Lineamenti di una sociologia storica del carcere

The essay presents an overview of the critical results of a research conducted on the archival sources of the Ergastolo di Santo Stefano di Ventotene and consists of two parts: the first of a theoretical and methodological nature; the second dedicated to the presentation of some the results of the analysis. In the first part, on the theoretical level there are three questions addressed: the epistemological profile of historical sociology; the centrality of the concept of archive following the the “archival turn” (Stoler, 2009); the concept of an archival system as an "information infrastructure" (Star & Ruhleder, 1996; Bowker et al., 2010). On the methodological level the main questions concern the rules for the sociological analysis of the archive and the document defined by a re-reading of sociologists of law such as Jean Carbonnier in the light of the archival sciences. The second part, after a description of the context and the historical and institutional profile of the research area, through the necessary conceptual contribution deriving from the sociological literature on prison, from Clemmer (1940), Sykes (1958), Goffman (1961) to Santoro (2004), Fassin (2015), Combessie (2018) and others scholars, offers an example of quantitative and qualitative analysis focused on the matriculation registers and documentation collected in the personal files of inmates.