BLACK WOMEN AND THE PUNISHMENT CYCLE: THE MAXIMIZATION OF PENALTY AFTER PRISON

Abstract

The central issue of this text is to analyze, based on the reports of women who have left the prison system and who are users of the Social Office of Bahia (ESBA), the maximization of punishment directed at black women by the criminal justice system, focusing on reflections on racism punishment and the criminalization of being a woman. The corpus of the present analysis are the reports of black women released from the prison system assisted by the Social Office of Bahia (ESBA) in the year 2021. The methodology used for the study is the content analysis (Bardin, 1977) of semi-structured interviews carried out with four former users of the institutional body: Maria, Nilma, Domingas and Paula. The reports present the extremes of the dynamics of punishment experienced by black women and the exacerbation of inequalities that directly affect this group. The aggravation of punishment is present in the corpus through disadvantages that are expressed in a violent relationship with the police, in the coloniality of the judicial system and in the subalternity of access to justice, in the cyclical link with the spaces of execution of the sentence and in the dynamics of network connection. Thus, the results indicate that penal policies and practices are based on the centrality of race and gender for the maintenance of punitive dynamics even after the imprisonment experience.