A INSTITUCIONALIZAÇÃO DOS ESTIGMAS DO ENCARCERAMENTO: A subjugação do instituto de política de proteção social brasileira auxílio-reclusão à racionalidade neoliberal

Abstract

In the current context of the deterioration of social rights in Brazil, particularly from the 1990s onward, one can observe a process of productive restructuring in which the social segment represented by incarcerated people appears as an amorphous mass devoid of interests in this process. From this perspective, it becomes evident that the dismantling of the financialization of social protection for this group was engineered in such a way as to obtain the endorsement of civil society. Contributing to this process were the “apparatuses of subjectivation,” which operated to neutralize reflective thinking, immersing society in images created by neoliberalism that naturalize oppression, within a scenario already grounded in mental structures shaped by racism, which therefore already normalizes sectarianism. The State takes on a central role in this policy of dehumanization of those considered stigmatized by the culturally shaped gaze of neoliberalism, institutionally corroborating this dismantling, with both social legitimacy and approval. As a consequence of this context, a representation has been constructed—one that permeates the social imagination and spreads throughout the official bodies of the Brazilian State—of the social-security benefit auxílio-reclusão as a “bandit stipend,” which then serves as the basis for sectarian public policy projects that reinforce this social representation. This forms a feedback system in which the contemporary State is simultaneously the receiver and disseminator of a common-sense worldview that produces individuals excluded from protection within the current Brazilian welfare state.