The ideology of incarceration and punitive prejudice

symptoms of Brazilian authoritarianism

Abstract

The Western model of punishment, shaped by transformations since the eighteenth century, has proven insufficient to contain the new forms of criminality emerging from modern paradigms of labor, property, and rationalized social organization. In Brazil, where violence and legal restriction have historically operated as mechanisms of social control, extended periods of authoritarian governments and widespread repression reinforced the adoption of a penal system aligned with the production model’s structural need to treat crime and imprisonment as coercive and regulatory categories. This article critically examines the inherent contradiction between a punitive State—formally framed as resocializing—and its tangible effects on mass authoritarian tendencies, social conformity, and public moralities. Drawing on Critical Theory, particularly the work of Adorno and Horkheimer, and grounded in Freudian psychoanalysis, the analysis explores the complex dynamics through which punitivism is produced, disseminated, and politically co-opted within the masses, articulated with the drive economy of individual and collective subjects, and mobilized by organized movements around authoritarian demands in the administered world. This study is theoretical and reflective, combining an exploratory conceptual discussion of the literature with quantitative and qualitative data on Brazilian penal policies and public opinion. It further argues that mechanisms of stereotyping, prejudice, and fear—intensified by sensationalist media—sustain deeply ingrained taboos surrounding the generalized notion of the “criminal,” thereby obstructing new relationships with this social object. Consequently, paranoia, unreflective moral reasoning, and widespread social destructiveness are reinforced within a population socialized to serve domination, adapt to systemic instability, and endure the exacerbation of structural and existential helplessness.