Como as Práticas da Repressão à Vadiagem Podem Contribuir para a Compreensão da Hist´ória do Processo Penal Brasileiro?

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the practices of repression to vagrancy as a main aspect to understand and to write about the history of the criminal justice system in Brazil in general and the history of criminal procedure in particular. Usually, brazilian researchers argue that the authoritarian skills of our criminal procedure derive from fascists ideas that spread during 1930 decade among the authors (and contemporaries) of the Criminal Procedure Code of 1941. In this work we try to demonstrate that this aspect is important, but not enough. For us, it is crucial to bring attention to the pos-abolition period in Brazil (the end of XIX and the beginning of XX century) and understand how police control was essentially directed toward black communities. To do so, starting from the Foucauldian analysis of power, we explored empirical data of police practices in the beginning of XX century. The research showed that police forces used to arrest a significant number of people – often black ones – accused by vagrancy or disorder and that these acts was not submitted to judicial review. In other words, police officers used to have a prominent task: controlling public disorder without any constriction. At the end, we conclude that this kind of control of disorder based on arrests not reviewed by justice with plain freedom of police officers is a central feature to understand the meaning of “authoritarian” in our criminal procedure.