Controversy over the juvenile justice model underpinning the Child and Adolescent Statute

• Autor(a) principal: Cifali, Ana Claudia
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Sociologias (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://seer.ufrgs.br/index.php/sociologias/article/view/117917
• topic: juvenile justice; punishment; Statute of Child and Adolescent; legal reforms; criminal policy; justiça juvenil; punição; Estatuto da Criança e do Adolescente; reformas legislativas; política criminal

In this article, we seek to analyze a concrete process: the struggles in the political and professional arena around the definition of juvenile justice in Brazil at the end of the 1980s. The approval of the Child and Adolescent Statute (Estatuto da Criança e do Adolescente - ECA) in 1990 is often represented as a rupture with the previous model, provided for in the Code for Minors (Código de Menores) of 1927 and 1979. Generally, the ECA is framed as a “revolution”, a “paradigm shift” in relation to the previous model, that is, as an expression of a rupture with the previous moment. For this, we chose to recover this struggle, seeking to capture the ways of thinking or rationalities about juvenile justice, the social representations about youth and criminality and the actors involved in this process, especially from interviews and parliamentary speeches. With this, we conclude that the juvenile justice content in ECA is the result of disputes fought in the juridical field by those identified as “garantistas” and “menoristas” and, despite bringing innovations in the sense of imposing limitations on state intervention, it still presents continuities in relation to the previous model.