Discursividades sobre o sistema prisional no Brasil: (re)produção, circulação de sentidos e efeitos no real da história

Abstract

This thesis analyzes dominant discourses that are produced and circulate in Brazilian society about the prison system and people deprived of liberty and which are inscribed in the reality of history through the imaginary that whoever is in prison deserves to be punished in the cruelest ways possible, because “if it is there it is because something did it”. Our general objective is to analyze how the ideology of the capitalist system reverberates in the discourses about the prison system and people deprived of liberty and how, also, through the discursive process, the capitalist system, through the State, through the functioning from cynicism, benefits from the prison system. To this end, we adhere to the theoretical perspective of Discourse Analysis proposed by Pêcheux (1990, 1995, 2005, 2007), in France and, developed by Eni Orlandi (2004, 2007, 2012, 2013), in Brazil. The corpus selected for analysis is made up of dispersed and articulated speeches (Silva Sobrinho; Ramires, 2022) which, according to the gesture of interpretation made, point to the subject deprived of liberty as the only one to blame for his arrest and disregard the role of the State as responsible for guaranteeing social well-being, for reducing social inequality and, mainly, for its responsibility in enabling conditions of access to services that today are restricted to an elite that pretends to be unaware of the causes that have led Brazil to have a of the largest prison populations in the world. In our analyses, we understand that such speeches, in some way, exempt the State from its responsibilities towards people deprived of their liberty, as it considers that “a good criminal is a dead criminal”. At the same time, they seek to erase the social, economic and political factors that determine who should and deserves to go to prison by increasing the prison population, that is, they disregard class struggles in the incarceration process, since “a full prison is [had] as] the problem of whoever committed the crime.” In the overlap between language, subject and history that we use to analyze the discourses about imprisoned subjects, we understand that the State and the capitalist system profit from the (re)production of these discourses.