Discursive Elasticity and Field Inertia in the Brazilian Criminal Law Field

• In Event: 40461 - Section on Sociology of Law Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 6: Political Economy / Democratic Deficiencies

Abstract

What is the role of legal actors in the material and symbolic construction of the penal state? How do global legal ideas impact local penal change? In this paper, I combine law and society scholarship on the role of legal socialization and doctrinal ideas with the sociology of punishment’s emphasis on the historical construction of penal discourses and practices. To do so, I examine the legal mobilization around Brazil’s Operation Car Wash and its aftermath. The 2014 investigation exposed a multibillion-dollar bribery scheme implicating high-ranking politicians and businesspeople. For the first time in the country’s history, powerful white businesspeople faced the same fate as the young, Black, working-class men who compose the vast majority of Brazil’s incarcerated population. Seeking to institutionalize this shift, federal prosecutors in 2016 proposed the Ten Measures Against Corruption, a legal reform inspired by global anticorruption ideas. However, the bill was killed in Congress, setting the stage for a paradoxical outcome. In 2019, former Car Wash judge Sergio Moro revived the Ten Measures in the Anti-Crime Package, merging the anticorruption agenda with far-right president Bolsonaro’s tough-on-crime policies. What began as a crusade against the powerful ultimately culminated in an American-inspired legal overhaul that reinforced punitive measures against the racialized poor. To explain this transformation, I develop a discourse-centered field analysis, drawing from Bourdieu’s concepts of legal field and habitus. I introduce the concepts of discursive elasticity and field inertia to analyze how penal discourses stretched to target elite crime before recoiling to reinforce long-standing penal inequalities. Based on over a year of fieldwork in São Paulo and Porto Alegre, 116 interviews, and a textual analysis of legal actors’ discourse in legislative debates, I show how prosecutors’ efforts to advance anticorruption reforms mobilized punitive logics that were ultimately repurposed to expand state repression against the racialized poor.

Author

• Ed Cornelius, University of Minnesota