A conspiração do silêncio: raça e encarceramento negro no Brasil

Abstract

This is an investigation of the intersection between race and crime. In order to do so, I was methodologically interested in bibliographic research and the analysis of secondary data, and I aimed to verify the existence of an institutional racism evidenced in the Brazilian prison system. In the first chapter, I address the principle of equality inscribed in the Federal Constitution of 1988, followed by the discussion on racial inequality in Brazil; In this sense, I clarified the option for the category "race" and its concept in sociology. I set out for a study of Brazilian racial relations, considering slavery as a totalizing institution and origin of our sociability, the rural patriarchy of Brazil-Cologne, the process of modernization and urbanization through which the country passed from 1808, the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the theories of whitening and racial democracy. The second chapter begins with a conceptual differentiation between Criminology and Criminal Law, and then embarked on an investigation into the founding of Criminology as a science, which would refer directly to the formulation of nineteenth-century racial theories and their relation to European colonialism. After made this diagnosis, I continue the study on Criminology with the Italian Positivist School and with the Liberal Contemporary School. Finally, I begin the third chapter studying the reception of Criminology in Brazil in the late nineteenth century; I needed to retake the historical context of the time, part of which was already dealt with in the first chapter, in order to understand how national criminologists lent their supposedly scientific discourse to the racist modernizing project of national elites. With the observation that criminal law at that time served a predominant interest in prejudice, above all, to the black race, socially more exposed and vulnerable, a direct inheritance of slavery recently abolished, I proceeded to analyze current statistical data to assess the situation in which the blacks are in the country today. What I found is that the Brazilian black population has consistently lower social indexes than the white population, which shows a direct link between the precariousness of blacks against whites, black slavery as a latent inheritance in our society and the existence of prejudice and discrimination in Brazil. I concluded that, rather than an institutional racism by our official agencies to control deviance, evidenced, among others, by the numbers of the prison system, what we have in Brazil is structural racism in our society, of which its institutional aspect is just a reflection.