Between Justice and Psychiatry: Drug users in the cracks of the judicial asylum

• Grant number: 23/10776-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: February 01, 2024
• End date: May 31, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology - Urban Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Sérgio Resende Carvalho
• Grantee: Sara Vieira Antunes
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências Médicas (FCM). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 25/02223-4 - Between Medicalization, Criminalization, and Moralization: Drug Users in Brazil's Forensic Psychiatric Hospitals, BE.EP.PD

Abstract

In the last thirty years, Brazil has experienced three major transformations in the fields of mental health and the penal system: the reorientation of the mental health care model, the resurgence of the political and media agenda of the "war on drugs" and the exponential growth of incarceration rates. Drug users captured by the criminal justice system are situated precisely at the intersection of these three phenomena. Mostly poor and peripheral, subjects criminalized for offenses related to drug use are more often sentenced to prison terms, but if a psychiatric report points to the existence of a mental disorder, they may be subjected to psychiatric hospitalization in a forensic asylum, through the legal institute of the security measure. There are indications that, in recent decades, forensic asylums in the State of São Paulo have received more and more drug users, which suggests the entry of these institutions into the circuit of control and containment of this population. In this scenario, the research will seek to understand the alliances and disputes between psychiatric and judiciary knowledge in the decision-making processes of drug user's internment in the Custody and Psychiatric Treatment Establishments of São Paulo state. To do so, I will analyze the psychiatric reports and sentences of provisional and definitive internment, between 2018 and 2023, made available on the São Paulo Court of Justice website. The research will be accompanied by an extensive bibliographic survey and a period of internship abroad.