Narratives of Former Prison Inmates and Media Discourses on Crime

Abstract

This article discusses the production of subjectivity of people who have experienced imprisonment, considering the media discourses about crime. The research is justified by the need to think about the work of Psychology with the incarcerated population, putting on questions for the challenges that the complexity of the imprisonment presents. The applied methodological tool was the conversation circle done with a volunteer group of men egress of the Penitentiary System, in which the media contents selected by the participants were used. Among the objectives, we sought to understand the subjective effects of these discourses on people who live this reality with its criminal and social consequences, to know how they resist or reproduce values and meanings, and also to provide a space for narratives and interaction among participants, valuing the sharing of opinions and ideas. We analyze the aspects discussed in the conversation circle that sometimes related to the reproduction of social exclusion, sometimes with criticism and resistance to criminal identity. These issues have been developed in topics about criminalization of poverty and the rescue of citizenship that comprise the set of themes debated and related to the media contents. We understand that the power/knowledge relation that circulates in the discourses, functioning as a permanent process of forging of life, is significant in the production of subjectivity. And finally, in counterpoint to this, we conclude pointing to practices of freedom exercised in spaces of reflection and self-narration as ways of breaking down marginalized identities, functioning as resistance to the processes of social exclusion and as a possibility to think of different paths.