Slaves, Free Poor, and Policemen: Brazil (From Crime History and Histories of Crime: Studies in the Historiography of Crime and Criminal Justice in Modern History, P 253-269, 1996, Clive Emsley and Louis A Knafla, eds. -- See NCJ-161818)

• NCJ Number: 161828
• Author(s): M L Bretas
• Date Published: 1996
• Length: 17 pages
• Sale Source: Greenwood Publishing Group
• Publication Type: Historical Overview
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

Since studies based on criminal justice records have been produced about different periods of Brazilian history, this paper divides them into studies of crimes related to slavery, to the free poor during the period of slavery, and at the turn of the 19th century to the creation of a free labor market; the emergence of a new set of agencies of social control to enforce the emerging social values is also discussed.

Abstract

The first study to focus on crime during slavery in Brazil was Patricia Aufderheide's "Order and Violence." In a study from 1780 until 1840, she dealt with data from many different cities and villages. In her view, apart from the street policing functions that controlled slaves, the judicial apparatus grew to repress the increasing numbers of mixed-blood free men. Slave owners were apparently able to control their own slaves. The existence of a significant group of free poor in slave societies was revealed in the 1960's through the classic study by Maria Silvia de Carcalho Franco. She described the living conditions of the free poor in the coffee region of the Sao Paulo Province in the second half of the 19th century, emphasizing how violence was a regular part of their lives. Newer studies of the free poor have focused on the control of particular social groups in an industrializing city. After the abolition of slavery, nonwhites were subject to police control as usual suspects of vagrancy, theft, or an organized kind of street fighting. Other issues that have received some attention from researchers are sexual and female crimes. The study of police history has not attracted much attention in Brazil. In most studies produced on violence and crime, the police have been presented as the instrument of the dominant class, exercising their power according to external wishes. This is still the view of many researches and the central approach of Neder and her collaborators in their study of Rio's police. A critical history of police institutions in Brazil has yet to be written. 69 notes