Entre Muros e concertinas: acautelamento panóptico para corpos rebeldes no cárcere para adolescentes do DEGASE

Abstract

Based on the thoughts of the French philosopher Michel Foucault related to prison (Foucault, 1977), using his concepts of biopower and biopolitics, this study intends to analyze the juvenile prison in Rio de Janeiro at DEGASE, General Department of Socio-Educational Actions. This is the body responsible for defining and implementing the mechanisms of coercion, discipline and subjection, applied to adolescents in compliance with socio- educational measures, for the execution of socio-legal and pedagogical determinations of mandatory schooling and professionalization. In this sense, this dissertation project arises from my professional practice as a “socio-educator” at DEGASE since 1994, combining with my career in teaching, teaching primary school students, high school students and youth and adult education students, leading me to an educational practice between classrooms and socio- educational institutions that restrict freedom. Based on Foucault, the concept of juvenile prison will be analyzed in opposition to that of socio-education, dialoguing with other theses, dissertations and works on Brazilian socio-education and in particular socio-education in Rio de Janeiro. In this study we will verify that 'compulsory schooling and vocational training', through the implementation of socio-educational measures to restrict freedom, consolidate the biopolitics of surveillance, control, correction and disciplining of adolescents incarcerated in DEGASE's socio-educational institutions. My experience makes it clear that the routines and daily action of organizing the time of adolescent inmates place them in an institutional mechanism that subjects their bodies to control, manipulation and submission to the State, with psychopedagogical training practices in routine exercises of obedience to rules, fulfilling their tasks and maintaining docile behavior to submit to the interest of becoming “well- employed workers” in the precarious (Braga, 2012) and uberized labor market (Antunes, 2020) of our society. This disciplinary technocracy also imposes itself on the entire multidisciplinary collective of professionals who carry out ‘socio-educational work’ to carry out socio-educational measures and produce new individuals. Producing new individuals based on the logic of “learning to be”, “learning to do” is to promote the docilization of bodies for neoliberal society. Therefore, socio-education can be analyzed as a device of subjection and submission to prison, being a bourgeois legal instrument, a machinery that with a professionalizing pedagogy claims to want to transform the 'adolescent offender' into an entrepreneur for the uncertainty of the market and work. Finally, it is concluded that prison for adolescents, as a restriction and deprivation of freedom, combines with the discipline of bodies and constitutes itself as an ideology insofar as it hides, falsifies and inverts its real technocracy of monitor, control, discipline and punish hundreds of imprisoned teenagers. The prison of adolescents at DEGASE promotes forms of coercion, habits to be exercised, obligatory movements, regular activities, with the aim of reconstituting not the legal subject of the social pact, but the obedient subject, the individual subject to habits, rules, orders, an authority that is continually exercised over and around him, and which he must allow to function automatically. (Foucault, 1975).