Law and order: the war against the poor.

Abstract

This study examines some discursive strategies that have guided treatment of political issues relating to public safety. We first exert ourselves to describe the arguments deployed in defense of an intensive model of repression to crime, usually referred to by the motto “law and order”. Then, we discussed the commitment of the formalization of such practices, emblematically undertaken by Jakobs (2007), with the “enemy criminal law”. Whereas the work of Wacquant (2001; 2007; 2012), Giorgi (2006), and Zaffaroni (2007), we identified a rupture in relation to criminal technologies described by Foucault, in the 1970s, as devices for standardization of bodies and regulation of the population.  According to these authors, it deals with the social construction of a “negative” population “surplus” (GIORGI, 2007, p. 105), situated on the edge of the order, and stigmatized, as a threat to the security of society, which it transforms into an elementary target of apparatus of repression. Finally, we conclude that the security strategies inspired by the neoconservative ideals, as well as the proposals for modification of the legal system, drawn up under the prism of the “social enemy”, insidiously evidence as an affront to the Democratic State of Law, increasingly identifying itself with totalitarian forms of domination.