Institution responsible:

Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law, University of Oslo

Commissioned by: 

The European Research Council

Head of project: 

Professor Katja Franko Aas

Time frame: 

1.4.2011-31.03.2016

Project summary

Control of migration is becoming an increasingly important task of contemporary policing and criminal justice agencies. The purpose of this project is to map the progressive intertwining and merging of crime control and migration control practices in Europe and to examine their implications.

The project is guided by three sets of research questions:

1. How do contemporary police and criminal justice institutions deal with unwanted mobility and the influx of 'aliens'(i.e. non-citizens) to their territories?
2. What is the relevance of citizenship for European penal systems? and
3. How do contemporary crime control practices support and perform the task of (cultural and territorial) border control?

The project aims to analyse the impact of the growing emphasis on migration control on criminal justice agencies such as the police, prisons and detention facilities. The basic hypothesis of the project is that migration control objectives are contributing to the development of novel forms of punishment and new rationalities of social control termed 'crimmigration'. The project aims to describe these novel hybrid forms of control since they constitute important conceptual challenges for criminal justice scholarship and require new theoretical perspectives.

A question will be asked: what kind of break from traditional criminal justice practices and principles do they represent? Is the focus on punishment and reintegration of offenders gradually being replaced by a focus on diversion, immobilisation and deportation? Moreover what kind of legal, organisational and normative responses do they require?