When freedom(s) are not free: surveillance, control and management of life stories crossed by pretrial release in São Paulo

Abstract

The present research project focuses on the processes of surveillance, restriction of rights and mechanisms of accountability towards people in pretrial release. While waiting for trial, several practices manage and control movements, impose and restrict daily activities and thus shape and inform life trajectories. Some examples are electronic monitoring, the need to stay at home during nighttime, the impossibility of going to certain places, talking to certain people, the obligation to carry out health treatments, among many other practices. Through a multissituated ethnography (MARCUS, 1998), guided by the transit of people through urban spaces, justice equipment and the psychosocial care network, following the conflicts placed by these restrictive measures in the midst of the experience of pretrial release, it is intended, from the points of view of the people subjected to these conditions, to answer questions about how these forms of prison modulation and reconfiguration are managed and experienced. With this, we try to provide subsidies to think about disputes related to a policy of criminal alternatives that, conceived to promote prison release, today is also criticized for representing an expansion mechanism of the criminal network.