“Meliante dotado de elevada periculosidade”: raça e classe na decretação da prisão preventiva por furto em Salvador

Abstract

The experiences lived by the researcher while working at the Patronato de Presos e Egressos da Bahia before the Salvador’s city penitentiary system instigated the development of criminological studies about criminal control’s real operability. Based on qualitative researches on the punitive system, with the support of the Public Defender's Office of the State of Bahia (2019), which provided us with the report's database, we decided to carry out a mostly qualitative study to analyze the decisions made in the hearings that took place in the city of Salvador. The present work aimed to investigate the criminal selectivity in preventive prisons decreed exclusively for theft crimes, in this city in the year 2018. The question from which we start is the following: how race, social class and gender indicators appear in the construction of the dangerousness judgment in the reasoning of these decisions? The hypothesis consists of the presence of the subject's danger among the grounds adopted by magistrates to decree arrests as a remnant of positivist criminology. In addition, we developed this research on the critical criminology’s perspective, associated with the agnostic theory of punishment and the racial perspective of the criminal issue, as well as using concepts such as processes of criminalization, labeling and mass incarceration. We sought to verify the presence of race, social class and gender markers in the construction of this danger judgment. Therefore, we conducted a documentary research, ex post facto, towards the 477 decisions handed down, with the collection of quantitative and qualitative data, through content analysis in the decisions recorded in the custody hearings for the crime of theft. The results show that even if nothing has been said about the racial profile of the subjects, the fact that 53 out of 67 prisoners are identified as black or mixed race reveals who are the people considered fearful by the judicial autorities. Thus, there are evidences that the judgment of dangerousness was designed to classify subjects that are biologically, socially or anthropologically inferior and tending to criminality. Therefore, their maintenance in the grounds is an indication of the presence of these stereotyped and racist notions in Brazilian judicial and police agencies. As suggestions for future referrals, we propose the development of state public policies for effective historical redress, so that the space occupied by the penal system is increasingly reduced by income distribution programs and fundamental and social rights.