Decolonialidade e sistema de justiça criminal: um diálogo teórico possível? : abrindo janelas para rumos compartilhados de responsabilização social.

Abstract

The work that is consolidated here makes sense in questioning the state’s institutional attachment to punishing bodies in order to deal with social conflicts and deviations. Likewise, the study is based on the questions that arise when analyzing the high rate of state violence against non-white and peripheral bodies in Brazil. To this end, it assesses how these contingencies are connected to a structure that is capillarized in a variety of intersectoral ways, with the common goal of subordinating strategically vulnerable collectivities. This conjecture will be studied here based on the artifice provided by critical criminology, which, based on critical race theory and read through decolonial lenses, will provide support to continue the movement to promote new abolitionist paths, discussions and horizons, which we will call here marginal abolitionist paths—routes that break with the Colonial/Punitive/Prohibitionist ties imposed by the modern/colonial ideal in Latin America since the 15th century. We will therefore investigate the roots of the Criminal Justice System, situating this apparatus within the logic of Modernity/Coloniality—a category whose origin coincides with the beginning of the modern/colonial world-system and which, in this investigation, represents the propagation of a racialized technology of body control. Decolonial critical theory will offer important tools for this analysis, enabling us to introduce to academia not only theoretical but also practical possibilities of being in the world beyond the systemic coercion of modernity/coloniality. In this movement, we embrace the notion of epistemic disobedience as a strategy of insurgency against Eurocentric rationality, promoting the recovery of Afro-diasporic and Indigenous worldviews and knowledge systems that were erased by the colonial civilizational project. These knowledge forms sustain epistemologies that oppose criminalization and reject the perspectives of vengeance and punishment that underpin the continuous state control over certain bodies. Decoloniality, being a practical movement as well, allows us to design abolitionist tools from the margins, grounded in ancestral wisdoms, which will reverberate in our study—constructions based on accountability, care, community-based and reparative resolutions, rather than punitive approaches, thus challenging the penal architecture naturalized by colonial power.