Punir menos, punir melhor : discursos sobre crime e punição na produção de alternativas à prisão no Brasil

Abstract

The objective of this study is to show the extent to which different discourses on crime, punishment and its subjects, as well as on relations between prison and alternatives to it, have been articulated in producing alternatives to imprisonment in Brazil. We believe that understanding these discourses and the ways they have been articulated has the potential to make visible the rationales that have driven such penal state practices. From the review of researches into both the Brazilian criminal policy from 1984 to the first decade of the 2000s and the effects produced by the implementation of alternative sanctions, we understand that the development of alternatives to prison in Brazil occurred in a context marked by multiple tendencies of criminal policy. The introduction of such penal state practices, and the effects they have produced, should be interpreted within that context. Based on discussions by philosopher Michel Foucault, we have taken the discourses about alternatives to prison as practices that have certain regularity and conditions of possibility for their emergence. We should consider the ways in which objects as "crime", "prison", "punishment" and "criminal" have been constituted in those discourses, the different places one can occupy to talk about these objects, the uses of concepts such as "treatment" and "retribution", and the strategies to which they are linked. By reviewing David Garland and Jock Young s analysis of the ways that conceptions of crime, the reaction to it and the criminalized subject have been articulated in different configurations of the field of crime control, we understand that different ways of discursively constructing an object as "crime" imply different possibilities of understanding their agents, as well as the actions to be taken. The research development was based on the analysis of documents produced by politicians and government agencies at the federal level addressing alternatives to incarceration between 1981 and 2012. With the aid of NVivo 10 qualitative research software, we sought to identify in these documents the emergences, shifts and continuities in the ways we have talked about prison, the alternatives proposed and those subjected to them. The materials were analyzed considering three axes: the individuals for whom alternatives to incarceration are proposed, showing the existence of a discourse that justifies a split between "dangerous" individuals and "non-dangerous" ones; the purposes for which alternatives to imprisonment are constructed, showing the articulation between a correctionalist perspective and a managerial approach in the production of discourses on punishment; and the extent to which alternatives to prison sentences are understood as actual penalties, pointing the existence of a discourse guided by modern penal rationality on the reaction to criminalized conducts.