The punitive fetish: should we judge again the prisoner?

They say you know how tough a country is according to the penal rules set out there. In Brazil, differently from what common sense promoted by the media when we talk about impunity, here the rules are harsh, especially if the subject is poor and black.

The "Lava-Jato brazilian operation" is largely responsible for making criminal matters a common conversation and with the 2018 presidential election, criminal penalty has become a major issue in Brazilian families.

This is an advance, as not long ago there was a popular saying that "politics, religion and the football team are not discussed in public."

However, in the legal system, the sector responsible for organizing the policy, there is a concern about how this dissemination takes place, as it often appears in an irresponsible and full of fantasies.

It is true that Hitler and Mussolini donnot created fascism overnight. The centre and hight wrings hate speeches are phenomena that settle in society slowly gaining popular support because they use the State failures.

On the other hand, it is essential to think that there are those who steal public money being corrupt, there are those who deal with hungry, the health system, unemployment and the low level of education due to the absence of public policies.

With the accumulation of popular dissatisfaction and a wave of "magical promises", neoliberal policies gained strength in Bolsonaro's government, where the central discourse is established in "we need to kill the bad guys."

But if we look more carefully at this hate speech, we realize that corruption, one of the greatest crimes against the population, is committed by a portion of society that in Brazil constitutes an economic elite. However, in the popular view, crime is only one in which the criminal sticks his hand inside your car during a closed traffic light and takes your cell phone.

It is the perfect plan for the narcissus, since between the vanity of the leader and his exaltation by the oppressed who elect him as a savior, issues related to guarantees and defense of rights, economic deviations against public policies disappear from Brazilian families, getting the conclusion where human rights becomes almost a bad thing.

Interesting, because there are some rights that you don't have to go to university to know they exist. You've probably heard about "everyone is equal before the law" and you've certainly heard about "in dubio pro reo" or "presumption of innocence", expressions that long before the discussion of the "Lava-Jato operation", we found stamped on newspapers.

The history that is generally not told is that these rights are the result of the struggle that took place during the military dictatorship, when bodies disappeared and never appeared again. If they appeared, they appeared dead, commonly marked by suffering and torture provoked by the State.

With the judgment of the validity of the imprisonment in the second instance, the Brazilian Supreme Court reinforced what is already in the Federal Constitution: "you cannot be arrested, until there is a final and unappealable decision".

The President of the Republic of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, reverses the narrative glorifying the military dictatorship. But for us human rights defenders there are some questions to ask you: Do you know anyone who has been arrested? What are the bodies raped and tortured in Brazilian jails? What color or race are they? Did you have the opportunity to talk about those experiences with a person who was in the jail? Do you believe that this person returned better or worse to society after expend time in the system? What if that person was your child, wife or husband? What if it was yourself?

This fetish for sadomasochistic punitivism naturalized by the perverse logic that “a good bandit is a dead bandit” comes from those who are sure they are untouchable by the Brazilian State because they are often work within the system and they will never be caught. Those who are unaware that the state of exception is right there, just in the corner when the right-wing government is running the State.