“Aqui ninguém fala, escuta ou vê” Relatos sobre o cotidiano profissional dos agentes de segurança penitenciária em Manaus

Abstract

This work deals with the prison guards of the State of Amazonas State Penitentiary System and its reports on the daily work. The research is the result of ethnographic accounts registered in the workplace: the prisons of Manaus and located on BR 174. I conducted conversations and interviews with forty professionals during the expedients, breaks, and talks held in the corridors of prisons and the bus routes. First, the dissertation is formed by a brief reflection on the research in Brazilian prisons, taking the negotiation as an important and permanent symbolic key in and out of closed institutions. Second, social control and the fight against social / internal enemies are central issues to reflect on the overcrowding of Amazonian prisons in a time of prison-business, and on the impacts promoted by public security policies oriented in terms of productivity and political option for mass incarceration. Therefore, the effort to think relational allowed a brief and recent description of certain ways of "crime" in the city of Manaus. At this point, I describe the "galeroso" as an accusation and justification for the criminalization of manauara youth, to signal the recent change in the police news narrative with the rise of new criminal collectives, promoters of a new dynamics of crime in prisons, neighborhoods and alleyways, putting the problem of insecurity and feeling of insecurity in a new and complex level. Finally, interview transcripts and field notes useful to understand the contingencies of one of the most difficult and precarious jobs in Brazil.