Filosofa da libertação e a questão carcerária brasileira: o encarceramento em massa como uma consequência do não reconhecimento da alteridade do preso e sua condição de cidadania

Abstract

One of the problems of contemporary Brazilian society is the prison question, which has more than quintupled in the last 25 years. This despite the fact that our constitutional text and related legislation provide that pretrial detention should be an exceptional measure and enable the criminal judge to use alternative measures in most cases. In addition, 15 years ago an official program was adopted to encourage the application of alternative measures, which apparently did not have the desired effect, as seen from the expansion of imprisonment. The National Council of Justice and the IPEA, investigating the reasons for that, conducted a survey on the application of alternative measures in Brazil and reached results that, although not surprising, do not find support in the Brazilian Constitution. From this research, it was verified that the Brazilian judges start from a positivist and abstract paradigm to offer a "response to crime". However, conscious or not, this paradigm lends itself to hiding the selectivity, cruelty and irrationality of the current penal system. The problem proposed here is to demonstrate that alternative measures in Brazil are not applied to the extent that they could because of the non-recognition of the defendant as a subject of rights, as a citizen, as an equal. The hypothesis discussed, based on a socio-juridical methodology, non-deterministic and without pretense of neutrality, starts of the adoption of Dussel's Philosophy of Liberation and Critical Theory of Human Rights, by Herrera Flores and Sanchez-Rubio as possibilities of re-signification of the concept of human dignity, from a concrete perspective. A local Latin American criminology, based on Lola Aniyar de Castro and Eugenio Raúl Zaffaroni, is also used to understand the criminal justice system as a part of the sphere of power of social control that must be re-signified. Thus, the analysis of the results of the IPEA research is carried out under such a critical perspective, concluding that there is a need for a new positioning of legal professionals, and especially of the Brazilian judiciary.