ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on author's experience of living and working in the country concerned by being 'virtually there', 'researching there' or 'living there'. It represents the final example of collaborative research to describe a collective international project, carried out between 1993 and 1997, examining the conditions in 18 closed prisons and six closed prisons for women located in the USA, Canada and in six European countries. The researchers hypothesized a direct link between criminal justice and wider culture predicting that 'the place and status of women in women's prisons would constitute a representation of the place and "status" granted to women in each country'. The chapter offers a description of some of the main features of criminal justice in Italy. It describes the cultural specificity of current changes there in the organization of the criminal process and points to important emerging trends in discourses about crime and criminal justice.
