In 1979, four decades ago, the Sociology professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), José Ricardo Ramalho, published the first Brazilian ethnographic study in which crime and prison were observed through the eyes of the prisoners themselves. The research, which gave rise to the book “The world of crime and reverse order”, was carried out at the São Paulo Detention House, better known as Carandiru, a prison complex that after a few years would be the scene of the biggest massacre of prisoners in history. from the country.
“The massacre was absurd, something indescribable of injustice and lack of understanding. Inside the prison, when I did research, there was permanent tension between the police and prisoners. There was repression, entering the cell and beating the prisoners, but not to this extent of the massacre. It is important to highlight that these are people who, although their freedom is restricted, are part of society”, recalled José, who was at the event “Carandiru and other borders”, held on Monday (25), in the Marielle Franco auditorium of the Institute of Human Sciences (IFCH) at Unicamp.
Keeping the memory of the massacre alive was the motivation for the event, according to Natália Padovani, organizer of the activities and professor of Anthropology at Unicamp. The event, also organized by the professor at the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar), Gabriel Feltran, also featured French researchers Marie Morelle, Sebastian Jacquot, Jerome Tadié and the professor of Sociology at the Federal Fluminense University (UFF) Daniel Hirata.
Natália, who is part of a network of researchers focused on the prison system and crime and the Pagu Gender Studies Center, points out that José's study was a pioneer in the country and, therefore, the idea was to honor this milestone in the trajectory of the area of search. For the researcher, understanding the various phenomena that involve crime has the potential to produce better ways of operationalizing State apparatuses, if the operators of these instances view dialogue as more than a mere formality.
“This research agenda has always been important for thinking about different forms of public security policies that do not actually have a security effect. Now, more than ever, there is a total failure of public security policies and a disconnect between State policies and the population that is supposed to be served by them”, he observes.
“If crime ends, a very large industry will end”
Today, 27 years after the massacre, the prison system remains in crisis, as well as public security, exposing the disconnect between a policy of mass incarceration - Brazil is third in prison population - and the effects on security in society . Deaths, torture and massacres continue, and the country is in 9th place on the list of most violent countries according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Why are policies and perspectives maintained whose results are demonstrably unsuccessful? For José Ricardo, the answer can be found in the words of one of his interviewees in Carandiru: “if crime ends, a very large industry will end”.
Natália Padovani also analyzes in the same sense. “The world of crime produces an industry, a commerce, and an entire network of public security services,” she says. The researcher, who focuses on women's penitentiaries, draws a parallel between the prison system and the issue of work to assert that the world of crime reproduces the world of work. “The prison system is an apparatus that not only produces the criminal it aims to incarcerate, but through it enables the creation of optimal numbers for the economy, as it removes employed and unemployed people from the statistics - it employs a significant portion of people in the industrial and commercial complex penal system at the same time that it removes unemployed people and imprisons them”.
Keeping certain sectors out of circulation in society, as Professor Gabriel Feltran points out, is a strategy for maintaining a sociopolitical order based on the generalization of market and punitive values. The ethnographer, who carries out studies on the outskirts of São Paulo, also points out that it was the war dimension of a prison policy in force in the state in the 1990s that produced the Carandiru massacre, which was also part of a panorama of high police lethality.
“It was a policy, in the state of São Paulo, more or less similar to what Bolsonaro and Witzel say today that 'there is a radical otherness and we have to kill our enemies and the more we kill, the purer we become,' The cleaner society becomes and the more order we will have when we remove the causes of disorder, which are others'”.
For the professor, if the massacre prompted a reformulation of public policies, bringing the issue of human rights to the debate, it also generated a reaction from imprisoned sectors that decided to no longer count on the rulers and organize themselves into groups such as the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC).
“The PCC statute, which dates back to 1993, explicitly mentions Carandiru’s reaction. Carandiru appears as a turning point in which it is no longer possible to rely on common sense or political actions. On the one hand, changes in public security led to the expansion of the PCC, because it precisely implements the policy of mega incarceration, of spreading prisons, to produce itself as a faction. And at the same time, the Carandiru events are used to say 'no more political contact or relationship, now the path is direct war'.”
Therefore, he explains that studying violence is studying the State. And in this sense, the professor analyzes that it is necessary to recover the action capacity of researchers to act purposefully around urgent issues and demands in society.
“The world of crime and order inside out”
José Ricardo Ramalho, in an interview with the Unicamp portal, recalled the motivations behind the research that led to the book, the result of his PhD in Sociology at the University of São Paulo (USP), carried out during the period of the military dictatorship. He says that, to confront the regime, it was necessary to unite the intelligentsia with the working class. Thus, studies involving popular sectors were seen as strategies of resistance.
“I lived in a context of military dictatorship, in a social science course that had the idea of building resistance to the military dictatorship. This meant seeking to reconnect intellectuals with the working people who had been beaten in 1964. In the period from 1964 to 1968, the workers were the ones who were beaten, the workers were the ones who were put in prisons”, he explains.
Looking less at organizations and more at workers, as protagonists of history, was an objective. Upon realizing that crime is directly associated with class division, the then student began attending the São Paulo Detention House, Carandiru, to interview incarcerated people. “The prisoners were considered by the press and society as real animals inside the prison. And I thought it was interesting to know their point of view regarding the fact of being imprisoned, their relationships with society, the punishment they had received.”
The thesis gave rise to the first Brazilian ethnographic work carried out inside a prison. Prisoners' own codes of conduct, which often conflict with the institutional codes of the penitentiary system, in addition to expectations surrounding “recovery” were identified in the research, signaling that the categories of work and family were frequent. Furthermore, the professor observed that the association of “delinquency” with the characteristics of the poorest, in newspapers of the time, was also a preponderant trait.
The book is available online and can be accessed here.
