"Somos todos réus primários" : o impacto da prisão no cotidiano de familiares pobres de pessoas presas

Abstract

Mass incarceration emerges as one of the main punitive strategies of the bourgeois State to control and contain populations with specific social markers. Therefore, our prison population is marked by gender (young men), by race (black people), by class (poor people), strata that, caught in the webs of punishment, places Brazil in the shameful third position of the world incarceration rank. Although the prison is intended to be hermetic, isolated from the social fabric, it is precisely its porosity, its in-out flows, that allows its existence. Families of incarcerated people are, therefore, important links in this flow. Imprisoned families, marked predominantly by gender, with women (mothers, wives, girlfriends, sisters, daughters, grandmothers) being the ones who march with their families, affected by the overflows of prison. Being an inside-outside link does not occur without hardships: families suffer from innumerous impacts that add up and worsen their existence. This is how they assume a dubious place in the institution: they are summoned to participate in the execution of the sentence, assuming co-responsibility for the maintenance of their families within the walls, the main function of the State, at the same time that they are pointed out as responsible for the "criminal history" of their family members and are also marked as potentially dangerous, accused of crossing illicit objects into prison. In the penal logic, it justifies being targets of the State scrutiny through vexatory searches, as well as other forms of oppression and violence that are imposed on them, for assuming the place of a family member of a prisoner. In this way, the financial (stigmatizing), relational, affective, and health impacts, among many others, intersect and make the existence of these families amalgamated to the State punitive dynamics. Therefore, we propose to understand this reality based on conversations with five women whose relatives are imprisoned in the State of Minas Gerais, Brazil. We start from the perspective of Ergology in dialogue with Critical Criminology to build a horizontal research path with these women to understand the impacts of imprisonment on the daily lives of poor families.