Convict Criminology and Abolitionism: Looking Towards a Horizon Without Prisons

Elton Kalica completed a PhD in Social Sciences: Interactions, Communication, Cultural Construction. He has personally experienced detention. Having immigrated from Albania to Italy for economic reasons in the mid-1990s, he was arrested when he had just turned twenty-one. In prison he applied to enrol at Padua University. Due to his status as an immigrant his application was rejected. Some university professors, outraged by the decision, collected signatures and presented a petition to the Rector in order to accept Elton’s request. In 2002, he was finally enrolled in Political Science, where the curriculum focused on “International Relations and Human Rights”. In October 2007, he graduated with a maximum of votes. Later, he registered for a second degree course in Political Science, where the curriculum focussed on “Political Institutions of Human Rights and Peace”. In February 2010, he again graduated with the maximum of votes. Once released from detention, he was admitted to a PhD program in Social Sciences, where he conducted research on life sentences without parole in Italy. As a researcher using an ethnographic approach while also drawing on his prison experience, he took interest in Convict Criminology. Recently, he edited a book entitled Farsi la galera (2018), which explores some important aspects of prison research and the need for scholars to draw on the lived experiences of incarceration to inform their work. His current research areas are: critical criminology, prison sociology, Convict Criminology, research methods to document and make sense of the deprivation of liberty, criminal mediation and restorative justice. He is a member of the scientific board of the 1st level Master in Critical Criminology and Social Security. He is also a member of the editorial boards of the prison magazine Ristretti Orizzonti and of the Associazione Antigone Veneto.