"Presas do trabalho": encarceramento feminino como dispositivo de (re) produção de vulnerabilidades e desigualdades

Abstract

From the understanding that the prison is a political device of domination and social control that is exercised by regulating the flows, the transit of objects and people, producing and reproducing exclusions and inequalities, the objective of this research is to analyze the dynamics that characterize the social relations and the disciplining process within a prison for women in conflict with the law. The locus of the research is the Maria Júlia Maranhão Women's Prison, where an ethnographic study was carried out supported by observation, semi-structured interviews and informal conversations with public servants working in the aforementioned penal unit and with women serving a custodial sentence in a closed regime, among others. February and June 2022. Statistical data on the Brazilian prison population, criminal legislation, reports and other documents made available by the Secretariat of Penitentiary Administration of Paraíba and by the National Penitentiary Department are also part of the analyzed corpus. The results of the investigation point out that the social markers of gender, race and class differences are articulated in the production of bodies vulnerable to incarceration and, when in prison, in the impact that this has on the prisoner's relationship with her family, in the way the punishment will be experienced and, even, in the possibility of recurrence and chances of success upon release/extrication. Inside the prison, the social dispositions acquired throughout the socialization process, function as a device for separating those defined as suitable and not suitable for internal work in prison. Those women who resist the daily discipline of prison are overly determined by the disqualifying gaze that demeans and excludes them, transforming difference into unequal opportunities and reproducing vulnerabilities. Maintaining the job requires, therefore, more than knowing how to do and carrying out the assigned task properly, as it demands assuming the dominant values and engaging in performances and symbolic exchanges with the surveillance teams, which, in other words, strengthens the punitive, moralizing and disciplining bias of the custodial sentence for women in conflict with the law.