Abstract

The question of deviant identity is a topos of the criminological tradition. During the neo-liberal age, its definition moved from the cathartic-medical model of the offender's correction to the paranoid-security model of his/her exclusion, causing - in much of the Western world - the phenomenon of mass imprisonment. Recent case law of supreme or international courts put on trial the security-paradigm in the name of the prisoners' human dignity, opening the way for a reconsideration of the limits of punitive power and of those labeling practices that hide under the conceptions of deviant identity proposed both by the cathartic and by the paranoid model.