Italie, Dr Rossella Selmini (Université de Bologne, Région Émilie Romagne)

In recent Italian history, the emergence of "crime" and "safety" as central questions of the public debate took place together with a crucial transition from a society strongly divided along class and political lines (perceived and described in that way by its members) to a society where the central sections of the working class became incorporated inside the established system of governance. From this perspective, a crucial protracted transition took place in the 1970s, when a number of social processes began to unfold. First, in the second half of the 70’s crime, and especially property crime, began to increase dramatically. Second, socio-economic change brought "to power" the organized working-class but also at the same time its nemesis, "post-Fordism" (decline of the factory, decline of work ethics, etc.). Third, a general process of class fragmentation strictly related to increasing symptoms of social disorganization and to the decline of social and political participation. One of the consequences of these general processes was, at the beginning of the Nineties, the rise in fear of crime and social alarm and the subsequent mobilization of (local) institutions in order to develop safety projects and crime prevention measures. Starting from these very general social process, my intervention will try to analyze and describe the development of safety policies in Italy during the last decade and the peculiarities of these policies with respect to other contexts. I will focus above all on some matters: the central role played by local authorities vis-a-vis the central State, so that competencies on safety policies became part of a more general struggle for federalism; the related conflicts between different level of governments and between local and central police; the strong tendency to use administrative devices for the governance of urban safety; the changes occurring inside traditional (local) public policies in order to face safety problems; and, finally, how these "new" preventive strategies intersect with more traditional instruments of formal social control.