Reféns da subjetividade: a definição de indivíduo perigoso pela psiquiatria forense

Abstract

In the past three decades, the huge growth in crime rates and prison population -- this predominantly a poor one -- in the West is indisputable. Likewise there is an increase and specialization of police contingents, the espread and sophistication of surveillance mechanisms, expanding the powers of social control, and the development and adoption of tools, technologies and scientific knowledge to undertake assessments and technical examinations of criminals. Among the studies seeking to understand this reality, two concepts stand out especially: the "culture of control" by David Garland (2004), and the "government through crime", by Jonathan Simon (2007). The latter combines the Michel Foucault´s (1992, 1979) concepts of biopolitics and governmentality. Taking this theoretical framework as a reference for thinking about the Brazilian model of treatment of crime and criminal, and considering that one of the forms of surveillance and social control in contemporary society is undertaken through the punishment of offenders regarded as dangerous to the social environment, by virtue of mental or behavioral - evaluation of forensic psychiatrist in charge - this research gives visibility to this psychiatric discourse in findings from examinations of mental health, addiction and verification of dangerousness made in criminal cases. It is suggested that psychiatry, to identify the dangerous individual repeats the pattern of incarceration in general, in making sustained argument eminently subjective and inconsistent with the technical-scientific advances that proclaims, include the psychiatric reformation, the being both an easy adaptation to an environment of tough social control and a proposal of governmentality through crime.