PENAL STATE AND HUMAN RIGHTS

the violations within the prison system of Rio Grande do Norte

Abstract

The reflections presented in this article are part of the authors’ dissertation work. Anchored in historical-dialectical materialism, based on a literature review and documentary research, the text proposes an analysis of human rights violations within the penal system of the state of Rio Grande do Norte, relating them to the determinations of the bourgeois State, in which violence is considered structural to its functioning. The elements discussed here indicate that the institutionalization of violence, as well as repressive practices and the barbarization of social life that affect the human race, constitute the tone of the units of deprivation of liberty in the region. These practices are sedimented by a neoliberal and conservative State, which, despite claiming to vigorously defend human rights, reveals itself to be contradictory in maintaining and deepening mechanisms of rights violations and repression. In this context, the penal face of the State reinforces a logic of social control that perpetuates inequalities and deepens processes of oppression, highlighting the historical contradictions of this social complex, notably mediated by the social and political context of a country whose social formation is imbued with ordinary, conservative, autocratic and repressive processes. Thus, it can be inferred that the prison policy planned and implemented in Brazil is yet another expression of the power relations and economic, political and cultural structures that sustain the bourgeois State in its penal face.