Incarceration and Penal Alternatives in Brazil - Elements for a Sociology of Punishment

The Brazilian prison population grows throughout the post-Constitution period of 1988. In this period, the so-called penal alternatives were expanded, with rights-restrictive sentences and the precautionary penalties in criminal proceedings. The expansion of the use of penal alternatives does not present a direct and necessary relation with the reduction in the use of the prison, and may even occur the expansion of both them. However, from the possible conclusion that the penal alternatives did not break with the centrality of the prison does not follow that such alternatives are incapable of any rupture. The effects of such alternative strategies to imprisonment are linked both to the interactions between the various political-criminal tendencies present in its emergence and implementation, as well as to the forms of understanding about the crime and the criminal that, at a given moment, guide its specific configuration. Thus, if it is relevant to question what the penal alternatives "did", that is, the impact of its implementation on reducing incarceration, it is equally relevant to question "what has been done" with the penal alternatives, that is, in what way the actors involved in its production and implementation, as well as in other areas of the judicial field, sought to lead, implement or oppose them. In this sense, this study intends to analyze the rates of incarceration and the application of alternative penalties and measures in Brazil, especially after the 2011 edition of the precautionary law in the criminal process, which creates alternatives to provisional incarceration , in the context of a sociology of punishment, seeking to verify the relations between the imprisonment movements and the criminal policies adopted, as well as to deepen the theoretical possibilities of interpretation of these data.