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This article examines the interactions between the public and private sectors in the process of increasingly endowing the Brazilian penal system with security technologies in the wake of a series of prison rebellions led by the "criminal group" Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC). By discussing the discourses and rationales mobilized by politicians, legislators and businessmen within the scope of the Congressional Inquiry of the prison system established in 2008, the article shows that the growing presence of private capital into the Brazilian criminal justice system activates the technical and discursive connections between cost-effective surveillance and violent repression as the main strategies for prison management in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Brazil, the presence of psychology in prisons was established by the Criminal Sentence Execution Act, in 1984, and it was intensified in the past three decades. In the paper, the results of a study are discussed to understand the activity of psychologists in the prisons in Minas Gerais, based on clinical approaches to the work. We performed a qualitative research, with content analysis of documents, observations in five prisons, and interviews with 14 psychologists who work at these prisons. We verified that the role of psychology in prisons has been controversial, with different institutional intersections resulting from the security and punishment logic, which seems to frequently oppose professional ethical principles. The institutional demand for classifying prisoners overlaps with the monitoring of rehabilitation programs, set forth by law. This scenario, worsened by the lack of professionals, results in obstructions in the activity, the distress of the worker, trivialization of the violation of rights, and uncritical adhesion to the repressive mechanism of the institution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tackles the configuration of the globalized risk society and its effects in the criminal-judicial order in Brazil. The rising of security guidelines, even with the mitigation of fundamental human rights, are problematized with the goal of reflecting the prison system and the surging of electronic monitoring as a condition of possibility for reducing the massive incarceration in the country. The problem that guides this investigation can su summarized in the following question: to what extent does electronic monitoring contribute to reducing the number of incarcerated people in Brazil? The employed method is the hypothetical-deductive one with bibliographic and document analysis techniques. As a result, the research found that the use of electronic monitoring, as shown by the statistics of the diagnosis made to the electronic monitoring policy in Brazil, represents an important measure for minimizing the effects of massive incarceration in the national penitentiary system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present work will be based on the analysis of an experience report about a technical visit made to two prison units in the prison complex in the city of Maceió-AL. For the purposes of analysis, a qualitative analysis was made from one unit to the other from the perspective of complexity, where we carry out reflections in relation to education as a tool for social reintegration based on the complexity of the target audience in the Alagoas Prison System. Finally, we exposed a survey of data on the prison population in Brazil with emphasis on the state of Alagoas. In view of the report of the visit made to the prison units, one can see the difference between the Resocialization Center of the Capital where there is a project based on modules of respect, the inmates circulate freely within the unit carrying out work and studying at the opposite time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research aims to understand the institutionalization process of imprisoned subjects, identifying subjective effects and strategies they use in serving the sentence. It also contextualizes the work of the Psychology professional in the Brazilian prison system and the debate with the Courts around the criminological examination. The study has a genealogical approach, using interviews and document analysis. The participants are three professionals and three inmates of a male prison located in a southern state of Brazil. The analyses showed that prison, as a total institution, provokes a rupture with the outside world and the previous reality of the inmates and that they abandon their identity and assume an institutional identity. Conducts are prescribed that legitimize hierarchies, and a language that signals to belong to the group is shared. Generally, the family is supportive, but the distance between it and the prisoners is a source of suffering for them, who create adaptation tactics for institutional coexistence. The perspective of freedom provokes feelings of joy and fear because the ex-prisoner stereotype remains with them after serving the sentence. The Criminal Execution Law provides the criminological examination in order to establish a program for the individualization of the sentence and progression of the regime but, the Federal Council of Psychology is against its elaboration by psychologists regarding the criminological prognosis of recidivism, the measurement of dangerousness, and the establishment of a causal link from the crime-offender binomial, and argues for monitoring the prisoner from the perspective of humanization, overcoming the punitive paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governance rules are efficient mechanisms in the sense that they increase people's welfare. They emerge even when the state is unable or refuses to create and enforce them. We study a situation in which this demand for governance manifests itself through the emergence of property rights in illicit drug markets: a privately-provided governance. Specifically, we propose a model for property rights emergence in illicit drug markets as predicted by the theory on governance provided by prison gangs. It is studied a situation in which an agreement among criminals, resembling property rights enforceability on its allocative effect, can emerge in illicit drug markets. Our Mechanism Design approach shows that a change inside the prison system, from a competitive environment to the hegemony of a group of criminals, implies the equilibrium in illicit markets to shift from warfare to peace: the hegemonic group is shown to desire to promote the collusive agreement when it is able to do so. This contrasts with the equilibrium under no hegemony, in which the possibility to conquer consumers/territories drives violence up to a positive level. The novel empirical perspective implied by the model is explored using data from Brazil, a context for which the theory of governance provided by prison gangs has been pointed as a key explanation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article tries to understand whether, in budgetary terms, the prison system is effective or not. A study in this sense is of fundamental importance for good practices in politics/criminal area, since efficient investments presuppose the perception of the deficiencies that are intended to cure. First, it seeks to elucidate the mechanisms of the public budget, as well as some particularities relating to its non-binding. Second, there is a brief history of the public budget, specific emphasis on the system of the National Penitentiary Fund and the topic of its contingency. It uses the deductive methodology, descriptive and exploratory qualitative research, as well as the documentary analysis of the indices presented by the government at the national level. In this way, it will be possible to fulfill the main objective of the study that is to evaluate, in economic terms, the prison system is feasible, clarifying, showing numbers, the current state of the art in Brazil. Our conclusion is that the policy of public spending and prisons has no symmetry, and that imprisonment is ineffective in fighting crime. Given the numbers, it is possible to affirm that the budget deficit of the prison system is practically irrecoverable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brazil has increased its rate of imprisonment by approximately 200% over the past 20 years. The objective of this work is to characterize the socio-economic profile of the prison units and to consolidate a collection of information that provides subsidies for proposing public policies and strategies for monitoring, improving, and inspecting the Prison System of a Brazilian Federation Unit (Maranhão). The methodology consisted of compiling and analyzing social indicators provided by the Ministry of Justice and the National Penitentiary Department - DEPEN, the Court of Justice, and the State Secretariat for Penitentiary Administration - SEAP. Supporting other studies, our results point to the drama that has become the Brazilian prison system. Following Brazilian logic, the progressive increase in the prison population is due more to a policy of repression and criminalization of poverty, than to a policy capable of reducing lethal or non-lethal criminal occurrences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The attorneys of the Public Defender's Office of the State of Rio de Janeiro (PDORJ) are heavily present in the penitentiary system of Rio de Janeiro, individually meeting the vast majority of detainees and conducting monitoring visits. This article presents the work of the PDORJ in the prison system, focusing on its role in the prevention of torture. Based on semi-structured interviews with public defenders, the article explains the paradox between the extensive presence of the PDORJ in the prison system and the few instances of torture that are officially reported. It also presents recommendations aimed at better identifying and responding to accounts of torture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to understand the role of the criminal justice system from the incarceration rates of the past 20 years, interacting economic concept of profit maximization with the criminological discourse of selectivity of the penal system. The discourse transformations in the field of criminal policy, characterized by a constant and strong prosecution, passing "penal welfarism" (correction) the increase in punishment, suffer significant interference from the economic model, in particular modulating the practices of incarceration with private interests, producing a significant increase in incarceration rates, permanent selectivity of action of the penal system and the changes in both the contemporary way of life as the action of the organs and structures of control and criminal justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the recent history of prison policy in Sao Paulo, the Brazilian state with the largest number of inmates. From a qualitative approach, was carried out research examining the different contexts and policies adopted, highlighting the difficulties in its institutionalization. The study shows that prison facilities expansion is followed by a tightening rule, ending a brief period of humanization in the 1980's. The hardening actions of "prison gangs", the spread of tough controls, such as the differentiated disciplinary regime, the political and mediatic brunt, reinforced a vicious cycle toward increase repression. We conclude that the paradoxical characteristics were kept in the prison system, in which one side of society takes custody of it's offenders and defends their human dignity as a moral obligation, while failing in the perspective of ensuring their basic needs. Thus, the balance between the strategies of expansion of the prison system and other actions concerning the rights of inmates will only be effective when processes of social inclusion of the inmates are tightly adopted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a succinct way of an analysis about the prison work, based on contributions from the studies developed by the Critical Criminology, trying to relate what is proposed by the rule of law in Brazil on this topic and therefore the effects of its application in within the Brazilian prison system. The discussion will start from the historiographical study on the arrest, the relationship between work and prison, using, for both, the major literatures that deal with the respective theme. From the analysis of the rise of the prison and its natural development over time, it will seek to address the political, social and economic aspects that influenced their transformations and enable the understanding of the current penal model adopted. Finally, based on all theoretical argument developed, it will be done a few remarks on the proposed issue. In other words, based on the ideas raised throughout the text, crave, without greater pretensions, clarify and demystify the views expressed by common sense and, consequently, absorbed as truth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of consolidation of the Brazilian Psychiatric Reform and the National Health Plan in the prison system, people in a security measure and the Hospitals of Custody and Psychiatric Treatment indicate a challenge to the realization of the principles and guidelines of the Unified Health System The description and analysis of the Program of Integral Attention to Crazy Abuser (PAILI-GO) is a strategy to delineate the limits and possibilities of building actions and health services for this vulnerable population. A visit to the program showed the potential for multiplication of government experience in the state, able to extinguish the security measure of some participants, thereby contributing to a process of social reintegration immersed in inter-sectoral action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has become a commonplace that Rio de Janeiro's guerra do tráfico is entirely unique within Brazil. In fact, this is inaccurate. Drug trafficking organizations that in many respects resemble Rio's facções do exist in other urban contexts. What differentiates them is less the ability to establish a local monopoly on the drug trade than the resilience of their internal structure, and consequently the duration of their existence and domination. During field research in nine peripheral communities in three cities, I observed not only high variation in the degree of concentration between local drug markets, but also variation over time within single communities. In this light, the stability of Rio's highly concentrated drug market can be seen as a unique equilibrium in which the fragmentary forces at work in other cities are neutralized by specific traits of Rio's factions. These traits, I argue, stem from the dominion these factions have exerted over the state's prison system since before the period of their original expansion into the drug trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]