The activity aims to introduce students to the reading and understanding of recent scientific studies that examine the effectiveness of laws and other crime prevention measures. Students will therefore learn how an analytical approach can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of legislative and judicial provisions and their social impact. The aim of this module is to familiarize students with the literature and to understand the importance of a scientific approach for understanding particularly pressing issues, such

as prison conditions, racial and gender discrimination in the application of laws and the prevention of corruption. This first module, which does not require any previous mathematical or statistical skills, is required to enroll in the second module, which aims to provide students with a basic knowledge of the different methods of empirical analysis used in the proposed studies.