Reincidentes da Penitenciária de Benguela: prisão e história em Angola.

Abstract

This work results from research carried out with young and adult subjects deprived of their freedom and recidivists, having completed at least half of their sentence at the Benguela Penitentiary in Angola. It focuses on the understanding of meanings assigned by such subjects to their experience as recidivist prisoners, and its purpose is to capture their feelings about the local prison system re-education program. The theoretical foundations of the investigation was based on the ideas put forward by a selected number of authors involving the day-to-day reality of that prison, the right to education that should be granted to people in places where they are deprived of their freedom, and the historical background of Angola, a country marked by a long civil war following the independence which freed it from the many years of Portuguese colonialism. Some Angolan authors have contributed to unveiling this historical process, together with several Brazilian authors, who have made significant contributions to the understanding of the prison issue. The relevance of this theme for researchers in the Brazilian academic world was largely provoked by their sensibility to international agreements on human rights, particularly those related to the right to education of confined young and adult persons. This Brazilian and international support was an important factor in the assessment of the Angolan State´s behavior in relation to this right and to its positive (or negative) response to the principles upheld by the prisons in Angola, considering that Angola is a subscriber to international agreements. The investigation can be viewed as a qualitative case study which includes observation, interviews and questionnaires as well as data gathering strategies, in order to obtain quantitative data. The questionnaires were applied to 10 re-educators acting within the prison and 26 recidivist prisoners, 23 of which are male and 3 female, all of them anonymous. The interviews covered a large spectrum, from the director of the penal institution to the person responsible for education in the province. Others who were heard are the person responsible for the prison security area, a prisoners´ lawyer and the mother of one of the recidivist prisoners. Problems of a political, economic and social nature, as well as the war, which was present throughout the history of Angola (1975-2002), have been a strong motivation for the subjects, particularly the young ones, to indulge themselves in criminal actions, resulting in the deprivation of their freedom. As the subjects say, their hope for change is placed on their return to school as well as on vocational training. They also expect that the jail itself will help to reduce social discrimination against ex-prisoners