Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The purpose of this article is to analyze racism and social inequality as foundations of over-incarceration in Brazil. The first section discusses the relationship between punitive selectivity and structural racism from a historical perspective. This is followed by an analysis of the relationship between the downgrading of the population's living conditions through the process of neoliberal counter-reforms and the increase in incarceration and naturalization of dehumanizing practices in the prison environment. The third section presents notes on the increase in female incarceration in Brazil for the crime of drug trafficking. The final remarks highlight that, in the neoliberal phase of capitalism, the structural racism that permeates the criminal justice system finds renewed arguments in the “war on drugs”, to legitimize the over-imprisonment of women, poor and black women in particular. The results indicate that the selective criminal logic reiterates the conditions of oppression from the perspective of gender. Women are doubly punished: by the criminal justice system and by the conservative morality that underpin patriarchal oppression. The method used in the analysis is the materialist-dialectic. From the perspective of social totality, we aim to capture the complex and multiple determinations that constitute the object of study. The research methodology is based on literature and document reviews.

The paper aims to show how the association of women who act as mules in the drug market is not a matter of chance. It follows a literature review of theses and dissertations produced in the last decade (2006-2016) on women arrested for the crime of drug trafficking in the five regions of the country. One of the results obtained in the study was the imprisonment of most of these women as workers in the informal and illicit drug market working as mules. The intrinsic relationship between the capitalist mode of production and the justice system is noteworthy, in which the latter not only ensures the private right to property, but also creates selective and criminalizing mechanisms aimed at the poorest and deprived of rights segments in society, also consisting of women. All of this has been decisive for maintaining the selective character of the justice and penal system in Brazil, where philosophical foundations are continuously manifested, determining the imprisonment of people based on their condition of class, race, gender and the maintenance of violations of the right to citizenship.

It is visible, in everyday life in big cities, the increasing number of people living on the streets, reproducing their lives in the open, and exposing the great contradictions of the capitalist system that generates inequality, pauperism and barbarism. This article aims at understanding “phenomenon” as an expression of the “social question” within contemporary capitalist society, its features and the responses of the State in the plots of urban settings. It is based on a historical and critical analysis of widespread research, on censuses based on the Marxist theoretical framework. The philanthropic aspect of this expression of the “social question” is identified, as well as responses based on repression and criminalization in the name of “order”, “progress” and development in cities, and the institutionalization of services and rights aimed at these people in recent years.

The new coronavirus pandemic that hit the planet has demonstrated the structural crisis of capital and, far from proving itself a “democratic” infection, brought about breakdowns in many countries, revealing contradictions, inequalities and the limits of capitalism as a mode of production and reproduction of life. In this article, we seek an approach to analyze violence against women in this context, acknowledging it as both product and producer of a system that increasingly demands the body-territory of women in particular for its maintenance. Therefore, from an enlarged reading of violence against women, the text shows connections between many expressions of this violence and its centrality to new forms of capital accumulation in critical times, which, in a pandemic setting, become ever-increasingly exacerbated forms of exploitation and oppression of women, women of color in particular.

This article aims to bring elements to the discussion of the health crisis based on the criticism of the capitalist crisis, of expropriations as a permanent process in the capitalist production mode, and its intimate relationship with the contradictions unleashed by the Covid-19 Pandemic. It also presents a synthesis of emergency aid and discusses the limitation placed by the focus of social policies as a tendency to the lack of social protection. This is an essay with a literature review based on historical and dialectical materialism. Thus, we adopted Marxist criticism to analyze the crisis and understand the consequences of the health crisis, investigating recent processes of expropriation of social rights. The discussion is also based on an understanding of social policy as a contradictory component of the State action for the reproduction of the working class, aiming at presenting a brief review of the incidence of the focalist path in the Brazilian social policy, as well as the paradoxes that it restores in a scenario of destruction of the fragile Brazilian social protection system.

This article reviews notes on the Brazilian social formation with regard to the relationship between the State and black people, taking into consideration the aspects of heteronomy, authoritarianism and systematic violence imputed / conferred to this segment in Brazil. It shows how this is reissued in the country as a sine qua non condition for the dependence and subordination relationship to the big world capital. It highlights the functionality of the myth of racial democracy that distorts the condition of citizenship of this part of society through non-access to public rights and policies. It discusses the permanencies and the search for ruptures that allow tensioning of the State towards overcoming racism, its challenges and limits in the overcoming of class society.  

The present essay seeks to problematize the relationship between over-incarceration in Brazil and the increase in torture practices by the repression apparatus of the Brazilian State. Its material basis is the forms of poverty management used since the capital crisis. It is understood that such consecrated forms of poverty management have particularities that cannot be neglected in Brazilian society, given its social formation of dependent capitalism marked by bourgeois autocracy and structural racism. To this end, we problematize the repositioning of the class struggle in recent decades, the role played by the criminal system in capitalism and its forms in contemporary Brazil. In this sense, we used research and statistical data that indicate the relationship between over-incarceration and worsening torture.

The dimensions of violence and the pandemic are in a historical terrain of full development of reifying relationships, changing our attitude towards death, producing a strangeness and anesthetizing consciences in the face of different forms of violence: subjective, symbolic, and systemic. The particularity of the Brazilian social and historical formation, with the exhaustion of the democratic and popular strategy, along with its course of class conciliation, manifests itself in a conservative tone marked by irrationalism and the worsening of the social polarization that leads to a fractured country. The historical bases of dependent capitalism and the autocratic political form are the foundations for the understanding of our attitude towards the pandemic and the violence that is expressed in it.

One of the main arrangements that aim to guarantee the Universities social integration is through networks. In Macaé, a city in the interior of the Rio de Janeiro State, the local government encouraged the scientific potential with cooperation between the various Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) located in the region, through the implementation of the Macaé City Observatory. This article aims to discuss the creation of an interinstitutional and intersectoral study and research center, with shared spaces for analysis and reflection. For that were opted for a practical research on the history of the nucleus for the intervention purpose. It was possible to verify that the sharing of physical spaces and the production of knowledge about different points of view occur with political, ideological, varied knowledge clashes, with the possibility of advances, sometimes inherent in the dialogue between people and institutions. In this process, it was noticed the incorporation of several actors - municipal managers, public agents, professors, students, private institutions representatives and society - streamlining the production and dissemination of knowledge with an emphasis on Macaé and the region.

This article aims to demonstrate the implementation of the Universidade Federal Fluminense in Macaé. We identified the emergence of UFF in 1960 from Law 3848, initially called Uferj, which featured several student and political struggles. Therefore, the study brings the focus to the institution's history in Macaé. The agreement with the Macaé Educational Foundation (FUNEMAC) in 1992, and finally the creation of the ICM in 2013, with direct elections in 2015 and more recently the inauguration of Building D. For this research, primary and secondary sources were used, such as the UFF and ICM website, official documents and local newspapers. The results corroborate the relevance of Higher Education in society, especially in the context of small and medium-sized cities.