Organizing this special number is a product of the research Os sentidos do cárcere: Incapacitação e ressocialização na realidade prisional brasileira (The meanings of prison: Incapacitation ad resocialization in the Brazilian prison reality), recently developed by the NECVU-UFRJ with financing by CNPq. Seeking ways to broaden the understanding of the coexistence of ideas of resocialization and incapacitation in current Brazilian prisons, we resort to a metaphor that intends to act as a general image of prison that does not reduce any of the considered axes. Neither disciplinary prison, nor depot-of-people: we propose to think prison as a labyrinth, considering the diversity of meanings comprised by the term.
Keywords:
prison; justice; punishment; violence; human rights