Monitoramento eletrônico e o paradigma neoliberal: dispositivos de controle na política criminal brasileira

Abstract

This work is based on an analysis through the lens of critical criminology regarding the electronic monitoring of individuals, established as a criminal policy in Brazil since 2010 by Law 12.258 and continuing until 2025. However, it also covers its origins in the United States in the 1960s, within the context of neoliberal rationality and the society of control, involving psychology, engineering, and criminal law as a device that navigates a range of discourses to update the disciplinary society. The study investigates how electronic monitoring operates not as an alternative to imprisonment, but as its technological and economic extension, reinforcing logics of selectivity and control over racialized and marginalized bodies. Using a qualitative methodology based on bibliographic review and interdisciplinary study, along with a quantitative approach analyzing public data on crime, incarceration, and the profile of monitored individuals, the work explores its genesis, spread, and institutionalization. The aim is to unveil the justifications supporting its implementation, considering the profit potential for private companies and the state in connection with the crisis of legitimacy of the penal system under the neoliberal paradigm, where the social, political, and racial effects of its application, far from representing a humanitarian innovation, expose their true nature under global strategies of continued criminalization. In Brazilian criminal policy, aspects aligning with the imperatives of austerity, efficiency, and life management promoted by the neoliberal state are traced, analyzing laws addressing the subject between 2010 and 2015, with diagnoses revealing an increase in punishment directed at young, Black, and poor men, expanding the punished population in Brazil. Electronic monitoring aims to renew models of submission and subjugation, which, with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, found space to become firmly established within the Brazilian penal system through its expansion, being used as a tool to reduce the incarcerated population most vulnerable to the disease. Extending beyond its initial field of application and reaching various sectors of production and institutionalization, the notion of a portable panopticon is developed through the adoption of microelectronic technologies, no longer requiring enclosed architecture, radiating into all public and private spaces by geolocation devices, with the function of producing constant information and surveillance over individuals who adhere to this technological innovation.