Struggling for law: role of the Public Defender’s office in streets and prisons

Abstract

Articulated with the empirical research fields "Management and conflict of urban spaces" and "Re-articulation of safety devices, punishment and incarceration", this post-doctoral research aims to know the performance of the "Defensoria Pública do Estado de São Paulo", considering the guarantee of rights of populations in the contextof the conflicts that take place in São Paulo as well as in the context of the different procedures that characterize the criminal process. The proposal is to reconstruct the judicial measures taken by the "Defensoria" in favor of a set of people affected by the actions of government, in and out of prisons. In this research, it is intended to address the formation of a field of disputes within the justice system that puts in opposition actors from different institutions, who hold different viewpoints, but are also belonging to the state organization. Thus, the interest of the study is to explore the specifics configurations around the role of law inurban management and social punishment. More broadly, it seeks to situate the role of the "Defensoria" within the social conflicts emerging in the reconfiguration of "neoliberal city" and "mass incarceration". The new forms of production and management of urban spaces, displacements on the fields of illegalism´s management, new forms of government of conducts, the reconfiguration of preventive and punitive measures are crossed by various conflicts that reorganize discourses and knowledges, actors and institutions, in short, the contemporary power devices. Considering the discussion of Michel Foucault about the different axes that make up the modern heterogeneous power technologies - law, disciplines and government management - the hypothesis to be explored is that the contextual identification of conflicts over contemporary production of urban and confinement spaces allows to draw the specifics borders of conflict and tension present in the processes to be analyzed. (AU)