Pelo menos agora eu posso falar, só não sei se vão me ouvir: uma etnografia das audiências de custódia por crimes de tráfico de drogas

Abstract

This master thesis aims to problematize how custody hearings are materialized in view of the social and legal markers that refer to the uses of substances classified as "drugs". Through a qualitative analysis that reveals the social roles, the voices and the eventual silences of their actors, analyzing their positions, fields of power, agencies and (in) existing interactions between them. After my work as a Judicial Resident and researcher at the Central de Flagrantes de NatalRN, where I did quantitative analysis corresponding to this first 18 months of operation, I realized that the numbers do not reveal all the experiences observed in that space. In this light, I decided to (res)signify my field from an ethnographic look, provided by Legal Anthropology. That acknowledged the gaps left by strictly positivist analyzes and demonstrated how voices, silences and marks are revealed between the real and symbolic grids of a custody hearings held in Natal and its metropolitan region. Especially, when focused on the crime of “drug trafficking”, that according to the 2019 national penitentiary survey, is one of the crimes that most result in ‘precautionary arrests” which are those that precede the final conviction. It is from this north that this work will use an empirical and participatory methodology, through the attendance of the audience and the application of semi-structured questionnaires. Through them I will study the roles played by judges, civil servants, prosecutors, defenders, family members and custodians. As well I will analyze the variations between the narratives; the listening and silencing processes and the reproduction of the stigmas related to drugs in the processes of differentiation between trafficking and possession for personal consumption. Moreover, an interdisciplinary, localized and deconstructive research will be prioritized to recognize the need to position the thesis and its researcher in a historical and political context and in the experiences and references that single out the lenses with which the data will be evaluated. Therefore, it is in the face of an overloaded and human rights violating prison reality and in times of curtailment and persecution of social and human academic research, that it is necessary to give visibility to the stories not told by the judicial terms and it becomes pertinent to question, qualitatively, the prisons and their rationality in a growing scenario of criminal selectivity and the reproduction of systemic and symbolic violence.