Social control: between theoretical analyzes of the past and future perspectives. The contribution of the theoretical criminological approach to the phenomenon.

Social control has been, and continues to be, one of the most debated issues in the entire social sciences panorama. Still today one wonders what the objects of control can be, how they can be identified, labeled and, above all, kept on the margins. The problem is that, in most cases, there is no process and historical view of the reality in question: sociologists think of “social control” as a set of tools or intentional measures designed to correct, reintegrate, contain or restrain the minorities; this way of thinking tends to conceive society in general as if it contained two zones: a central sphere of more or less autonomous, self-governed, “responsible” subjects and a periphery of deviant under surveillance and control, whose access to the central sphere is monitored from different guardians (gate keepers) and whose identities are marked, at least in part, by their label of “deviants”.