Propositions about the present and the future of critical criminology in Brazil

Abstract

The proposition is analyzed to recognize more clearly the relative autonomy of two different fields of study - the critique of political economy penalty, in one hand, and criticism of the social construction of crime and deviance concepts, on the other. Thus, the assertion is taken that the demolition of the etiological / causal hypotheses about the "criminal behavior" was and is sociologically founded on a kind of deconstructionist sociology, marked by the rejection of the functionalist conception of social control. But the "traditional criminal attorney" is anchored in social control concepts typically functionalist, or brought back to the state function when he limits the concept of "penalty" to the premise that it is treated merely as a "reaction" to the deviation, and not as a constitutive practice. It is necessary, finally, to deconstruct the concept of punishment, justice and the punitive speech also in his "common sense" in daily life and in the population, seeking ultimately a deslegitimization of "bottom-up".