Polícias penais e ouvidorias penitenciárias : reformas por mais direitos?

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the post-redemocratization reforms of custody bureaucracies and prison ombudsman offices in the 27 Brazilian federated units, with an emphasis on the period between 2015 and 2022. Using the theoretical framework of sociological neoinstitutionalism, it is demonstrated, on the one hand, that the reforms in the bureaucracy until its transformation into a penal police force occur in the same direction in all federated entities, although they are at different stages of the process. The trajectory has led these forces to become a police force closer to a full cycle, wich now increasingly operates outside the prison walls. Prison ombudsman offices, on the other hand, have expanded over the last decades and exist in almost all federated unities. Although they have different institutional designs, they have, for the most part, little autonomy and act as “service desks”, mediating access to basic rights of the prison population on a case-by-case basis. There are difficulties in measuring the effects of such reforms on the rights of prisoners due to some bottlenecks in the available database. These bottlenecks are discussed along the thesis aiming to highligh the problems that need to be solved. Next, in order to overcome such difficulties imposed by the data, we sought to evaluate the relationship of the reforms with the better instrumentation of prisoners and their families in the fight for the rights to freedom and clarification of their deaths. To this end, the scope and reliability of some administrative records that may promote these rights were assessed. It was found that the reforms are not related to improvements in these records, but in the case of states with ombudsman offices, the deterioration over the years has been slower. In other words, there are gains in the construction of oversight bodies in the way they have been criated (little autonomy and acting case-by-case), but these are little in the face of the massive violation of rights in prison systems all over the country.