Economia e Punição: sistema prisional e a desumanização do cárcere através da construção de subjetividades dóceis à serviço do Estado-Neoliberal

Abstract

The present work, “Economy and Punishment: Prison System and the dehumanization of prison through the construction of docile subjectivities at the service of the Neoliberal State”, seeks to analyze, through the historical-materialist Marxist lens, the intimate relationship between the economic order and punishment . It starts from the understanding that, throughout social-economic history, punishment was used as a flexible tool to serve the transformations of capital accumulation. To develop this analysis, it raises the famous statement by Rusche and Kirchheimer (1939): "Every system of production tends to discover punitive forms that correspond to its relations of production". description of the accumulation of capital, analyzing its historical times, and how this imbrication was metamorphosing until arriving at the configuration of the modern prison system. The construction of the prison served as a training tool to make the poor docile to the factory service. Ultimately, it is understood that , in the marginal region of Latin America this process did not occur the way it did in the Global North. Our punitive system stems from the idiosyncratic particularities of dependent peripheral economies. It is argued that the prisoner in the marginal region offers more value, when analyzed by the issue materialist lens of the economy of punishment, serving as cheap labor for exploitation and acquiescence of the market, when egressed into society. However, it is understood that in contemporary times, prison under barbarism capitalism takes on multiple contours, training, neutralization, extermination and authoritarianism over a mass of the dispossessed who will serve the dictates of the neoliberal order. Therefore, the objective of the present work is to analyze how, in the current economic order, the prison under the sign of punitive control has different ways of punishing, and therefore the adoption of the cultural political economy of the penalty, is necessary, understanding that our punishment is both material and symbolic. In this sense, a materialist reading of these issues was carried out, without vilifying cultural processes circumscribed in the Latin American punitive margin.