by the preponderant medical mould of Italian criminologists. This sustains a taken-for-granted attention to the single individual, seen as the ‘end product’ of processes and conditions which can indeed be ‘social’ but the reference to which is of interest predominantly in order to ‘explain’ or situate the behaviour of the single individual.
