Female incarceration and COVID-19

the acting of the Court of Justice of the Federal District and Territories (TJDFT) in the (in)effectiveness of the rights of women deprived of liberty in the prison system of the Federal District

Abstract

In this article, we analyze the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on the reality of women preventively imprisoned in the Female Penitentiary of the Federal District (PFDF), as well as the performance of the Court of Justice of the Federal District and Territories (TJDFT) in the execution (or no) of the rights of these women, in compliance with Recommendation nº 62 of the National Council of Justice (CNJ). To this end, we carried out a bibliographic and documentary survey, from multiple sources, guided by the ethnographic perspective of material collection, including the observant participation of lives and podcasts. Based on a theoretical and empirical corpus, we contextualize the issue of women's incarceration and female invisibility in traditional criminological thinking, highlighting the need for a way of understanding the processes of criminalization and victimization of women guided by Feminist Criminology. By observing the Judiciary's role in keeping women in prison during the pandemic, we contrast studies that demonstrate the tendency of the courts to deny requests for freedom and/or house arrest through standardized speeches. That is, in the face of a system intentionally engineered from abandonment and oblivion that, even during the pandemic, reinforced the dehumanization of imprisoned bodies, especially those who menstruate; we concluded that the law alone did not solve the public health problems of the DF prisons resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic, as it was also evident that the TJDFT did not comply with the guideline of Recommendation nº 62, of the CNJ, for extrication and adoption alternative measures to imprisonment.