The punitive selectivity (what crimes are processed by the criminal system) focuses on the robberies, murders, kidnappings, narcomenudeo. There is a good part of the prison population. The media gaze denigrates the perpetrators, claiming their corpus. It never analyzes its context, its causes. Broad sectors of the population echo and go beyond the National Constitution. The prisons, according to this interpretation, should not serve for resocialization but for punishment, contrary to what is established in article 18 of the Constitution. Hard hand, shout. Tooth for the tooth, as the law of the Talion.
It is found in that social sector to which a good part of the perpetrators of street urban crimes belong an atoning goat. A culprit of the evils of society. The poor, the blacks, the heads, do not deserve the protection of the State. Or they are vague or they are jets. Or murderers. Or rapists.
On the other hand, within the analysis of the issue, another relevant issue should be considered. The police also – their great majority – come from the popular sectors. It does not seem accidental. On the contrary. A system that builds a war against the crime in which on the one hand and on the other there are poor is a system that directs it divides to reign.
On the other hand, the crimes committed by other classes, the so -called “White collar crimes” (Economic crimes, such as scams, evasion, corruption, etc.), are only exceptionally processed by the judicial system. Except, as observed in recent times, when the processes are directed for political persecution purposes.
In this way, it is limited to a social sector, that of low or null resources, a negative otherness. The other as dangerous, as responsible for the failures or frustrations of the rest of society. Discrimination appears thus in a dangerous way, as a cornerstone of the worst crimes.
In this sense, the philosopher Giorgio Agamben He coined the concept of “Homo priest”, that is, that individual who after having committed a crime was exposed to death. Any citizen could kill him, and that act was not legally considered homicide. The offender was out of law. His life became bare life that anyone could take. Starting from this concept, then, the philosopher Darío Sztajnszrajber reflects: If the law builds the norm, what is outside is the abnormal. Those excluded from the system, the poor, without rights, the “nadies” are those that remain daily in “state of exception.”
Daniel FeiersteinArgentine sociologist and researcher, has developed a theory according to which negative otherness is the first six steps that lead to a genocide. Let’s see. The construction of a negative otherness; harassment; isolation; systematic weakening policies; material annihilation and, finally, the symbolic realization of genocide.
Feierstein studies Nazism and the Argentine military civic dictatorship. First it marked another dangerous. In a case the Jews and the gypsies. In the other, bolches, subversion. This scheme is transferred in many academic studies to the dynamics of current discrimination towards social or foreigners social sectors.
Also, in recent days, from the top of the Argentine Executive Power, the stigmatization of the members of the heterogeneous LGTB community has been led. That is why you have to be very attentive to these social reflexes.
Now. The truth is that, returning to the subject that occupies me, security is also a right. Article 34 of the City Constitution, for example, guarantees it. The great issue is how to guarantee security without violating human rights.
Let’s look at some possible responses in the long term. Prioritize prevention over repression. Strict control over police forces in order to avoid possible “excesses”, with agents with good physical training, training in the logic of human rights and well paid to avoid temptations. Clean and spacious prisons, as a complement to effective justice that gives criminal responses in reasonable terms.
Focus on prevention implies, among other things, to study the causes of crime: education, culture and work for all. Guaranteeing these three rights for the entire population, street urban insecurity rates are much lower, as demonstrated by different cases in the world. Cuba or Sweden for putting diverse examples.
Even so, these concepts do not reach. The progressive look of security leaves aside the “meanwhile”, the short term. Until we reach the previous paragraphs, many tears are going to run under the bridge. And a lot of blood. And a lot of pain. Also frustrations and helplessness. They will spend years, if finally one day it happens. But, in the interim, governments must guarantee both human rights and security. They should not be opposite, on the contrary, they should be complementary. But duty is not eaten.
Popular governments that have tried security policies based on respect for human rights have not yet given the key yet. They have not been able to demonstrate high degrees of efficacy in the decrease in street urban crime. Yes, perhaps, they have battle in the cultural field against negative otherness (that of “the country is the other”) and that is important because from the State the stigmatizing discourse is delegitimized.
Nor the punitivist and reactionary governments have achieved better results. Meanwhile, they harden speech, praxis and propaganda to satisfy their audiences. Only in part. Behind the veil, the reality is the same. The hard hand does not reduce the crime for the simple fact that the causes of the street urban crime do not obey the quantity of the quality of the penalty but to much deeper social, cultural and economic factors. The offender does not commit crimes with the Criminal Code in the hand. They are other reasons.
So?
That is the question of philosophy and criminal science. There is not a single answer. Perhaps, it would be important to succeed with the question or questions.
Meanwhile, public management must travel the thorny path of guaranteeing security without denigrating the other and, finally, respecting the human rights of all. It is a tremendous challenge. But it is always worth trying without simplistic solutions that are always partial and ephemeral.
Source: Ambito
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