Plots and encounters in criminal hearings:

colonialities, anti-blackness and the judiciary based on observations in Salvador and Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

In this work, we reflect how judicial practices and rituals, in Salvador and Rio de Janeiro, can express the relationship between the penal system, racism and whiteness. Based on experiences in both courts, including observations with ethnographic inspiration in the common spaces of the buildings; custody hearings in Salvador and Criminal trial hearings in Rio; and analysis of one sentence, we put in perspective the relationship between legal discourses, anti-blackness and colonialities. At first, we present some of the difficulties founded in conducting empirical research involving the criminal justice system, highlighting that violence, on these spaces, operates from its own sophistication. In a second, we present two concrete cases that express how criminalization processes can reinforce systemic advantages and disadvantages in our society. From their externalities and contingent relations with the oppression of race, gender, class, sexuality and territoriality, experiences involving the criminalization of black people reveal a strategic alignment with the political project of the control and incarceration of these bodies.