Representações sociais de reclusos sobre violência policial, Maputo

Abstract

This monograph deals with the social representations of violence police, with a main focus on the way in which they construct their representations on violence police. The theoretical perspective that guided this study is the Social Representations developed by Serge Moscovici (2003). The central argument of this study is that inmates construct their social representations of police violence based on the stock of knowledge they acquire during detention and imprisonment. Field data reveal two perspectives on the manifestations of police violence. The first consists of two poles that is, of the group of prisoners who experienced acts of violence during detention, some consider them unjust and others advocate that they are normal and deserved. The second perspective is associated with inmates who, during detention, have suffered police violence, but they argue that police violence is somewhat abnormal and constraining. The social representations of prisoners on police violence are heterogeneous, because we able to identify distinctions in the way they represent police violence. Thus, it was represented by the majority of the interviewees based on the experiences lived in the prisons. The same experiences allow them to conceive of police violence as a form of discrimination, such threats and blackmail, as punishment for deviant prisoners, as deprivation of contact with family members and, lastly, as inherent in physical aggression.