DA TERAPIA À PUNIÇÃO: ANÁLISE DA INTERNAÇÃO COMPULSÓRIA DE USUÁRIOS DE DROGAS À LUZ DA CRIMINOLOGIA CRÍTICA

Abstract

This research resorts to critical reflection to understand the phenomenon of Compulsory Hospitalization and the Brazilian Psychiatric Reform Movement, with a view to explaining the legal, existential and social situation of drug users in relation to the theme. Critical Criminology is the epistemological framework used, from which the treatment and punishment relationships of drug addicts will be used, providing users with a broad dialogue between the medical and legal fields. The terms “From therapy to punishment”, brought in the title of this work, refer to the following paradox: therapeutic treatment and social punishment. The method adopted for the preparation of this research is the hypothetical-deductive one, in which it starts from a general premise – namely: that compulsory hospitalization was a historically ineffective method for guaranteeing mental health – to reach a conclusion : that the marginalization and oppression relegated to drug users in Brazil come, primarily, from such an oppressive legacy. As a research problem, the following question arises: can Law and Psychiatry be an instrument for perpetuating the asylum and segregationist structure inherited from traditional criminologies? The aim is, therefore, to undertake a critical discussion about the figure of Law as a reproductive entity of segregationist, asylum ideologies and of contempt for the vulnerable condition of the Brazilian drug user population, especially in the aspects of race and class, in order to understand how the discourses of penal selectivity and the criminalization of poverty operate in the Brazilian State. The idea that it is impossible to offer mental health to people who use drugs in an asylum context is taken as a guide, bringing up the idea that the change of nomenclature from “Judicial Asylum” to “Hospital of Custody and Psychiatric Treatment ” represents, in fact, the mere attachment to linguistic semantics, since the punitive logic, inherited throughout the history of Brazilian forensic psychiatry, remains in these spaces. It is necessary to analyze, ultimately, the coercive power of the State as a strong reproducer of social controls and orthopedics, as advocated by Foucault (2005), with a view to understanding the processes of class domination and marginalization of undersirables.