Escravidão e Poder Punitivo: Superexploração, controle social e aniquilação produtiva da força de trabalho no Brasil

Abstract

In this work, the hypotheses of coupling between the slave mode of production in the period understood as second slavery and the application of public punishment in Brazil were tested. To do so, we analyzed 604 criminal procedures from the district of Vassouras from the 19th century, which compose the entire unified collection of Iphan and the ICC. We begin with the presentation of the historical types of slavery to extract the universal elements and qualitative differences in relation to the historical moment studied. To avoid anachronisms, we describe the main political, economic and social institutions of the time, mainly the slave trade and the coffee economy, largely tributaries of the expansion of the capitalist mode of production. We carried out quantitative correlations with known data from that criminalization process, including the participation of slaves as defendants or victims, and more general data on the productive structure, such as availability and price of labor, captive and free population numbers, average productivity, among others. We also analyzed ten criminal cases, which were transcribed with the help of paleography, to collect new data with qualitative analysis. These are mainly cases in which enslaved people were sentenced to death for the murder of their masters, but also cases of homicides committed against another enslaved person, against free people, in addition to physical offenses and escape. We identify, among other things, the plasticity of the state response to crime, the compatibility between domestic and public punitive power, the preservation of the seigneurial interest in criminal prosecution and the high burden of socially distributed punishment, a founding element of the super-exploitation of workers. At the end, we summarize how these discoveries relate to each other and are articulated in long-term phenomena that still permeate the criminal issue, pointing out perspectives for future efforts to fill in the gaps in the researched collection.