O adolescente em conflito com a lei e a escola: criminalização e inclusão perversa

Abstract

This study aims to identify the relation between adolescents in conflict with the penal law, who were convicted to assisted freedom (a socio-educative measure applied by the Juvenile Justice system as a sanction to adolescent offenders), and the school. The research was developed in the Community-based Assisted Freedom Program of Pastoral do Menor , in Fortaleza (capital city of Ceará State, Brazil). The study has engaged 21 adolescents, eight program professionals, three members of the Center for Defense of Child Rights in Ceará, five teachers and eight school principals and education managers from the schools attended by the adolescents in the neighborhoods of Pirambu, Tancredo Neves, Jardim Iracema e Bom Jardim. It intends, based on dialectical and historical method, to define the investigated adolescents as persons with a very singular insertion into the social structures of neoliberal capitalism. Their adolescence is subject to consumerism appeals, to the limits imposed by these appeals and to perverse ways of insertion in the system, such as criminalization, segregation and marginalization. It reveals that the school attended by the adolescents reproduces such conditions of insertion. At the same time, these conditions are elements of identity, by which the adolescents are characterized.