Transgressão, norma social e crime: o papel da dissuasão social nas áreas mínimas comparáveis no Brasil (1991-2010)

Abstract

Measures of crimes in Brazil, particularly violent and fatal, have been maintained and increased, since the 1980s, over ten homicides per hundred thousand inhabitants; minimum threshold recommended by the World Health Organization. To this social "pollution", it is usually answered with increased effort to combat and control the police-judicial apparatus. However, state authorities are unable to monitor illegitimate activities under their jurisdiction. Therefore, they cannot do without other controllers. Although they are less effective in crimes, but more territorially diffused, social controllers can act as a primary deterrent by socializing positive beliefs of adherence to social norms and laws, from negative beliefs to their violation and the administration of sanctions. Criminal policies, especially those involving criminal law changes, cannot ignore the effects of other legislative changes on the incentive structures governing the activities of these primary controllers. Assuming that criminal and transgressive decision-making processes have a common nature (involving criminal and social punishment, respectively); that individual decision to enter criminal activity requires useful information and that, in the absence of organized illicit markets, other information channels are used, such as personal and extraneous criminal and transgressive experiences; Transgressive-criminal density could carry information about the moral cost of such entry into proscribed industry. The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate the qualitative effect of social deterrence as a primary barrier to individual illegitimate choices. Since the levels of transgression can indirectly signal the level of this primary deterrence, a methodological strategy was developed that could measure it. In addition to a preliminary evaluation of the territorial distribution and the temporal evolution of some transgressions, in the brazilian comparable minimum areas (AMCs) from 1991 to 2010, Clusters and Discriminant Analysis are carried out to identify groups of AMCs at levels of transgressivitycriminality; the common transgressive factors (defined as "transgressivity by incapacitation", "family-religious transgressiveness" and "adult educational transgressiveness") are extracted from the sample of AMC groups with higher levels of transgressions and crimes and with larger populations by Factor Analysis; and, through Qualitative Comparative Analysis, the relationships between these factors and homicide rates are ascertained as a more robust measure of the level of crime. In addition to the identification of groups of high, intermediate and low levels of transgressions and crimes, and of these three factors, the evidence suggests that high family-religious transgressiveness (equivalently, low family-religious deterrence) is consistently associated with a high homicide rate; even when combined with high state deterrence.