A desistência do crime entre egressos do sistema socioeducativo: uma leitura semiótico-cultural

Abstract

This research aimed to describe and analyze the semiotic dynamics through which egresses from the socio-educative system regulated the desistance from crime in their life trajectories. A qualitative, idiographic and developmental multiple case study, based on semiotic-cultural psychology, was carried out with four young people who, after having walked a journey of criminal persistence, decided to end their criminal careers. Data production included a document analysis, filling out a sociodemographic data sheet, drawing up an individual timeline and conducting three interviews: one narrative, one episodic and one semi-structured. The verbal and documentary data obtained were transcribed, read, synthesized, organized and analyzed in the light of the Trajectory Equifinality Model – TEM. The discussion of the results in the light of the literature led to the finding that, for the discontinuity of the criminal course of the participants, several factors cooperated, such as: the experience of deprivation of liberty and socio-educative care, guidance and monitoring by professionals of the socio-educative system, educational and professional training, labor insertion, obtaining a legal source of income, moving away from criminogenic contexts through changes of address, breaking off contact with offender colleagues, religiosity and spirituality, conjugality, paternity, disillusionment with crime due to the misfortunes it bequeathed and the risks inherent to it, participation in social projects involving art, culture, music, literature, sport and leisure, family support etc. The interpretation of the data in the light of the theoretical framework, in turn, led to the conclusion that to the criminal desistance of boys underlay a series of semiotic mechanisms, such as: the breaking of criminogenic transitive cycles, under the impulse of anti-crime semiotic catalysts synthesized by the participants; the rise of anti-crime signs, values and social suggestions to higher levels in the semiotic regulatory hierarchy, thus overtaking the criminogenic semiotic mediators; the acquisition, by the anti-crime semiotic components, originally microgenetic, after successive mesogenetic reactivations, of ontogenetic generality and stability, then going on to guide, mediate and regulate the behavior of boys in a stable and lasting way; the activation of promoting signs, through which the participants, by imaginatively predicting, on the one hand, a horror scenario if they continued offending, and, on the other, a friendlier scenario if they left the crime, assigned meanings beforehand to these two potential scenarios, starting, then, to strive in the sense of distancing themselves from the first one and advancing towards the second one; the predominance given by the boys, in the synthesized personal orientations they carried out, to the promoting semiotic forces, to the detriment of the inhibiting ones, of desistance from crime; the mobilization of symbolic resources to facilitate the transition to non-criminal developmental paths, after the rupture of criminogenic regularities; the reconfiguration of the boys’ semiotic framework of values, so that the anti-crime moral values started to direct their affectivity, their cognition and their behavior, leading them to see, feel and perceive criminality in a negative way.