A criminalização da questão social: uma juventude encarcerada

Abstract

This paper aims to comprehend the phenomenon of criminalization of social issue, in the context of Brazilian society, emphasizing how this process is presented in terms of the criminalized youth in our country. Drawing on the theoretical perspective adopted by the authors of critical criminology and using the materialist method, historical and dialectical, sought to forge an analysis able to elucidate the contradictions put to the understanding of the phenomenon above. Considering the criminalization of the social issue a phenomenon historically produced and consolidated, as well as the discourses and practices that are intended to it, they are proposed some lines of analysis about the social and political elements that cross the reality of the subject criminalized and likely to be criminalized in our society nowadays. For an approximation to the internal dynamics of the country, a social ransom is made, in order to situate the historical foundations that underpin our political, economical and cultural formation. In a second step we bring particular aspects of the process of formation of the state of Espirito Santo, territory in which the research takes field. Aspects of the notion of youth(s) and the relationship of these elements to the history of the rights of children and youth were also discussed throughout the paper. From this author's experience with youth in custody and reflections built along the academic livelihood it was built up a field survey that sought to give voice to the subjects criminalized. This was one of the strategies chosen as a possible mechanism of deconstruction of prejudices and stigmas, as well as understanding the effects of criminalization process on its addressees. The criminalization of ever larger portions of the impoverished working class has been the strategy adopted by the State to cope with the absence of social responses that combat, effectively, the structural violence characteristic of Brazilian society. The field research was based on a qualitative sample and performed by using methods in oral history. Ten (10) young people in custody - who were in the Unidade de Internação Socioeducativa da região metropolitana do Espírito Santo (UNIS) - were interviewed in June to July 2013. This part supported the empirical analysis performed in this work and joins the secondary data presented in this dissertation.