Banca de DEFESA: Flávia de Freitas Cabral

Between truth and danger: speeches by judges in the decrees of provisional hospitalization of adolescents in the Federal District

provisional internment, decision-making process, discourses, juvenile
criminal law, justice system.

This dissertation is the result of ethnographic research conducted at the 2a Vara da
Infância e Juventude do Distrito Federal, aiming to analyze the production of
discourses that underpin precautionary decisions and that culminated in provisional
internment decrees for adolescents between the years 2018 and 2022. From an
anthropological perspective, the study aimed to unveil how categories of truth and
danger are invoked to substantiate judges' discourses and legitimize their practices, in
order to understand the decision-making process for selecting, categorizing, and
determining which adolescents should be deprived of liberty. In this sense, it was
demonstrated that when there is no discourse of truth, what assumes the role of
legitimizing the state's power to punish is the discourse of danger.