(Neo)conservadores da lei e da ordem: hegemonia e controle penal da "underclass"

Abstract

This thesis intends to offer a critical-criminological interpretation to the phenomenon of hypertrophy of the United States penal system and to the massive criminalization of poverty in that country. We argue that, far from achieving its officially stated objectives - to promote public safety for citizens -, the United States penal system has been an essential part of a hegemonic-ideological project of the ruling classes, whose purpose is to legitimize both the dismantling of the Welfare State and instituting a “State of Security”, based on the expansion of the powers of the military-industrial complex, the private corporate giants and the penal system. We aim to demonstrate the importance of the narrative of neoconservative intellectuals who identified (a) the corrosion of all forms of authority produced by the 1960s counterculture profligacy; (b) the egalitarianism of social income distribution programs; (c) and the leniency of the penal system as central causes for the dizzying increase in street crime, drug use and trafficking, considered by that narrative as the main social lesions. In addition, these intellectuals attribute the protagonism of those injuries to an underclass, a minority group composed of intractable, irresponsible, immoral, dangerous and undeserving individuals. There is also a fundamental role played by the mass media in endorsing and socially disseminating the neoconservative narrative, contributing to the justification of the extinction of social programs, as well as to the expansion of power and the militarization of the police forces, to increase the severity of criminal laws and to the reorientation of the prison towards the incapacitation of the “dangerous ones”. The thesis holds that mass criminalization contributes decisively to building a pejorative social identity of the poor (especially non-whites), assigning them responsibility for their own condition and the protagonism of socially destructive behaviors. Neo-conservative intellectuals, the mass media, and the penal system have collaborated to propagate the (supposedly) rational and moral superiority of both the free-market capitalist system and neoconservative “punitivism”, deflecting from public attention the socially much more damaging injuries produced by the neoliberal restructuring of the US economy and by the actions of the private corporate giants.