Lost Youth? The police process of youth public policies through PRONASCI - National Program of Public Security and Citizenship

Abstract

The phenomenon of juvenile delinquency structures speeches and practices concerning social order and the means of controlling the conflict. Youth delinquency justifies the existence of power devices executed by the state action in two fields: the repressive criminal policy (police) and the policies of social protection. Such fields overlap in the control procedures coming from public institutions. Through such intermingling, social control by penalization and policing society become the general rule and the easiest principle to be proposed and followed. Youths residing on the outskirts of large cities, members of the socially and economically excluded classes, come to be seen as dangerous classes, and as a consequence targets of policing public policies. Such a posture is concealed under humanistic speeches of social integration and reinsertion, but hides the perverse practice of the criminalization of marginality. The youth held to be “vulnerable” or “in a situation of social risk” is categorized as the enemy who needs to be controlled, now no longer as a moral duty related to social protection, but because they threaten the establishment, which makes them, through the fear aroused, electoral components of public projects. These projects do not aim at protecting them, but at using them for what they are. The project entitled PROTEJO (Program of Protection of Youths in Vulnerable Territory) is the paradigmatic example of the manner in which one of the main preventive public policies of the current Brazilian youth criminal policy materializes the speech and practices of perverse social control.