O tear de vida e morte no Brasil: as prisões no relatório de Lemos Britto às Comissões Parlamentares de Inquérito

Abstract

The guiding question of this research was: through which knowledges and tactics did Brazilian prisons, between the 20th and 2 1 th centuries, despite the criticism against these spaces, continue d to occupy a central place in the thinking and punitive practices in Brazil? To answer this question, in a dialogue with the field of documentary research and documentary ethnography, an analysis of a set of primary documentary sources was carried out, con sisting of five national reports on Brazilian prisons, published, respectively, between 1924 1926 (report in three volumes by José Gabriel de Lemos Britto), 1976 (final report of the 1976 Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry CPI on Prisons), 1993 (final report of the 1993 CPI on Prisons), 2009 (final report of the 2009 CPI on Prisons) and 2015 (final report of the 2015 CPI on Prisons), and a set of secondary documentary sources, consisting of documents from public memorials/collections and news from newspapers, with the additional complements to these two sets of docume nts with the analysis of Brazilian legal norms, in order to outline the panorama of ideas and tactics about prison and imprisonment in Brazil, in the mentioned chronological cut. The five mentioned reports were filed and, from these filings, excerpts considered relevant to reach moral and rational dimensions , as well as the exercises of power in the circulation of knowledge and tactics on punishment and imprisonment in the Brazilian history of the last hundred years, were synthesized. At the end of the analyses, the following thesis was reached: prisons and imprisonment in Brazil, in the 20th and 21st centuries, must be understood in a double relational dimension: the first, of an internal nature, implies observing th em inscribed in the dynamics of an “device of imprisonment ”, morally operationalized by a socioracialized fear and an opposition to the “different”, rationally from a certain system of thought organized around the idea of metrical imposition of suffering and , sewn in its various connections through dynamics of a certain type of exercise of power, which implies making people live and die, unequally distributing access to the goods of life and dignified or unworthy forms of death. The second dimension implies understanding the device of imprisonment connected to other devices that feed back and function as points of justification of certain dimensions of each other, that feed back and function as points of justification of certain dimensions of each other, allowing these “devices allowing these “devices in conjunctionin” to sustain each other, despite criticism and to sustain each other, despite criticism and occasional needs of internal revisions