The Spirit of Crimmigration

Abstract

Crimmigration is a policy, according to Mucchielli, a culture, according to Palidda, an economy, according to Wacquant or a socialization trait, according to Young. Crimmigration is the result of pathological modes of social control, a substitution for slavery when it became impossible, in the opinion of Alexander and a degeneration of neo-colonialism in the opinion of Klahr. What renders crimmigration an object of sociological study? Is it the confluence between the expertise of Criminology and Sociology of Migration, or maybe the fact that this is an emerging social phenomenon amongst Western societies in a context of profound crisis: a welfare crisis and a crisis involving the dominant concepts of life in society? A total social phenomenon, as proposed by Marcel Mauss: something sufficiently diffuse to be found more or less everywhere in different shapes, assuming the form of institutions and individuals and conditioning the organization and the processes of sociability? In the present paper I propose the hypothesis that crimmigration is a positive social fact, a real fact which can be defined and observed as such, as opposed to a theoretical construct among researchers trained in different subdisciplines.