This article aims to question the role criminal justice and criminal law play in structuring the set of dominant conditioning questions in criminology. Based on socio-legal approaches and past fieldwork in immigration control, I argue that the punitive use of non-criminal-based normative systems (such as immigration law) is not a new trend and that, therefore, we are not assisting a ‘criminal contamination’ of other justice systems, but the re-emergence and consolidation of different punitive logics. In that sense, I suggest that criminal justice acts as an epistemological obstacle, being a major barrier to perceive such nuances. Instead, I propose a wider conception of the penal field which operates as a mobile (kinetic sculpture) and includes the criminal law realm, but also other institutional normative systems that configure ‘less’ prominent locations of punishment, such as: regulatory criminal law, civil courts, immigration law, military law, parole boards and other administrative legal systems that play an increasing role in social reaction. I ultimately argue that criminologists should also focus on such administrative-based justice systems in order to better address and resist punitiveness.
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