The Last Hour: A Study about Homicides and Social Exclusion

The research "The last hour" objective record the stories of people who experience the social exclusion through the most stigmatized representation: as murderers and as prison inmates. The focus of the research are workers who only killed once, that is, these people are not part of groups that practice murder. The methodology used in our research is based on the reconstruction, by the respondents, the “last time” that preceded the murder and the identification of symbolic elements that surrounded him at relevant moments of his life. This moment empowers the breakdown of social prohibition to commit murder, while marking its entry into a socially-recognized group and labeled as "excluded". For Robert Castels (1997) marginalization is a process and this result of a dynamic of exclusion, which is produced in the fragility of their social ties.

Another author referenced, Pierre Bourdieu in "The biographical illusion," states that “a life is inseparably the set of events of an individual existence conceived as a story and the reporting of this story." We found in our research that all of the mentioned relations (leisure, family, religion) they are restricted geographically to the way that the individual travels from home to work and experienced in the gaps left over from the time not spent at work. Considering that all the activities carried out by respondents are poorly paid and require a commitment of time often higher than other workers, the limitations of social relations are difficult to overcome.

In this research, "the life organized as a story" brings us to the set of activities which form socially the individual, such as leisure, personal relationships, relationships work, sports or games as elements that were part of the construction of the break with the social code more important, which is that of not kill.