Cárcere e mercantilização de corpos: a contenção, o extermínio e a privatização de presídios na razão neoliberal

Abstract

This work aims to analyse the prison privatization processes in Brazil, through qualitative bibliographic research, investigating them as new devices of a neoliberalizing logic that aims, in addition to dealing in a violent and brutal, selective, classist and racist way with the mass of the poor generated by the capitalist state model, profiting from the commodification of suffering through the prison industry. Such an industry goes beyond the manufacture of police force equipment and electronic security and surveillance devices, but again brings to the fore, in a post-coup 2016 national moment, the discussion on private-sector construction and management of prisons, as well as the activities inherent in its operation. We seek to investigate the neoliberal penalty, from its earliest moments as part of a process of response to the structural crisis of capital, until its rise to hegemony along with neoliberalism itself, such rise that took place through globalizing dynamics and international impositions – including dictatorial ones. We analyse the history of the prison sentence, from outside to the Brazilian case, in the light of critical criminology, finding it as a tool of capital for the transformation of prisoners into proletarians, through the training of bodies and conditioning to the factory, with the criminal law at the service of the Bourgeois State, until the spaces, after the prison ―boom‖, once overcrowded, serve mainly to neutralize the undesirable ones. Finally, the privatization of prisons is discussed as a response to the creative destruction of neoliberalism to the chaotic state of the public prison system through the fallacies of resocialization and humanization of these spaces. It is therefore concluded that the deprivation of liberty as we know it is inherently related to the capitalist mode of production, and that after the fall of the Welfare State, the resurgence of the penal state and mass incarceration prove to be very costly, making room for in the hegemonic neoliberal logic, the privatization of prisons and the profit from the mortification of those who are designated as disposable, in spaces that, although at first they seem ―model institutions‖, soon prove to be as problematic as the public, since the root of evil lies in the prison itself.