Punishment, imprisonment and medicalization: management techniques of undesirable and dangerous bodies

Abstract

The work proposal here presented, based on ethnographic research conducted in different urban areas, consists in an attempt to understand growing mass incarceration practices and medicalization, which, as two lines of interlaced strength, connect urban pheripheral neighborhoods, prisons and hospitalization units of Fundação CASA. These urban areas are objects of government actions operating with a complementary logic. On one hand, there is a punitive prison-vector which, among other effects, led to the incarceration of thousands of people in the last two decades. On the other hand, there is a medicalized vector, which operates not only in the management of bodies of those who survive in remote areas, but also in the restraining of those who were confined in institutions of social control. In this sense, the incarceration and the medicalization via psychotropic substances work as interrelated management techniques. The idea is to apprehend such vectors - understood as an heterogeneous set of practices, speeches, laws, institutions and governmental policies - as if they constituted a control device, which operates in the management of undesirable and dangerous bodies. (AU)