Criminal expansion,democracy and human rights in Brazil

Abstract

This article presents as general objective to discuss the discrepancies between the criminal system, democracy and citizenship in Brazil, as well as try to establish possible connections between them, within political organization models nominated as democratic rule of law. More specifically, we propose to analyze the deficit of citizenship that permeates the process of elaboration of contemporary criminal law. Faced with the new criminal technologies and their negative effects – massive incarceration – on the state of freedom of low-income and well-defined plots of populations in countries with fundamental rights and guarantees systems in their Constitutions, it is urgent to reflect on the implications between the exercise of the punitive power of the State and the consolidation of citizenship in societies such as Brazil, where deep social inequalities prevail. In this article we will discuss the lack of citizenship in political decision-making processes, because the lack of competitiveness in the representative democratic system, and its implications for the production of contemporary criminal law, which the main consequence is the frightening increase of the prison population. The result of the investigation indicates the existence of strong implications of a lack of formal and political citizenshipin shaping the penal system, for access to power is limited for the majority of the population involved in the criminal phenomenon, a situation that has as main effect the directing of an efficient performance of the penal system aimed precisely at those portions of people excluded from the criminal decision-making process. By the very antinomic and paradoxical nature between normative systems aimed at the enhancement of freedom and autonomy – Constitutions –and punitive systems that directly reach these values, the methodology of dialectical approximation for the development of the present work was adopted.