Prisões cautelares na prática judicial do Amazonas

Abstract

Brazil has currently the 3rd largest prison population in the world, with 726,712 persons deprived of their liberty, of which 33.29% are provisionally arrested, that is, they are awaiting trial, which reveals the excessive use of precautionary prisons in Brazil. Given this context, the present work aimed to understand the use of preventive detention in the judicial practice of Amazonas from the perspective of magistrates, having as theoretical framework Pierre Bourdieu's social theory. A qualitative field research was undertaken, and a documentary and bibliographic survey was conducted, as well as a comprehensive interview with 05 (five) magistrates working in the criminal area. In the end, it was found that Brazilian law reflects a legal tradition that historically served to hide serious social inequalities and to protect the ruling interests, which contributed to the consolidation of the judiciary as a highly elitized career far from the Brazilian social reality. It was also concluded that judges share a set of internalized dispositions with regard to what should be valued when deciding on imprisonment or release that are not necessarily backed by law, revealing a judicial habitus that tends to widen the demands placed on the individual to be granted freedom, which in turn results in a tendency to decree the prison. Given this, the prison proves to be an effective instrument of social control and, moreover, a true tool for maintaining class order, as it enables the “justified” segregation of undesirable individuals who insist on diverging from behavior deemed appropriate according to the ruling scale of values, making prison a central place as an instrument of poverty management in order to perpetuate a cycle of social inequality.