Conference Program

This contribution draws on the specific experience of teaching the subject Sociology of Law and Deviance within the Sociology degree programme at the University of Federico II in Naples, Department of Social Sciences, in the high-security wing of the Secondigliano penitentiary in Naples. The course, by its very nature and purpose, aims to examine, illustrate, and reflect on the relationship between law and society, focusing on the interplay between norms and violations, with particular attention to criminal transgressions and all that this entails, within the theoretical framework of the socio-legal definition of criminality itself. Similarly, the course focuses on the analysis and implications of the broad concept of deviance, understood as the opposition to social prescriptions, and on the related issues of recognition and the formation of subjectivities. Introducing these issues in a penitentiary context, addressing students typically sentenced to long terms of imprisonment for serious crimes, brings about certain specificities. In a way, criminal phenomena, alongside elements of legality, emerge both as the subject and as the context of the teaching. Furthermore, when engaging with individuals who are experientially distinct, certain social dynamics, such as those related to judicial assessment and penal execution, emerge in the dialectic between normative principles and practice, where the law as outlined in theory and on paper meets the law as experienced in reality. Here, the tension may appear precisely between the experiential aspect and the specialist knowledge (with potential comparisons, whether implicit or explicit, sometimes even contentious). An additional point of interest is how those being addressed perceive the subject (and, in some ways, themselves as student-prisoners) and how they expect and wish it to be approached (as well as how they themselves express their views on the matter). In this regard, the way in which the subject is discussed “openly” in relation to phenomena that inherently tend to be concealed or disguised, on the one hand, and how it is addressed “theoretically”, or even somewhat “abstractly”, on the other hand, seems significant, given that within the broader context of the educational relationship, these phenomena manifest as “materiality” (even to the extent that, underlying it and in its subsequent consequences, they may form the very basis for the choice of the educational path offered). Finally, the involvement of such students in specific projects (e.g., in the field of restorative justice) offers, in a certain sense, perspectives framed in terms of “research”.