LAWBREAKER WOMEN: INSANITY AND DANGEROUSNESS IN SÃO
PAULO'S JUDICIARY
This thesis seeks to analyze the role of women with mental illness who
committed a crime and the way they are represented by jurisdictional actors
during criminal proceedings. In a context of the closure of the Custody and
Psychiatric Treatment Hospitals (HCTPs), the offending woman with mental
health disorders encounters several difficulties, even before her trial, as she is
usually preventively imprisoned in conditions that do not favor her treatment
and the experiences a process of aggravation. of her illness that often still
contributes to impair her judgment. In this aspect, the main theme of this work
is investigate in criminal proceedings the development of the trajectory of
women diagnosed with mental disorders who committed a criminal offense
traying, to understand how the diagnosis contributed to the outcome of the
verdict, continuing to significantly influence compliance with the internment
security measure. The allegation of mental illness, it in theory it removes the
guilt of woman who committed the crime, in practice puts her in a much more
harmful position than the common prisoner, since the conditions imposed on
the fulfillment of the internment security measure, in addition to facilitate social
exclusion from the beginning of the process, it still justifies kidnapping for an
indefinite period. Therefore I attempt, to verify various contradictions present
in discourses that support the idea of the security measure of hospitalization
as a treatment, since the main argument for the maintenance of these women
in HCTPs is the association between dangerousness and mental problems,
demanding from psychiatry a future prospect as to the possibility of them re-
offending their crime. The research is empirically based on nine criminal
cases of the Court of Justice of the State of São Paulo (TJSP) in which it
seeks to find evidence of how the dangerousness attributed to women with
mental problems who committed crimes influences the trajectory of the
criminal process, overshadowing other circumstances that could contribute to
their defense, such as the violence they suffered throughout their lives. Since
the diagnosis of mental problems, judgment becomes oriented according to
the presumption of future risk, even if this is nothing but a fiction, given the
impossibility of psychiatry to predict any form of recidivism. The analysis was
accomplished out from three perspectives: the instrumentalization of
psychiatry by the Judiciary, the construction of dangerousness of women with
mental illness by jurisdictional actors and the social conditions that influenced
the representation of these women in criminal process.