Facções criminosas prisionais, violência e criminalidade na semidemocracia brasileira.

Abstract

Ensuring the effectiveness of civil rights is one of the fundamental premises of a democratic regime and it is up to the State to provide its citizens with the full enjoyment of such rights, through its legal structure and formal institutions. Brazil has not yet fully accomplished its political regime transition and, despite showing considerable levels of electoral democracy, the rule of law is noticeably limited, with huge gaps in the effectiveness of law and order enforcement as well as in the guarantee of civil liberties, which allows its classification as a semi-democratic country. The country has had high indicators of violence for decades and has become one of the largest markets for drug trafficking in the world, a scenario stimulated by high levels of corruption and impunity. In such a context, violent group crime has been one of the most significant public issues in Brazil. Stopping the actions of organized crime is, therefore, a mechanism for protecting the country’s civil, political and economic life. In this sense, the action of criminal factions in prisons is a result of the malfunctioning of the Criminal Justice System institutions, which is strongly related to the inefficacy of the rule of law. This research aimed at analyzing the phenomena related to the appearance, structuring and performance of prison gangs in Brazil and how they have become more expressive in the current time of electoral democratization. Methodologically, the research is exploratory in nature with the use of statistical techniques and theoretical interpretation. By using statistical data, it was demonstrated that the high rates of violence in Brazil are associated with the fragile institutional design of our Criminal Justice System, in which low levels of institutional responsiveness is verified, thus keeping the country in a semi-democratic gray zone.