De novo, redução da maioridade penal: explosões incessantes do discurso punitivo

Abstract

This thesis is the result of concerns experienced in the daily life of a social activist and worker during internships and work experiences in spaces of deprivation of liberty and in projects with adolescents in conflict with the law. Methodologically, the research begins by questioning the strength and permanence of the struggle to reduce the age of criminal responsibility in debates on public policies, in parliament and in the media, despite the ECA (Statute for Children and Adolescents) predicting that adolescents from 12 years of age be held accountable for infractions, including deprivation of liberty. The research makes clear how the punitive desire demands that the penal age be lower and lower, especially knowing that poor and black people will be the targets of punishment. With the aim of making this topic an analysis tool to understand the mechanisms that call for more punishment, a path of study was built on laws, control techniques, theories and practices that endorse the myth that the more and sooner you punish and, above all, incarcerate, the safer society is. The discussion about the biopolitical control of bodies (Foucault) and its updates with Necropolitics (Mbembe) were fundamental to debate the construction of undesirables and the idea of freedom consumed by liberalism. The way prisoners were treated during the COVID-19 pandemic was an interesting scene of analysis to understand the sparks that contribute to the various forms of punishment in society. War on drugs and mass incarceration are understood as naturalized policies that set the tone for how social conflicts are addressed in contemporary times, individualizing problems, and making punitive differentiations depending on which bodies are addressed to them: if young and black, mostly with prison and death. Racism pervades all analyses, since the foundation of Brazil has as one of its bases the enslavement of people, whether native or introduced to the country by trafficking, and the first laws were built from the idea of eliminating enslaved and former enslaved people. Penal abolitionism appears, then, as an alternative to the horror of prisons and criminal justice, effective in killing and incarcerating the black, poor, and young portion of the population. The punitive discourse, supported by theories, is updated in the practices of social workers and judges. In a different sense, this thesis produced another type of look, supporting non-punitive practices and seeking to generate explosions that contribute to building the power of life and not of death.