Between Alleys and Enemies

Drug Policy and Selective Racial Incarceration from the Perspective of Enemy Criminal Law

Abstract

This paper aims to critically analyze racialized criminal selectivity in light of Günther Jakobs’ theory of Enemy Criminal Law, demonstrating how institutional practices transform certain subjects into “enemies” to be fought. With a qualitative focus, the research is bibliographical and documentary in nature and seeks to analyze the historical origin of anti-drug legislation, the legal discourses that legitimize selective social control, and the data that prove the racialization of the current model of Brazilian criminal policy. The general objective of this research is to critically analyze Brazilian drug policy and repressive criminal policies and their relationship with racially selective incarceration, investigating how enemy criminal law manifests itself in institutional practices and legal discourses that support the war on drugs in Brazil. The central question of this study can be summarized as follows: How does drug policy in Brazil become a tool of racialized criminal selectivity and how can this operation be understood in terms of the concept of enemy criminal law? Finally, the work provides an understanding of the mechanisms that maintain structural inequality in the Brazilian criminal justice system and contributes to the debate, providing important data and references from the central perspective of the topic. Therefore, there is a racial penal selectivity, which corroborates the high rates of black people incarcerated.