Racismo estrutural e encarceramento em massa da juventude negra: uma investigação do processo histórico e social de criminalização do negro no Brasil

Abstract

Currently Brazilian prisons are overwhelmed by the majority of black population. This work aims at an investigation of the causes that lead to have a greater number of Afrodescendants in prisons compared to the number of white people. Another question that leads us to this inquiry is the procedure by which the mass incarceration of black people occurred. In this way, the present work identifies Brazilian structural racism based on interracial relations and on the historical and social recovery of the population. This analysis is made from slavery, in which blacks as slaves were considered objects. Then, with the abolition of slavery, blacks were excluded and despised by the state due to the lack of interest in inserting them into society. From this picture, in the process of exclusion of the black population, these came to be seen as a danger to the collective, and thus persecuted. Today this is perceptible in face of the different treatment of policing in favelas and in urban centers. In favelas where there are more blacks and poorer families, it is the place where there are greater cases of violence and deaths, compared to the urban centers, where the white population and the middle class predominates. This current framework reflects in the genocide of the Brazilian black youth. Moreover, when young blacks are not killed they are imprisoned. In addition, as far as the analysis and research are elaborated, the North American context, considered reference in relation to the mass incarceration, is based as the base, being the country in which it is most caught in the world, besides the mark of the racial segregation. After these considerations, structural racism is understood as a social pathology which can be combated through the new social construction.