Selectivity analyses

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António Pedro Dores, 30 May 2008 CRCC meeting, Ankara

What is our goal?

• To present national results of social selectivity on criminalization

• To access the knowldge of social services professionals on cost evaluation of crime repression

• Perception of profissionals about the efficiency of judicial and penal activities

• Special focus on drug war situation

Table of issues

• The Portuguese situation

• Known social targets for penal selectivity

• Theoretical and methodological decisions on social research

The Portuguese situation

• Strutural problems on education, justice and modern social movements (and economics)

• Low crime rate, low immigration rate, low political controversy

• High social inequality

• High number of prison inmates, low prestige of justice decisions, weak social movements claiming justice fairness

The Portuguese situation (II)

• High level political (conspirative) conflicts about justice system (to promote economic fairness perserving

practical imunity to social high rank people. Look at corruption discussions)

• Few studies on law or prisons. Justice statistics availabel only very recently.

• Administrative censorship constraints on justice and prison workers

• Easy preventive imprisonment (automatic for foreigners)

Known tragets for selectivity

• Gipsys, black people and foreigners – Africans, Brazilians and eastern Europeans

• No educated and poor people

• People living “problematic neighborhoods”

• Impunity for VIP and corruption

Methodological ambiance

• Government decline to colaborate

• Dificult to achieve authorization to reach ressocialization professionals on job

• One can recrute two researchers assistents who knows well Portuguese prison system

Some theoretical findings• Emerging links between social networks

inside prison and social networks in popular neighborhoods

• Mixage media/police programs producing and exploring insecurity fellings

• Hipothesys: penal selectivity main variable is territory!

• Question: producing, labeling and stigmatizing neighborhoods: calculating costs

Critical approach

• Repression of crime is not only (or even mostly) penal procedings

• Corruption in planing building sector is crime and produces crime

• Metropolis are explored by popular media/police coalision (as in 19th century)

• Politics uses metropolis segmentation to help competitive concentrations of capital

Critical approach (II)

• Speculative evaluation of territory looking at finantial exploitation excludes non competitive people

• It acumulate segregate neighborhoods, under the rank of expected solvability

• Competitive (and sick) voyeurism mixes with security purposes of surveillance

Applied methodology

• Comparing two cases on two diferent towns (one more than 30 years old neighborhood of paisant Portuguese immigrants into Lisbon; one few years old black neighborhood

lodged at Amadora)

• Look at the ways this neighborhoods has been produced and labeled

• Interviews with professionals of all social areas who works there (political, educational, police,

social security, religious, local planning professionals)

End