The Brazilian criminal justice system and racial hierarchy: a socio-legal analysis based on drug trafficking hearings and sentences in Rio de Janeiro

Supervisor/s: Silvia Rodríguez Maeso and Felipe da Silva Freitas

Doctoral Programme: Human Rights in Contemporary Societies

Funding: FCT

This interdisciplinary project aims to understand how and to what extent the criminal justice system reflects and reinforces the racial hierarchy in Brazil. The research consists of an empirical, socio-legal investigation of the implementation of the current national Drug Law in the city of Rio de Janeiro. This law allows judges great discretion in the classification of drug offenses, and it has increased incarceration rates, especially of Black people indicted for "drug trafficking". The study examines the central role of judges in the legitimization of the racially selective repressive action of the State in the "war on drugs" with a focus on the analysis of institutional whiteness within the Judiciary. The study combines ethnographic research of court hearings with qualitative documentary research of drug trafficking sentences in order to understand the complex interrelationship between racial hierarchies, law, and criminal policy within routine judicial practices.