Prisons and Asylums: a study on the inmates admitted to the Criminal Lunatic Asylum of São Paulo between 1936 and 1952

• Grant number: 24/05991-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: April 01, 2025
• End date: June 30, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Sociology
• Principal Investigator: Jacqueline Sinhoretto
• Grantee: Francisco Guitler
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The creation of the criminal lunatic asylum in São Paulo was the result of a legal-penal intervention into the problem of mental institutions. The problem was how to apply a judicial sentence to an individual who did not understand the illicit nature of the fact. It is well known that the insane were hospitalized or arrested in psychiatric mental hospitals, public prisons and police stations, but what was the profile of the offender that the state legislature sought to isolate in a specific psychiatric institution? To this end, the aim of the research is to analyze how the creation of a judicial asylum in the 1930s, and therefore of a device for the penal control of madness, seemed to respond to a change in criminal dynamics in relation to violent deaths in the state of São Paulo. The research method is qualitative and the materials used for analysis are the governor's administrative reports, medical records of patients who were interned in the Criminal Lunatic Asylum, court cases published in the Official Gazette of the State of São Paulo and the sessions of the Chamber of Deputies regarding the creation of a judicial asylum in São Paulo published in the Correio Paulistano newspaper.