Expansion, standardization, and densification of the criminal justice apparatus: Recent developments in Brazil

Abstract

The democratic transition in Brazil witnessed the return of civil liberties and the emergence of a legal framework based upon respect for human rights and the adoption of extensive social entitlements. In recent years, the reduction of poverty and upward social mobility have also transformed the country’s social structure. In spite of these welcome changes, however, crime and prison rates went through a steep upsurge during the same period, undermining many of these more positive social changes. A number of reasons underlie the emergence of this predicament, ranging from large structural shifts to the piecemeal adoption of harsher criminal laws. Enmeshed in these developments nonetheless there is also important institutional modifications in the configuration of the criminal justice system. The present argument seeks to understand how the recent thrust in the modernization of state institutions helped to create this situation of crisis. The expansion, densification, and standardization of the criminal justice apparatus has prompted its greater effectiveness and, thus, contributed to the current predicament of high crime rates and mass incarceration in the country.

Exceptional states: The political geography of comparative penology

“…Similarly, Northern Ireland, colonial conflict and British imperialism are all effectively erased from the dominant story of British penal developments in the 20th-century. 4 The idea of a punitive transformation within this small network of regions would become all the more complicated if we include the post-colonial Anglophone sites such as the Caribbean, Singapore, India or Hong Kong, for example (Brown, 2017; Carrington et al., 2016; Fonseca 2018b; Lee and Laidler, 2013; Paton, 2004), or examined the differences of the punitive turn in South as well as North America (Sozzo, 2018). If we were to broaden the scope from prison to punishment we see the abolition and/or abeyance of Magdalene Laundries, industrial schools, Jim Crow, colonialism, slavery and the death penalty in Anglophone world problematises the notion that there has been a dramatic shift from social tolerance to popular punitiveness (Alexander, 2010; Garland, 2010; O’Sullivan and O’Donnell, 2007).…”

Neoliberal politics and state modernization in Chilean penal evolution

“…Second, policing, sentencing, and sentence administration and corrections have remained outside the dominant legal culture despite the RPP. Like in other Latin American countries (Fonseca, 2018a; Iturralde, 2010; Sozzo, 2016), the dominant criminal justice framework has been linked to substantive criminal law, reconstructed under sophisticated doctrinal constructions taken from German legal thought (Matus, 2011) since the 1940s. The reform movement of the 80s and 90s successfully challenged the fixation with substantive criminal law by bringing procedure to the forefront of policy (Hathazy, 2016; Palacios, 2011).…”

“…Those state control practices changed following the criminal procedure reforms in Latin America. Even though the reforms meant to produce criminal procedures more akin to the Western image of the rule of law, it also contributed to an expansion, densification, and standardization of state control (Fonseca, 2018a). The state expanded its investment in criminal justice resources and rationalized its organization in order to maximize an expected output (i.e.…”

“A grandes cautelas, otras mayores”: importing neoliberal criminal justice policies and practices into chile

“…Despite the reforms, most of which dated between 2008 and 2012, numerous bills have been passed to increase the penalties for different types of crimes, thus enlarging the catalogue of faults that are punishable with jail (Consejo para la reforma penitenciaria, 2010, pp. 40-41; Bustamante, 2011;Espinoza Mavila et al, 2014). These bills, occuring at the same time of the aforementioned reforms, are counterintuitive within the context of the prison modernisation discourse, since they add harsher punitive measures to a system that was overly harsh to begin with.…”