BETWEEN REFORMISM AND REGRESSION: CIVILIZING AND DECIVILIZING TENSIONS IN BRAZILIAN PUBLIC SECURITY POLICIES AFTER 1988

Abstract

This article analyzes the structural ambiguity that characterizes public security policies and prison governance in post-1988 Brazil, examining the extent to which the institutional design of ADPF 347 and the Pena Justa Plan responds to selective and decivilizing processes historically embedded in the prison system. The research adopts a mixed qualitative and quantitative, documentary, descriptive, and comparative approach. Qualitatively, it conducts documentary analysis of ADPF 347 and the Pena Justa Plan. Quantitatively, it combines secondary data from SISDEPEN/SENAPPEN and the Continuous PNAD/IBGE for the 2016–2025 period, focusing on the racial, age, educational, and procedural composition of the prison population. Norbert Elias’s theory of the civilizing process, W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of the color line, and Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics are mobilized as interpretive frameworks. The results show a persistent overrepresentation of Black and Brown people in the Brazilian prison system throughout the entire series, even while other demographic and procedural indicators changed. The article concludes that institutional rationalization and procedural reformism, although relevant to confronting rights violations, are not sufficient on their own to break historical patterns of penal selectivity and racial inequality.