Italian Pre-Removal Centres (CPRs): An Analysis Through White-Collar Lenses

This thesis investigates whether Italy’s Pre-Removal Centres (CPRs) can be considered white-collar crime. The question stems from a fundamental flaw in existing scholarship: human rights and administrative law approaches analyse abuses using legal categories shaped by the very institutions whose actions should be scrutinised, perpetuating the selective blindness that allows systemic harm to go unnoticed. The study employs The study employs Friedrich’s three-stage layered approach, but inverts the traditional order: the empirical assessment of harm precedes the typological classification, ensuring that the categorisation is based on evidence rather than theoretical predisposition. Using Canning and Tombs’s zemiological framework across five harm categories (financial, physical, psychological, autonomy, and misrecognition), the thesis investigates three CPRs—Milan (Via Corelli), Rome (Ponte Galeria), and Trapani (Milo)—over three years (2023-2025). Despite deliberate differences in geographic location, managing entity, and observation period, the three centres produced fundamentally identical harm profiles, and management transitions had no meaningful impact on outcomes because the same core violations were reported year after year, regardless of who operated the centres. The comparative conclusion is that the harms documented in Italian CPRs are not the result of isolated mismanagement or rogue operators, but rather of a systemic architecture designed to produce them on a regular basis. The thesis then compares each major white-collar crime category to this evidence before concluding that Jamieson and McEvoy’s State Crime by Proxy is the best fit, falling into the implicit-commission quadrant of Kauzlarich, Mullins, and Matthews’ complicity continuum. Indeed, the Italian government creates structural distance between its policy choices and their harmful implementation by legally othering irregular migrants, delegating to private contractors, fragmenting procurement, and allowing for lax oversight, all while retaining the political benefits of detention. Identifying the CPR system as State Crime by Proxy is not a mere classification exercise. It identifies the perpetrator, explains why decades of documentation and judicial condemnation have yielded no results, and gives victims visibility who have been denied by the legal system, laying the groundwork for accountability and reform.