Discipline and Governance of Urban Immorality in the 19th-Century Rio de Janeiro

• In Event: Windows into Historical Crime and Punishment

Abstract

By the end of the 19th century, the immoral habits of the urban outcasts in Rio de Janeiro became a matter of concern for the authorities. The police and the prison system were mobilized to crack down on what was considered degenerate behaviors (e.g., beggary, vagrancy, loitering, prostitution, public inebriation, gambling, and Afrobrazilian cultural practices). Repressing such activities indicates the enforcement of rationality aimed at disciplining the masses into a specific morality and code of conduct.
This research examines the social control of urban outcasts and the punitive governance of habits through the lenses of Michel Foucault’s discipline. This project employs a descriptive research design that investigates the strategies of social control in 19th-century Brazil in light of critical theories about power, punishment, and governing through crime. Through this analysis, I compare Foucault’s arguments with the academic literature about the history of criminalization in Brazil. The preliminary findings show that Foucault’s remarks on the lectures at the Collège de France and his books can provide an analytical framework to understand the genealogical transformation of the Brazilian criminal justice system and its political rationality at the fin the siècle.

Author

• Jovi Krieger, University of Alberta