Atividades e biografias laborais de recuperandos da Associação de Proteção e Assistência ao Condenado de Macau/RN: entre o crime e o trabalho

Abstract

The present study focused on the place occupied by work in the life of people deprived of liberty. Work is here understood as a component of human socialization, being central in the constitution of individuals, and exerting a psychological function, because it allows the construction of meanings and senses. This research is anchored in the Social Psychology of Work, a field with epistemological-political orientations that understands work as a material, historical and central category, situated in intersubjective relations. It is a descriptive, transversal and qualitative case study, having ethnographic characteristics and a participant observation layout. The locus of the study was the Association of Protection and Assistance to the Condemned (APAC) of Macau/RN and the participants were 11 subjects in a state of deprivation of liberty. The instruments/techniques used were: individual narrative interviews, photographic records and field diary. The themes of the interviews were the following: work life history, prison work (common prison and APAC) and future perspectives in relation to work. The narratives were analyzed considering such axes, being submitted to textual analysis of Descending Hierarchical Classification (CHD) with the help of software. In addition to the narratives, the photographic records and the field diary were added to the results in order to compose a global analysis. The results revealed the following attributes of the relationship to work in pre-incarceration time: precarious, exhaustive, limiting and marked by submission. The few experiences were in “bicos” (informal short-period work). After entering the common prison, contact with work continued to be small, rare and not accessible to people as a whole. When it happened, it was under a cruel regime of humiliation, with exhausting hours, without qualification and without professional perspective. With the insertion in APAC, work is perceived, in spite of the limitations, as a source of fulfillment, pleasure, learning medium and therapeutic instrument, but without perspective of continuity in the outside world. Postincarceration, future work plans were uncertain and indeterminate, with only one certainty: that of not wanting to return to crime. For this new stage of life, individuals put the stigmata and low level of schooling as major challenges. With this, the study hoped to contribute to the discussion about the relation between subjects and work in a prison context, in a situation of vulnerability and social frailty, aiming to rethink the prison environment, as well as the role of work and public policies in this context.