FROM PUNITIVE SELECTIVITY TO NECROPOLITICS

THE IMPACT OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC ON THE BRAZILIAN PRISON SYSTEM

Abstract

The article seeks to evaluate the impacts that punitive selectivity and necropolitics have brought to the Brazilian prison system with the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic. Given the theme, this article was built having as research problem the following question: to what extent the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic in the Brazilian prison system are tributaries of a punitive selectivity that, in the pandemic scenario, transmuted into necropolitics? As an initial hypothesis, it is possible to affirm that the Brazilian punitive selectivity, in the pandemic period, assumed a necropolitical bias. As a result, young, black or brown men, with low education and, consequently, poor, incarcerated in Brazil, were differentially affected by the pandemic caused by the coronavirus - to the extent that their chances of contamination and death, in the context of prisons, were enhanced by Covid-19. As a general objective, the research seeks to evaluate the criminal selectivity as a factor of social exclusion of certain groups and how these factors impacted the prison in the pandemic period, allowing us to speak of a necropolitical scenario.