Migration, Imprisonment and "Race": Toward a Comparative Study between the US and Europe

By Dario Melossi

(University of Bologna)

The number of migrants in prison is very high in most European penal systems today whereas it 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). At the same time, between the period of Reconstruction and the Great Migration, Americans of African origins became increasingly the target of processes of criminalization. Consequently, the number of migrants in prison became negligible, while the “overrepresentation” of African Americans became commonplace. Is there something to be learned today in Europe from such a story? Is there the danger that also in Europe there may be a possible shift from xenophobia to racism in processes of criminalization and prisonization? In this first, tentative, and for now descriptive, analysis, I present data taken from the recent Italian migration context in the last 30 years, connecting imprisonment rates and migrants’ nationalities, in order to start thinking some of these issues through.