PARA ALÉM DO CÁRCERE: o significado reeducativo da pena privativa de liberdade em uma instituição penal para mulheres em São Luís.

Abstract

The present study is an outcome of qualitative research carried out at the Center for Reeducation and Social Inclusion of Convicted Women CRSICW/CRISMA in São Luis, State of Maranhão, Brazil in the period of 2009 to 2010. The aim of the study was to investigate how the reeducation character of private penalty is organized and manifested in that institution. The objective unfolds into secondary ones as follows: to discuss studies which approach the reeducation proposal as the goal to the private penalty release; to analyze what treatment provided to women in the prison system setting; to identify the effects of confinement on the social identity of convicted women; to show how re-educatingactivities are organized at the Center for Reeducation and Social Inclusion of Convicted Women CRSICW/CRISMA; to identify how educative practices developed at CRSICW/CRISMA are manifested; to identify how the inmates perceive the institution re-educative work, and in what level they consider it to contribute to their social inclusion. Since the present work presents as the central issue the reflection on re-education in the prison environment, the analyses performed by Thompson (2002), Zaffaroni (2001), Baratta (2002) on the goals of penalty, are pertinent because they approach the implications of the penalty rehabilitating objective designated indistinctively of regeneration, re-adaptation, re-socialization, and re-education, taking into account that the prison environment borders on complex power relationships in a space characterized by all sorts of contradictions. We also present the contributions by Luckmanand Berger (1985) when dealing with primary and secondary socialization processes, which are important aspects for understanding the premise of the present study. Thus, the understanding that human beings are socially built, his character being unfinished and constituted along his lifetime, is the endpoint foundation of an education intended for humanizing and answering to the challenges posed by the prison reality. The study endeavored to understand that the convicted women at CRSICW/CRISMA observed the identity of good prisoners as a necessity to survive in prison and as a way of resisting to the criminal stigma, since this roll-play is not compatible with the desire to re-claim their social spaces. It was also verified that the women attribute greater importance to work and professional qualification than to schooling, since for them qualification prepares them for the job market representing, besides the opportunity to earn a wage, there is the possibility of penalty redeeming. Semi-structured interviews were used with a prison warden, a teacher and the Institution General Supervisor, and the application of Focal Group technique to inmates, as well as the study of pertinent bibliography, state, national, and international (FOUCAULT, 2008b)devices dealing with criminal enforcement with respect to assistance guaranteed to prisoners, educational assistance in especial, where we sought mainly to reveal the gender inequality traits in those discussions with respect to treatment of incarcerated women.