Crime, Punishment and Migration

With his characteristic flair and erudition, Dario Melossi elucidates the troubled – and troublesome – connections between migration, crime and punishment, exposing the myths that often pass as facts and showing how globalized market society shapes today’s anxieties about immigrant crime. This brief book is a masterly introduction to a profoundly important topic. 

-- David Garland

This compelling volume is encyclopedic in its reach, theoretically rich, and masterfully argued. Through a sweeping overview of the intersection of criminal law, migration law, and economic forces, Melossi paints a broad canvas of the criminalization of immigrants, moving the analysis across multiple historical periods and contexts. The result is a tour de force that will recalibrate debates about immigration and crime.

-- Cecilia Menjívar

Dario Melossi′s Crime, Punishment and Migration is a must-read book for scholars, students and practitioners interested in the analysis of the relationship between penality and human mobility. Among many other critical contributions, the book provides a compelling theoretical framework to comparatively examine the punishment of migrants in different countries and continents, and it thoroughly traces the genealogical evolution of the criminological knowledge on the subject.

-- José A. Brandariz-García
In this concise, accessible, yet theoretically sophisticated work, Dario Melossi explores a crucial issue facing social justice scholars and activists today—the criminalization of migrations in the Western world. Written in a compelling style that will appeal to academics, students, and non-specialists alike, Crime, Punishment and Migration reminds us that in an age of militarized borders against migrants and refugees, freedom of movement for all should become one of the main human rights issues of our times -- Alessandro De Giorgi
Erudite, acute and effective without sacrificing brevity, this book integrates cues of the sociology of migrations into
criminology, enriching socio-juridical analysis of the relationship between migration, crime and penalty.

-- Valeria Ferraris * Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia *
Given its theoretical and methodological contributions, Crime, Punishment and Migration should be an essential reference for anyone interested in researching the issue of the criminalization of migrants. -- Federico Luis Abiuso Review

This book by the leading scholar Dario Melossi covers a particularly complicated issue in a relatively simple manner: the relationship between migrants and penalty. A very nice introduction to the particular place the study of migrant population has in criminology. Among its virtues are the insights of a comparative approach with a long historical reach. This reminds us that the processes that trouble us are often not as new as they seem, even when they take new shapes.

-- Ignacio González-Sánchez, Punishment and Soc