Corrupção e justiça restaurativa: horizontes pós-Lava Jato

Abstract

Operation Car Wash (Lava Jato) constitutes an apparent novelty in the functioning of the Brazilian criminal justice system: a large-scale prosecution against crimes of corruption committed by members of the country's economic and political elites. But the consequences, in either left-wing, or right-wing readings, are not satisfactory. The aim of this research is to seek more appropriate ways of dealing with corruption in the field of restorative justice. As restorative justice is, today, the main alternative to the penal system but also has open content and receives contributions from different schools of thought, the main concern is with restorative elements that are capable of pointing out a viable alternative in the treatment of corruption. The impasses to be overcome are discovered through a dialectical approach to the layers of crisis that relate to the chosen problem: the correlation between Operation Car Wash and the persistent Brazilian political-institutional crisis and the lack of demonstration of the operation's effectiveness in reducing corruption rates in Brazil or strengthening democratic institutions; the entanglement of corruption and the capitalist mode of production and the selective and merely symbolic use of criminal law to confront the crimes of the powerful ones; and, finally, the discursive crisis of the retributive paradigm, revealed in the historical confiscation of conflicts by the State and in the failure of legitimizing theories of punishment, and worked under the concept of modern penal rationality. Based on these assumptions, we seek in the literature produced on restorative justice to find contributions that present more clearly an immediate alternative to the penal system in the treatment of corruption which can be able to solve the identified problems and show a way to overcome the retributive paradigm.