As prisões e os arquivos prisionais : a vida e o destino dos detentos do presídio do Serrotão em Campina Grande, PB (1991-2012)

Abstract

The objective of this work is to understand the life and destiny of inmates of the Prison of Serrotão by analyzing the documentation that gives them meaning. For such, we have studied the history of prison reforms in the Brazilian northeast, including the three modern forms of prisons in the Country: the Correctional House, the House of Detention and the Agricultural Colonies. The Correctional Houses, older than the other two types of prisons, were designed as monuments for the capitals of the republic, with a Panoptic structure and operating the Auburn system. More than anthropometric studies for the understanding of crime and criminality, they reinforce the patriarchal and slavery features that characterize the sugarcane society of Salvador and Recife. In the countryside, this model is nevertheless converted into the House of Detention, with cellular structure and operating either the Auburn or the Pennsylvania system. The criminal identities were amplified by the criminal code of 1830 and the municipal codes of posture. Hence, the identities of the criminals, denounced by lawyers that also worked as journalists, were different from what they imagined in the metropolis. In the City of Parahyba, the Old Jail (Cadeia Velha) was replaced with a prison, which ended up inspiring the name to a neighborhood of João Pessoa, Roger. In Campina Grande, the Detention House is considered a landmark of the Monte Santo neighborhood. Finally, of all the models imagined for the less industrialized regions of the world, the Agricultural Colonies spread throughout Latin America offer a historical documentation that we intend to recompose through the dead file of the Local Agricultural Prison of Campina Grande (Presídio Regional Agrícola de Campina Grande), Prison of Serrotão, and through these connections the life and destiny of the inmates: the runaways, deceased, transferred and released from prison, including those who stood out for their private life and crime relationship, for their socioeconomic and/or sociopolitical condition, and for the means that they employed in order to released from prison.