Crime e Congresso Nacional no Brasil pós-1988

Abstract

From the mid-90s of the twentieth century until today, part of the international literature on criminality, public safety and criminal justice (primarily in the U.S. and England) signaled the abandonment of traditional criminal policy -called the penal welfarism. The policy, based on the liberal tradition of human rights and on the ideal of social resocialization of criminals, would have been replaced by a tougher criminal justice policy, more comprehensive and now more focused on social defense. The strategic functioning of criminal justice and its contemporary relevance has changed. From this general framework, this research examines the criminal policies which were adopted by the Brazilian Parliament. To that end, I analyze the production of the major laws approved on public safety and criminal justice in the Brazilian Parliament in the period from 1989 to 2006. The research is divided into two different moments: i) a mapping of the material indicating which are the proponent parties, states and houses; presidential mandates, the number of laws adopted per year and the time of the drafting of laws in according to the proponent house ii) the general types (models) of punishment proposed by the laws. I propose in my final considerations that: the coexistence in Brazilian criminal policy of criminalization and the stiffening of criminal laws/expansion of rights in Brazil. Despite this coexistence or (and) overlap between these areas, the Parliament and the Executive 'choose' the symbolic use of the penal laws as a fundamental form of conflict resolution from state (or civil society) demands for more extensive (or heavier) criminalization of conducts.