“MEUS FILHO TÁ PERDENDO A INFÂNCIA DELES POR CAUSA DE MIM”: estudo de caso sobre os impactos da prisão domiciliar na vida de uma mãe em João Pessoa

Abstract

Recent legislative changes have expanded the list of cases that authorize the substitution of temporary holding by house arrest. Since 2016, pregnant women and mothers of children under 12 years of age have the right to have preventive detention converted into total confinement in their own homes. Although potentially decarcerating and less devastating than imprisonment in a common cell, home detention is still a measure that deprives liberty. Thus, from the point of view of Critical and Feminist Criminologies, under decolonial approach, this paper aims to analyze what are the socioeconomic and subjective impacts experienced by women who were granted home detention, instead of pre-trial detention, in the city of João Pessoa. For this, it was carried through, of beginning, bibliographical and documentary research with the objective to verify which are the obstacles and difficulties of the fulfilment of the pre-trial house arrest for women in Brazil already reported by literature. In this opportunity, it was found difficulties in performing daily tasks, access to income and emotional and subjective order. Then, we proceeded to a case study, through a semi-structured interview with a woman under house arrest in the capital of Paraíba, analyzing the central elements addressed during the interview. In the occasion, the results obtained pointed out that the interviewed has difficulties in access to income, due to the impossibility of leaving the residence to work and the insufficiency of government income transfer programs. Still with regard to the imprisonment at home, adversities were identified for the exercise of daily tasks of care and access to the children's rights. Furthermore, it was verified that there are obstacles in the access to justice, as well as emotional and subjective consequences, since the measure, besides being excessively burdensome, is a source of anguish and guilt due to the limitations that are imposed. In conclusion, although home detention is applied to ensure motherhood in dignified conditions, the measure is not able to ensure the rights of the mother and children. In this sense, it is characterized as a form of social control of the state in a "privatized" way, intensifying the feminization of poverty and reproducing the logic of colonial domination that criminalizes black bodies and subjects. We conclude, therefore, that while the colonial, capitalist, patriarchal, and punitive system demands from black women the duty of care work that benefits the white man, it also denies these mothers the right to care for their own children