January 10, 2024

Labour Relations, Social Inequalities and Trade Unionism

Madalena Duarte

Cooperative work can find its spaces of accomplishment in the most diverse social groups, especially when they are pressed by overcoming obstacles and conquering common needs, with arrangements ranging from the least to the most structured. This is also the case with people deprived of their freedom by judicial sentence. In countries like Brazil, where prison conditions present all kinds of ills and disrespect for human rights, cooperation also happens, albeit very informal, beyond the internal organization of prisons guided by criminal factions. In this controversial context, in search of overcoming or minimizing the serious problems accumulated in the imprisonment system, methodologies have been developed towards a model of community prisons, where the participation of the community, both external and internal, is essential to find alternatives. The method in focus in this thesis is the one practiced by the Association of Protection and Assistance to Convicts (APAC), and its specific object is the determining factors for the development of the cooperation process in the units, where the exercise of prison co-governance exercised by its internal population has significant results to the point of determining the existence of prisons without the presence of armed guards, because the inmates do the work of mutual surveillance, besides all the others for the prison functionality. The analysis of the words of the protagonists involved in this process reveals that their participation is the evolutionary result of cooperation among them and generated from a process of reciprocity caused by the institution, whose starting point and effort for its maintenance are the benefits provided to the incarcerated community, including their families, by the institution itself, which is responsible for prison management before the Judiciary. As a result of this significant participation, the maintenance costs per inmate are one-third lower than those practiced in the conventional system, in addition to the results in terms of recidivism also proving to be much more satisfactory.

Keywords: cooperation, prison co-governance, reciprocity