Criminalization, Social Control and Media in Brazil

Since the end of the 1970’s, practices of punishment and incarceration h ave grown in modern states all over the world; in Brazil, only in the 21st century, prison population has tripled. In parallel to this fact, some television shows are approaching police themes using a discourse that demands longer and more harsh penal sentences. The goal of this paper is to comprehend, through the analysis of these shows, how they can be perceived in relation to the transformations of current capitalism. As empirical data, is presented the analysis of “Cidade Alerta” anda “Brasil Urgente”, to television programs on that matter with nationwide exhibition. Thinking the transformation in capitalism and in the labor force, we take the notion that each laborer is becoming an entrepreneur of his or her own self, in a way that the worker has to build a trajectory that allows him or her to be enable to obtain income, even as an employee. Hence, ideas such as subjective engagement and individual responsibility have grown, and thus that the motivation to work and the perfect labor force should come individually from each laborer. Nonetheless, some possibilities of obtaining income are forbidden due to their criminalization, like theft or drug trafficking. We present, as a working hypothesis, the idea that these criminalizations generate new forms of social control over the poorest extract of the population. Moreover, these criminalizations, and its subsequent mass incarceration, are only possible due to a strong moral reaction against the practices that are criminalized, and this moral reaction is largely potentiated by the television programs that are analyzed here. Thus, there programs articulate themselves with new forms of social control provoked in the wave of mass incarceration of the 21st century.