Crime and punishment all out of kilter

Discussing the topic of violence in Rio de Janeiro a month ago, Brazil's president Lula raised the question of whether criminals are normal people. One is led to ask, are all criminals abnormal? Talvane de Moraes, Forensic Psychiatrist belives the opposite is true: ”Its a false opposition, that is roundly rejected by psychiatry”, said Moraes.

Moraes (photo) has worked at a penitentiary asylum and at the Forensic Medicine Institute in Rio (Instituto Médico Legal) having examined well-known criminals, and in his view they are no different from anyone else, they have their social bonds, sense of companionship and codes of ethics. “Criminal behaviour may evade rules, but it is human”, said Moraes.

The psychiatrist was one of the invited speakers at the First Seminar on Criminology and Public Security that took place at the School for Magistrates of Rio de Janeiro, Emerj, at the Rio de Janeiro Forum. The participants, most of them people who work in security or in the judiciary, did not spare criticism of their own systems.

According to Moraes, the main characteristic of mental illnes is a desintegration of the psychic world. “Crime is a pragmatic act that is committed with a purpose. The criminal is a cold person from the psychic point of view, but criminal conduct does not determine mental illness,” said Moraes. "On the contrary", he adds, "people with mental illnesses rarely commit crimes and generaly, when they do, do so by accident, say when they suffer a bout of psychosis and feel they are being persecuted."

Moraes explains that when faced with deviant behavior, there is a natural tendency to judge the  person involved as abnormal. “When someone commits a brutal crime, we reject this person from our circle, in an exorcism of sorts. To attribute illness is a way to repudiate those criminal acts and exclude the person who committed them from our social circle. But offending is very different from mental illness,” said Moraes. According to him, it is hard to establish medical models for human behavior and for criminal behavior.

“There is an old notion that people are born to do good or evil. Human beings are a biographical, not a biological construct. I am not trying to deny the role of temperament, of a person's fundamental characteristics, but individual uniqueness is a biographical construct based on what we were given by our circle: our family, school, friends. It is what leads us to be ourselves. We live in constant flux between what we are or would like to be and the social group in which we live,” said Moraes.

The psychiatrist stressed that society today is more tolerant of differences among people and now accepts certain behaviors as part of human diversity, behaviors considered deviant in the past. In his view it is a mistake to focus solely on punishing criminals. “If the state has the monopoly over punishment, then it has to offer the offender new perspectives so that he or she does not return to crime in the future, it must offer opportunities for change,”said Moraes.
 
Cláudio Ferraz, Head of the Organized Crime and Special Investigations Unit, Draco in Portuguese, agreed with Moraes. “Crime is a business and the goal is always profit”, said Ferraz, adding that jails are a “graduate course in crime.”

Criminal Policy: schizoid and contradictory

Carlos Canedo (photo) a prosecutor at the Public Prosecution office (Ministério Público) of the State of Minas Gerais, criticised policies on crime that he denounced as both “schizoid and contradictory” the world over. He said that policies addressing crime “dissociate control from punishment. You shut one end and open the other”.

According to Canedo, although demoralized, today people seem to want to see renewed value in prisons. “Prisons are not useful to resocialize, but to exclude. When prisons are being valued once again, it is done in the worst possible way: people value it as a tool for isolating criminals, for as long as possible. It turns into a type of social profilaxy,” said Canedo.

The prosecutor adds that in policy discussions the position of the victims is also inappropriately framed, as if attenuating circumstances for criminals would mean disrespecting victims. “The pain that victims go through is very real. The State reaffirms its sovereignty by dispensing punishment, but it comes at a high cost, and the jails are overpopulated,” said Canedo. In his view the solution lies in adopting measures of social control.

All out of kilter

The criminal system and incarceration were also criticed by Police Captain Orlando Zaccone (photo below) coordinator of the Polinter Prison Unitds. In his view the role of incarceration in terms of their goals with respect to security, - to punish, to prevent recidivism (through intimidation), and to rehabilitate – are in open contradiction to each other. “Prisons were a failure the day they were created, and are still a failure in their goals. One either punishes or one socializes,” said Zaccone.

According to Zaccone, jails are extra-legal areas, and are not prepared to receive prisoners. Adding that today there more people in jail awaiting trial than sentenced to prison. “We inverted the system, we lock them up first and ask questions later. There are more suspects in prison today than there are convicts. The result is cruel, jails are full of people who have no power whatsoever, and the bosses are transferred out the same day. The place made for suffering ends up being filled with people who are the most vulnerable,” said Zaccone.

Still according to the police captain, the offense that leads to the greatest number of prison sentences is drug trafficking. This affects for example, poor women who are not violent, but are caught and sent to prison for taking drugs into jails for their partners. “They traffic in love,” said Zaccone. After them the offenses to send more people to jail include robbery, bearing guns, theft, receiving stolen goods and domestic violence. In Zaccone's view, who has authored a book on drug trafficking entitled “Acionistas do Nada – Quem são os traficantes de drogas”, these people end up in jail because they do not cause social ripples.

“The system choses its enemies. Is not paying your taxes a crime? Of course it is. But how many shop owners are arrested? They are not target by the justice system. A middle class trafficker is treated like a user, like a “shop owner”. Now how long do mules and international drug traffickers stay in jail? It would be interesting to find out. The world of the penitentiaries is all out of kilter,”said Zaccone.

Still according to Zaccone, the high levels of autos de resistência (or 'resistance killings' caused by police officers who record such deaths as self-defense). “If the police forces do not think, they atrophy. We need to rethink what is war, what is omission and what is corruption," said Zaccone, who added that prisoners must have the right to dignity.

Repression backfires

Rio de Janeiro State Military Police Colonel Jorge da Silva, (photo)  spoke about police action. In his ivew the notion of ending violence through force is both unproductive and wrong.

“There is no lack of police in Rio. People say we must do more, but more of the same? The more police we use, if we lack control, means more deaths and death of police officers too.” According to Silva, the system itself may help increase the violence, if, for example, it is corrupt or discriminatory.  Silva would like to see police work refocusing and a reform of public security policies.

The idea of pacifying through committing massacres is a problem. Do we want to end drug trafficking or to eliminate drug traffickers from the shantytowns? To merely suppress is no solution, you catch a few and other quickly take their place, like a machine. This way of acting is simply a pretext for keeping the shantytown communities under control. The more we fight trafficking, the more street crime goes up, " said Silva.

Translated by Lis Horta Moriconi