A infância abandonada é a sementeira do crime” : o julgamento de menores pela Comarca de Santa Maria (1910-1927)

Abstract

This dissertation aims to analyze the construction of the image of the "juvenile" offender through conceptions of jurists and other specialists of the criminal area in the early First Republic. It also seeks to verify if the meanings attributed to these juveniles are reflected in the trial of the District of Santa Maria da Boca do Monte’s criminal cases spanning from 1910 to 1927. As a research method, publications of jurists and criminal cases have been qualitatively analyzed; and, in a quantitative way, legislation and criminal procedures data. To reach this goal, we sought to analyze, in the first chapter, how Criminal Anthropology was appropriate in the construction of criminal profiles and how this intervened in the punishment of "juvenile" offenders. In order to do that, through jurists’ publications jurists in the early twentieth century, the understanding of juvenile crime and what were the proposals and suggestions indicated by these experts for the "decrease", "prevention" and "correction" of " minor offenders " have been found out. Still in the first chapter, we reflect upon the values that were added to the term "juvenile" and how it came to be used through the historiography of childhood and youth years. Lastly, a brief evolution of the legislation dedicated to children and young people until the implementation of the first Code of Minors is brought up. In the second chapter, we sought to verify how public and private places in Santa Maria contributed to the motivations of juvenile offenses, the defendants’ contact with work and literacy, the relationship between gender and crime, as well as the relationship of the sentences passed on by the Judges of the District with the jurists’ impressions about juvenile criminality. Our outlook, spanning from 1910 to 1927, was defined due to the period of concentration of the jurists’ works, to the access to the criminal cases that are under the custody of the Historical Archive of Santa Maria and to the deadline corresponding to the establishment of the first Brazil’s Juvenile Code (Decree nº 17943-A, from October 12, 1927), dedicated to dealing with various situations experienced by children and young people, such as crime, abandonment, work and education. As sources for the research, in addition to the criminal processes and publications of jurists, reports from the State of Rio Grande do Sul’s State Department of Interior and Exterior Affairs, the Penal Code from 1890 and other legislations pertinent to the research have been used. We have also seeked to connect with the historiography of the social history of childhood and youth, as well as with that which thematizes crime.