Social Control Thinking: an empirical study of parliamentary debates on lowering the age of criminal responsibility

• Autor(a) principal: Cappi, Riccardo
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Revista de Estudos Empíricos em Direito
• Texto Completo: https://reedrevista.org/reed/article/view/6
• topic: Teoria fundamentada nos dados; Pesquisa empírica; Maioridade penal; Controle social; Racionalidade Penal Moderna; Grounded theory; Empirical research; Age of criminal responsibility; Social control; Modern penal rationality

This article aims to offer a description and a theoretical analysis of the “ways of thinking” social control of criminality and criminal justice. The starting point here is the analysis of both the Constitutional Amendment Proposals to lower the age of criminal responsibility and the Brazilian parliamentary debates on the subject in the Senate and the House of Representatives from 1993 to 2010. Furthermore, it shows the possibility of using Glaser and Strauss’ Grounded Theory in the field of Sociology of Law, through an empirical study of the legislative production. After the discussion of the suggested method, some strategies and results of the study will be presented as follows: the structure of the arguments in favor of lowering the age of criminal responsibility; an identification of the crucial opposing points between the arguments for and against this constitutional change; the development of four argument typologies, highlighting different ways of conceiving social control of juvenile delinquency. Finally, drawing on the concept of “modern penal rationality”(Pires), we demonstrate that, beyond the political positions held, a wide spectrum of parliamentary discourses remain centered on both a hostile vision of the offender and the idea of afflictive punishment, which are predominant references in the matter of social response to criminalized behaviors.