Do convento ao cárcere : do caleidoscópio institucional da Congregação Bom Pastor D'Angers à Penitenciária Feminina Madre Pelletier (1936-1981)

Abstract

This dissertation centers its analysis on the history of the first female prison in Brazil, the Madre Pelletier penitentiary, that was administered by the Bom Pastor D’Angers congregation. The main objective of this dissertation is to understand the historical process and the political issues between the state government of Rio Grande do Sul/Brazil and the Bom Pastor D’Angers congregation during the construction of Brazil’s first female penitentiary and also during the former covent’s transformation into a penitentiary. The motivations behind this act are here unveiled, especially why the state government resorted to the help of a religious institution to secure the implementation of a new penitentiary. This work dialogs with Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman for its theoretical framework. In tandem with this theoretical framework, the federal and the state penal legislations are also analyzed, taking into consideration the juridical debate that predominated at that time in order to understand its norms and changes during the historical period here analyzed. A vast body of documentation was collected for this dissertation, including archives in Brazil (Porto Alegre, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro), France and Portugal. Among this documentation, it is possible to highlight the contracts signed between the state government and the D’Angers congregation, D’Angers congregation administrative acts, official diaries, newspaper coverage, private correspondence and interviews and pictures from the penitentiary’s interior. Buttressed by this vast body of documentation, the trajectory of this peculiar penal institution is told since its beginning, in 1936, until 1981 when the Bom Pastor D’Angers congregation passed back the penitentiary’s administration to the state of Rio Grande do Sul