Prison privatization

Abstract

The article addresses, within the context of the crisis of the Brazilian prison system, the proposal for "prison privatization," examining it in light of liberal state theory and the 1988 Federal Constitution. Drawing on Locke, Hobbes, Bobbio, and Foucault, the author demonstrates that freedom and its deprivation constitute an object of non-waivable, non-delegable state oversight, the State holding the monopoly of force as the foundation of its sovereignty, and distinguishes socially oriented community participation, as embodied in Community Councils and Patronage boards, from the economic appropriation of penal execution by private enterprise. He argues that reducing the concept of freedom to the mere right to come and go obscures the true breadth of that legal interest, and that the Constitution excludes freedom and human dignity from the scope of economic activity. He concludes that prison privatization is incompatible with the tenets of the Democratic State of Law, amounting to a negation of the State and of the prisoner's dignity.