Ausências que encarceram: sobre quem pune e quem é punido no Brasil

Abstract

The selective over-incarceration was consolidated in recent decades in Brazil as a state policy. Under a new guise, it corresponds to the way the traditional policy of control and violence is presented nowadays, in which socially excluded populations are subjected, to the detriment of alternatives aimed at inclusion or social solidarity. In this context, this work aims to analyze how, in a supposedly democratic scenario, the dynamics of racial and social profiling, as well as the increasing number of imprisonments, (almost) always targeting the same subjects, are carried out and legitimized. For this, the phases of the police approaches, the arrests, and the trials, conducted respectively by police officers and magistrates, were identified as central. Who are the police officers who always identify young black men from the urban outskirts as potential "criminals"? Who are the judges who confer an appearance of legitimacy to this biased selection? What is the larger, institutional and national, context in which their daily choices, that shape the current criminal policy, are inserted? Based on these questions, empirical studies were conducted for this research on the profile, modes of operation, and influencing factors that affect the agents who lead the institutions that are directly responsible for the arrests. The analysis of gender, race/color, age, among other social markers of the 92 secretaries and high-ranking officers of the Brazilian military police and of 807 ministers and appellate judges with criminal jurisdiction in the country allowed us to attest to the existence of a significant pattern of privileges concerning the profile of those who direct the punitive power. Among those who dictate the directions of the criminal policy, the bodies, experiences, and markers characteristic of those who are punished are absent. The research is divided into three stages. These are, respectively, one about the agents and institutions that directly coordinate and compose the penal system; the second about the demand for order and the historical option for punishment and control; and the third about gaps and small ruptures in the functioning model of the analyzed system. It was possible to observe how the selectivity constitutes the rule and purpose of the penal system, not its side effect. In this context, the otherness between those who punish and those who are punished appears as a key element for the feasibility of the project to expand the punitive model. Finally, considerations were made about the (slow) recent expansion of access to diversity in power spaces through affirmative action policies, and the possibility of the presence of those who belong to non-hegemonic, stigmatized, and preferably criminalized groups in the position of state agents, not defendants, to constrain and promote changes. The strangeness, the denunciation of injustices, and the political mobilization from the gaps in the current penal system, arising from its unsolvable inconsistencies, generate small ruptures that, in the medium and long term, can be decisive for its overcoming.