Criminality and social repression at the rising of XX Century: the Brazilian Identification and Statistics Cabinet and Boletim Policial Magazine (RJ, 1907-1918)

• Grant number: 24/02254-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Effective date (Start): July 01, 2024
• Effective date (End): April 30, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - History - History of Brazil
• Principal Investigator: Tania Regina de Luca
• Grantee: Ana Beatriz Lima de Sousa
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Letras (FCL-ASSIS). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Assis. Assis , SP, Brazil

Abstract

In the beginning of XX Century, the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, went through a series of demographics, economical and social transformations, which exponentially arose dominant classes' worries about crime and poverty. This dynamic resulted in intensification of repression politics and policing system minding public safety, which were grounded on scientific discourses, such as biological determinism, based on the belief that individuals with certain physical, social and psychological characteristics were naturally likely to commit crimes and threaten public safety, and were more dangerous the more degrading were the environment they lived. Thus, poverty, homelessness and vicious behaviors, especially associated with the non-white population, were seen as biological and hereditary characteristics, so that to establish social order and safety, these individuals had to be identified and treated as soon as possible. As a support mechanism to police repression and in order to easily recognize criminous, the Brazilian Identification and Statistics Cabinet was created in 1903, responsible for registrate information about people with entrance on police stations by using criminal records that considered, besides the infraction, aspects such as family history, physical appearance description and dactyloscopy. From 1907, the Cabinet began to publish the Boletim Policial magazine, which publicly reported institutional activities on policing and criminal investigation. This project proposes to investigate this material, in order to identify how the intentions and mentality of this period were expressed on the magazine's pages, the influence of the Cabinet on brazilian history of social repression, how the organization's activities were developed on Rio's daily life and its presence on Brazilian First Republic structures.