A crise estrutural do capital e o encarceramento em massa: o caso brasileiro

Abstract

The present dissertation has as its scope, based on the analysis of a theoretical production of critical criminology and the theoretical accumulation of the political economy of punishment, analyzing and demonstrating the intertwining between the formation of the capitalist mode of production and the origin of the custodial sentence with the current structural crisis of capital and the mass incarceration of the last decades. The penalty of deprivation of liberty until 1970 remained stable across the planet. The tendency was for the application of the prison sentence to specific cases, utilizing other instruments of social control for the containment and surveillance of marginalized persons. However, this scenario changes radically. The jail as a penalty began to be employed, initially in the United States, from the mid-1970s, as the main punishment of the state for those labeled as criminals, resulting in the imprisonment of millions of people - mostly, black and poor – from 380,000 in 1975 to almost 2 millions in 2000 (WACQUANT, 2007). This punitivist eagerness soon arrived in Brazil. From the 1990s, with great accentuation in the year 2006 onwards, the Brazilian prison population grew at levels never seen before – from 380,000 in 1990 to more than 725,000 in 2016 (INFOPEN, 2017) -, marked by selectivity which is characteristic of the penal system in all countries. It is also investigated how economic and criminological theories and practices have repercussions in Brazil, not forgetting that Latin American historical specificities make the criminal system even more lethal to the bodies of poor and black people. The method of approach that will be used in the present research is dialectical historical materialism, serving as a guideline of the analysis of the dynamics of the functioning of the penal system and its interfaces with the socioeconomic system. We seek to analyze some of the contents observed in this process: hyperincarceration, deconstruction of the Welfare State, criminal selectivity, neoliberal economic policies and racism as analytical categories present in the theoretical-scientific discussion of the penalty within contemporaneity. It is concluded that socio-economic determinations, adopted in response to the structural crisis of capital, have caused the phenomenon of imprisonment of millions of people, acting more or less violently depending on the socio-historical particularities of each country.