Abstract

AGUIAR, Maria Léa Monteiro de. O aparato de combate ao crime e a sensação de insegurança. Rev. Mal-Estar Subj. [online]. 2005, vol.5, n.2, pp.225-245. ISSN 1518-6148.

State spending on law enforcement and security is increasing world wide with the expectation that it will improve public security.Despite these ever larger expenditures on security equipment, police officers, prison construction and to pay for the jailing of more and more criminals, a feeling of public insecurity remain. In some large urban centers this insecurity has reached almost unbearable levels.The subjective feeling of insecurity seems to grow as a result of the anti-crime apparatus rather than as a result of crime itself. This is largely because efforts to repress crime are directed at the poorer population, a population that is more numerous than the social and economic elite. The fictitious connection between criminality and poverty results in the exaggerated fear that wealthier groups are developing against areas of concentrated poverty, especially in large urban areas. It's not by accident that these ghettos are the main sources of the prison population, which is growing throughout the world, provoking more exclusion and revolt and as a consequence, more insecurity. The public security crisis has been a constant theme in modern society and grows along with urbanization. On the other hand, violent crimes exercise a seductive force over people and receive, in turn, privileged treatment in the mass media. As a result, the public security crisis may be a political construct designed to deal with a chronic problem inside the impersonal urban world. The feeling of "being safe'', as a result, is perhaps something that can only be measured by communities, but the neither the ghettos of the excluded nor the security fortresses that the rich construct in protected neighborhoods can be called communities.

Keywords : security; prision; community; ghettos; criminality.

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