Traduções da desigualdade: pensamento criminológico e campo policial no Rio de Janeiro da Primeira República

Abstract

This work has, as a general goal, to study the criminological positivism s permanence in Brazil and its share of contribution to the naturalization of inequality in our Social Control System s selectivity. Taking as a background the hegemonic ideology of racial democracy , the research intends to remove the occultation that racial harmony has built, and to show how the positivist criminology s incorporation carried the reification of a racial distinction under the view of the criminal question , rooting it in the Criminal System. Starting from an actual problem the racism in the Brazilian Criminal System s selectivity the research seeks, by the historical retrieval, to understand the translations that the Brazilian intellectuals has made by questioning the nationality and the citizenship in the transitions of First Republic to build ideas about crime , criminals , and social defense , using distinction criteria based on general and individualizing racialized visions. Therefore, we call into question the positivism s insertion in the police under the context of police reforms in the beginning of the 20th century. We draw attention to the roles that the translators traitors of positivism who we call police intellectuals had in the police field by using the idea of a symbolic struggle for changing the police practice. In order to contribute to the study of the criminal question and to the comprehension of the Brazilian Criminal System through the dialogue between criminology, history and sociology, this work conclusions point that the approach to the police as a social field provided with an specific habitus is an interesting opportunity. This point of view makes it possible to read the police intellectuals modernizing claims next to the positivist thought as pressures on this field s structures, which may be rejected or translated inside this specific social world . On the other hand, if we admit that the police habitus can be tensioned and restructured by external demands, we can find in those durable dispositions some elements of the positivism s permanence that has printed in the police practice the inequalities hidden by the racial democracy myth .