Contributions of Latin American critical criminology

• In Event: Critical Criminology 4: Critical Perspectives on Crime and Criminalisation

Abstract

This abstract is the result of doctoral research and aims to present the main contributions of Latin American critical criminologists, portraying the advances and challenges of critical criminology or liberation criminology in Latin America, with a focus on Brazil, from a materialist analysis. Thus, the research aims to highlight the importance of these authors in critical criminological thinking, focused on the regional particularities of countries with a slave, colonial and dictatorial heritage. Contexts that were marked by repression, criminalization and violence of the population, especially black people in Latin America. The foundations of critical criminology in the critical understanding of the state and the law in the face of capitalist relations of exploitation and punishment, the concept of crime as a social construct, the penal selectivity present in all criminalization processes and the criticism of penal dogma, are important elements in a critical analysis of the Latin American penal system. Critical criminology is an important aid to theoretical and political liberation and represented a watershed in the criminal sciences. In this sense, it is of the utmost importance for critical criminology to develop strategies to broaden its concepts with the common sense, broadening the horizons of academia, seeking concrete transformations in the materiality of the penal system.

Author

• Giovanna Caneo, PhD student in social work at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, Brazil.