O trabalho de assistentes sociais nas prisões brasileiras analisado em produções acadêmicas: há liberdade para o(a) assistente social no cárcere?

Abstract

The capitalist system catalyzes and highlights the expressions of the Social Question, among them the advancement of hyperincarceration. Acting in communion with the capitalist system, we envision the criminal justice system and its ongoing policy, which helps to consolidate social control, through punitivism, criminal selectivity and the consequent criminalization of poverty. In this way, prisons in Brazil have become spaces of resounding violations of human rights and the annulment of subjectivities. Despite all this, they are also spaces for social workers to work, professionals who in theory should act with freedom and autonomy, guided by the principles that govern the profession as set out in specific legislation, which collides with the physical and existential extermination so blatant in the prison. Given this situation, we investigated how the professional practices of social workers in the prison system in Brazil have been analyzed in academic/scientific productions. Thus, we analyzed how the actions of social workers in prison have been developed, discussed, thought about and problematized, in light of the current criminal policy. Therefore, this master's thesis had the general objective of analyzing, through documentary and bibliographical research, the work of social workers, their limits and possibilities in Brazilian prisons, from 2012 to 2022. To this end, they were used as sources of research, databases from the academic portals of CAPES, SCIELO, UFPB Repository and BDTD. In the first stage, 122 works were obtained, including articles, dissertations and theses, leaving the final database with 14 scientific productions. The research was based on concepts worked on by Critical Criminology and human rights studies such as: a) criminal punitivism; b) penal selectivity; c) criminalization of poverty; d) social control; e) resocialization. It was concluded that the participation of social workers in prison is still devoid of freedom, in the sense of seeking to build a reality of resistance to the penal state and its criminal policy. However, the active and reflective participation of social workers in the search for their autonomy in their daily work in prisons would reflect the values proposed in their ethicalpolitical code, pointing out creative ways of acting against the oppression of the penal state, such as the promotion of a libertarian professional practice.