Punishment and social structure in Brazil under slavery: From the colony to the inauguration of the modern prison.

Event Details: Slavery determined specific punitive practices. The concrete relations of the slave society reveal the coexistence of a private punitive power alongside a public system of punishment. The differences between rural and urban slavery, as well as the political, social, and economic transformations in the period studied, reveal how the constituted powers adopted their own punitive forms for the reproduction of the slave order. With the Independence of Brazil, a liberal discourse and a conservative practice coexisted, which influenced the process of inaugurating the modern Brazilian prison, still in a slave-owning order. This presentation intends to discuss the real purposes of the emergence of the modern Brazilian prison in the midst of other measures to harden punitive practices with the purpose of controlling the black population and reproducing the slave order.

About the Speaker: Dr Patrick Cacicedo is a Brazilian prison researcher. He holds a doctorate and postdoctoral degree from the University of São Paulo. He is a full Professor in the Doctorate Program in Criminal Sciences at the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala. He is coordinator and researcher at the Centre for Research and Extension on Penalty and Penal Execution at the Faculty of Law of the University of São Paulo. Patrick is also Member and Researcher of the Global Prisons Research Network and a Public Defender in São Paulo, Brazil, where he coordinated the Specialized Centre for Prison Situation.