Abstract

In this paper, Tony Platt, more than fifty years after the publication of the first edition of The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (1969), recently re-translated into Italian, offers an autobiographical testimony on the most significant stages of his career as an academic scholar and activist. Eight stages, from 1960 to today, in which personal history, political commitment, intellectual work about carceral and criminal issues, are combined within the United States cultural and political context.