Motifs du contrôle et figures du danger : l'abaissement de l'âge de la majorité pénale dans le débat parlementaire brésilien
(2011)
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- Authors
- Supervisors
- Kaminski, Dan
- Abstract
- (en) This research stands in the context featuring the proliferation of criminological studies and discussions about the evolution of the responses of the penal system that lead, among numerous changes, to an increase in the severity of punishment, or also the diversification of measures taken against the perpetrators of criminal acts. The situation in Brazil doesn’t elude this abundance of penal options nor the intense debate raised, especially as the criminological policies conducted after the “restoration of democracy” in the country, over the last twenty years, bear witness to important changes, putting into practice widely differentiated conceptions of penality. Our contribution wishes to offer a description and a theoretical reading of the various “ways of thinking” the control of delinquency and penal justice, starting from the study of debates in the Brazilian parliament about the age of penal majority, as they have developed over this period following several proposals of constitutional changes presented in the Parliament, that are aimed at lowering the age threshold. The research firstly puts all these debates in context by linking them, on one hand, to demonstrations of violence in the Brazilian society and policies enacted to cope with it, and on the other, to the progressive enhancement of juvenile justice, distinct from adult criminal justice, as can be observed in the legislative evolution of the country in the last century. In the core of our exploration we will propose an inductive analysis of parliamentary speeches about the age of penal majority, dealing with the way in which agents of Brazilian parliament, considered as political actors, view the response to be given to criminal acts by youths. By highlighting the arguments and cognitive references that these debates put in motion, we will synthesize, under the form of four types of speech, the different “ways of thinking” the control of delinquency. The results of this practice will then be analysed using a particular conceptual tool – modern penal rationality – that will enable us to cast a new light on parliamentary speeches, studied in order to perceive in them, beyond the traditional distinctions between favourable and unfavourable positions concerning the reduction of the age of penal majority, the existence of a dominant and transversal system of thought to which the various positions can be indexed in spite of their distinctions. In the wake, we will discover that certain parliamentary communications seem even so to elude this dominant thought, witnessing approaches that will be better qualified in the light of the concepts of innovation, on one hand, and of regression on the other. Thus, the modern penal rationality, the innovation and the regression will constitute an important conceptual trilogy to represent the different “ways of thinking (and enacting)” on penal matters. However, we will propose in conclusion a complementary approach of the “ways of thinking” the control of delinquency, putting the accent, this time, on the ways of looking at the problems of violence and its characters, in respect of which responses must be proposed. We will mainly observe the “ways of viewing” that emerge from the parliamentary speeches, which will have already been brought to light by our inductive analysis. Thanks to an etymological reading of the words of danger – “danger”, “risk”, and “peril” – that will reveal different “ways of relating” to the object that these terms represent, we will arrive at the discovery, sustained by our empirical material, of a renewed reading of the former conceptual trilogy.
- Affiliations
Citations
Cappi, R. (2011). Motifs du contrôle et figures du danger : l’abaissement de l’âge de la majorité pénale dans le débat parlementaire brésilien. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/154668