By NILO BAPTISTA*

Foreword to the newly released book, edited by Marco Mondaini

First of all, it is necessary to emphasize the feat that Marco Mondaini achieved with this volume, bringing together some of the most prominent representatives of Brazilian and Latin American critical criminological thought and also, as a way of guaranteeing the continuity of this current, three talented young researchers.

This feat cannot be explained solely by the book's organizer's extensive academic background, which spans between history and social work; after all, many competent historians and social workers seem uninterested in the bloody contribution of the penal system to Brazil's social tragedy. Perhaps Marco Mondaini's sensitivity to the criminal issue, in addition to the extensive reading of criminology that his questions reveal, was stimulated by his weekly walk along the paths of democracy, observing curves and obstacles that are far from democratic.

The first interviewee, Vera Malaguti, exposes – with the usual clairvoyance of her political-criminal analyses – the historical roots of her influential criminological reflection: the apparently inexhaustible legacy of slavery, which makes the police see Manoel Congo's quilombo in any favela and sniff out “suspicious behavior” in any black boy walking through a rich neighborhood.

The indifference of political sectors in the progressive camp to police brutality is seen by her as an untimely disqualification of the lumpenproletariat, in a historical period in which the working class itself finds itself deformed by even more perverse models of exploitation.

The criminalization of popular economies, especially the trade in illegal drugs, is addressed by her with a strong criticism of the recent decision of the Supreme Federal Court, which “does not get to the heart of the problem” and, between us, would be an advance in the 1970s of the last century, and today it is – also history does not help the sleepyheads – a setback that does not change anything about the failed and deadly prohibitionism.

Rectius: it is a failure for its ostensible purposes, but it is a success in maintaining the empowerment of the police, providing a legal pretext for invading poor homes, extorting profits and legitimizing police executions (it is enough to say that the dead man was a drug dealer, even without showing the conviction). This police “captured by the war paradigm” has no possible reform, and Vera Malaguti has just organized a book whose title is No Police: we have to leave the “I hate the police” speech behind and reflect on overcoming it with something institutionally very different and better.

Marília Montenegro, an academic authority on gender violence, presents her pedagogical formula to denounce the schizophrenia of contemporary penal systems, divided between prison (“for the same”) and alternative sentences to prison (“for others”), although it is true that the advent of the latter has not reduced the use of the former in the slightest (but has certainly increased the control of the penal system over the population).

This same schizophrenia reappears in the ambiguity of this worn-out and perhaps useless expression: public security, which in the form of urban policing simultaneously produces “benefited neighborhoods” and “oppressed neighborhoods.” Marília Montenegro notes the resistance of many judges and courts to custody hearings, and could have mentioned the three-year slumber of the guarantor judge in a drawer of the Supreme Federal Court.

The relevance of an adequate technical-legal examination of the absolute need for pre-trial detention, at the time of the custody hearing, derives from the finding that imprisoned defendants are statistically much more likely to be convicted than free defendants.

Turning to domestic violence, it is interesting to remember that, when the intention was to aggravate the criminal suffering of convicts by preventing the application of merely financial sanctions, the expression “basic food basket” was used derogatorily (in the sense of something of little value as retribution) by those in favor of aggravation, beings who live in the clouds. In the Brazilian reality, the victim-woman was revictimized in terms of the budget whenever the family economy was hit by the purchase of a basic food basket that the offending partner had to offer to Themis.

Among the many observations about domestic violence courts, I select one from which so many others derive: these courts are “appropriated by the logic of criminal law”. I will not close this topic without mentioning two memories of the book’s organizer in his conversation with Marília: the stereotype used in classes on how to approach the military police and the relevance of alcohol in comparison with illicit drugs; Marco Mondaini has the perspective of a critical criminologist.

The interview with the great master of Brazilian Criminology Vera Andrade (who is also an excellent penal lawyer) is full of lessons, starting with the warning that the opposite side of abolitionism(s) is “penal efficiency, expanding populist punitivism”, and not guaranteeism, despite some theoretical disagreements.

The reader is given a well-founded mention of the various forms of abolitionism as an introduction to a broad overview of the state of the art of restorative justice in Brazil, despite the fierce resistance of the penal system. Indeed, moving from the authoritarian – almost arrogant – model employed by some agencies of the penal system to a horizontal regime, in which offender and offended reflect on their conflict and ways to overcome it, seems impossible: our “fossilized punitive culture” opposes this.

It will be essential to “disempower the Judiciary”, which, with very flexible arguments coming from neo-constitutionalism, not only manages to circumvent the Constitution (remember the Supreme Court in the face of the presumption of innocence), but sometimes legislates and other times decrees.

It is difficult to categorize Cecília Coimbra. This heroic Brazilian, imprisoned and tortured for resisting the dictatorship, has a revolutionary temperament that shines through in a phrase from her interview: “those who wait never achieve”. This great activist was the founder and leader of the group “Torture Never Again”. But this professor and doctor of psychology made a notable contribution by showing how punitiveness shapes subjectivities.

Her path towards critical criminological thought, as she recounts it, had the meaning of renouncing the hatred of the torturer who hated us, for the insurmountable reason that we are not equal, that we do not feed on the suffering of others. Cecília Coimbra knows it all: “prison is always political”, and “punitiveness wants us all to be police officers for all of us”.

Cecília Coimbra works with ease between “the two arms of biopower: medicalization and criminalization”; in the field of illicit drugs, the first arm serves the rich buyers and the second the poor sellers. The lack of understanding of the criminal issue by political figures from the progressive field is resolved by her with the support of Gilles Deleuze: “there is no such thing as a left-wing government”.

Raúl Zaffaroni is, without a doubt, one of the greatest Latin American criminal lawyers of all time. In addition to his creative contributions to the theory of crime, he was the intellectual leader of our critical criminal law, built on the realization that criminological and political-criminal knowledge is capable of irrigating criminal-legal dogma and converting parched conceptual deserts into fields of flowers.

Your interview, as always, is a master class on the structural selectivity of penal systems (“punitive power is represented according to people’s vulnerability […] through stereotypes”), with a timely mention of directed selectivity (lawfare), which affected left-wing political figures on our continent (Lula, Cristina Kirchner, Rafael Correa, Evo Morales).

However, I have difficulty in adhering to his opinion that formal representative democracies more or less dominated by punitive power (expansion of the penal system, significant presence of police officers in the Legislative and Executive branches, politicized Judiciary, Armed Forces oriented towards the execution of police tasks, repression of civil demonstrations, belief in punishment as the solution to all problems, etc.) on our continent (think, for example, of El Salvador) would not be properly police states (a concept he restricts to the model old fashioned of the 20th century, such as Nazism) but only “weak states”, thus predisposed to see themselves colonized by financial capital.

My disagreement lies in the origin of this weakening, which for Raúl would reside in the “destruction” of his police, which would have suffered a process of deterioration due to contact with mafia groups, with the emergence of vigilantes and militias; therefore, the State would have lost the famous monopoly of legitimate violence.

From the outset, I have difficulty working with the Weberian concept because in my country – think of slavery (in the colony and in the Empire) first and the coronelismo of the old Republic later – punitive power was never exclusively public: slave owners and colonels exercised it with greater protagonism than any public official.

Only in the 20th century did public punishment surpass private punishment in Brazil, although it still allowed for some collaborative competition. On the other hand, from Vidigal to Marielle Franco's murderers, the Brazilian police are much more destructive than destructible, and have recently formed a militant electoral base for the extreme right; didn't the police play a fundamental role in the coup against Evo Morales and the attempted coup against Lula?

Raúl Zaffaroni’s lapidary definition – “genocide is a punitive power without restraint” – points, in Brazil, to the police, frequently (think of massacres) exercising punitive power without any restraint, much less those prescribed by law. But I completely agree with Raúl Zaffaroni regarding the invisible conductor who directs this orchestra: contrary to the famous aria of auspicious, it is not Satan but rather transnational video-financial capital that is leading the dance.

Along the lines explored by Cecília Coimbra, we have the projection of the penitentiary experience onto the offender's subjectivity, in Raúl Zaffaroni's brilliant formula: upon entering, “I stole” or “I stole”; upon leaving, “I am a thief”.

Ana Luisa Barreto, Glauciene Farias and Clara Albuquerque, young and encouraging criminologists who, at the beginning of their promising academic careers, know things that took me decades to learn, harmoniously complement this book and fill us with joy and hope, because we feel that we have not preached in vain and that all our struggles will have more prepared and stronger fighters in the future.

*Nile Baptist is a lawyer and professor emeritus at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). Author of, among other books, Critical introduction to Brazilian criminal law (Revan).

Reference

Marco Mondaini (org.). Anti-Punitivist Dialogues. São Paulo, Editora Alameda, 2025, 166 pages. [https://amzn.to/4mepY1d]

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