Critical criminology, criminal justice system and complexity: The operability of the death machine revealed by the analysis of homicides in the city of Pelotas in the years 2012 and 2013

Abstract

Formal and informal instances of penal control have been carrying out historically in our continent, a massacre from its selective operation criminalizing and victimizing. Such genocidal contours are linked to new dynamics that enhance his death production capacity in a recursive and feeding back logic. In this sense, it is assumed as a working hypothesis that the deaths produced in homicides demonstrate the achievement of an autophagic  process with the production of death from the collaboration of the own clientele of the penal system, which plays a supportive role to the genocidal formal instances of the institutionalized punitive control. It is the criminal justice system in its most perverse and astutely way, as it not only selects and kills the excluded, but also makes participate themselves in a death spiral.  In this perspective, it is used as a theoretical reference, the contributions of critical and radical criminology, focusing on analysis of marginal and peripheral reality. This scientific work is the result of a literature characterized by an interdisciplinary and critical bias on the phenomena analyzed, as well as an empirical sociological research (quantitative and qualitative) with descriptive and explanatory traits.