Crime and Punishment in B razil

Abstract

The Portuguese courts sentenced convicts to penal transportation, which was an integral part of Brazil's early settlement. After independence, Brazil devised different punishments for slave and free convicts despite its liberal constitution and penal code. Brazil's emperor Pedro II brought about a de facto end to the death penalty in 1876 followed by a de jure abolition of capital punishment in 1890. In the late twentieth century new criminal organizations emerged from Brazil's overcrowded prisons where guerrilla insurgents influenced common criminals to form new more highly organized criminal organizations. The rapid growth of Brazil's prisons sped the growth of these organizations that have members in and outside prisons.

Conclusion

“…In order to create at least some element of differentiation, they moved even further away from uniformity and deliberately introduced a greater diversity of execution forms, while at the same time developing an increasing number of sentencing options in non-capital cases by the use of transportation, imprisonment, hard labour on the Thames and solitary confinement. 65 In this period, when a much wider range of minor property crimes could potentially be punished by death than had even been the case in the classic 'early modern' period, post-execution punishment provided a coherent response to those who pointed to the unfairness of giving the same sentence to both minor thieves and those who had committed premeditated murders. This long eighteenth-century capital punishment regime had its own logic within which post-execution punishment undoubtedly played an important part.…”

Introduction

“…The penal regimes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had relied mainly on physical punishments such as whipping, branding and hanging, but the introduction, and widespread use, of transportation and imprisonment in the eighteenth century added new flexibility to the sanctions available and encouraged the growing use of pardoning in capital cases. 50 Moreover, as will become clear as this study unfolds, the period from the late-seventeenth century to the early years of the nineteenth also witnessed a considerable expansion in the depth of capital punishment. Aggravated pre-execution techniques were much discussed and two forms of post-execution punishment were increasingly used as the century progressed, creating (for murder at least) a new level of differentiation within the capital punishment system that paralleled the similar change that took place amongst non-capital sanctions as the new intermediate sanctions of transportation and imprisonment came to dominate punishments for property crime.…”

“…The two most important legislative moments-the 1752 Murder Act which made the dissection or gibbeting of murderers' corpses compulsory and the Anatomy Act of 1832 which put an end to the former practice-have received some attention. 16 However, no serious discussion has yet been offered of the century-long debate on aggravated execution punishments; of the long-term origins of the Murder Act and its relationship to the problems created by the growth of the Bloody Code; of the many other post-1752 legislative initiatives that attempted to introduce (or modify) the use of post-execution punishments 17 ; of the reasons why the post-execution punishment regime codified in the Murder Act lasted for so long, or of the number and types of offenders that were subjected to such punishments between 1752 and 1832. Whilst the extent of capital punishment has been studied in detail, the various ways in which greater depth was added to 'the spectacle of the gallows' in England has not received anything like the same attention.…”

“…In 1786 the Prime Minister himself supported a bill introduced by William Wilberforce designed to extend the post-execution punishment of dissection from murder to several other offences including burglary and highway robbery, and similar (if less well-supported) attempts were made in 1796 and in 1830. 25 Although from the mid-eighteenth century onwards critics of capital punishment increasingly emphasized the need to replace it with non-capital options, such as transportation, life imprisonment with hard labour or solitary confinement, 26 one of the core themes of many early-eighteenth-century critiques-that hanging was not punishment enough and needed additional post-execution punishments to be attached to it-clearly continued to have resonance, and to gain considerable support within governing circles, not only in the 1780s and 1790s but also well into the nineteenth century (Chap. 4).…”

Changing Attitudes to Post-execution Punishment 1752–1834

“…Physical publically inflicted punishments directed at the body, symbolized by the gallows, the pillory and the gibbet were giving way to private, non-physical and mainly prison-based sanctions directed at the mind and aimed at generating the reform of the offender, as can be seen in the rapid growth in the use of imprisonment to punish property offenders and in the building of new penitentiary-style prisons in several counties. 178 The solitary cell hidden from contact with the world, rather than the solitary corpse gibbetted by the roadside was becoming the new focus of attention in late-eighteenth-century penal debate. Historians are deeply divided about whether we should see this movement from the gallows to the prison as simply a new and deeper strategy of control and social discipline, or as a function of a fundamental change in sensibilities towards violence.…”