CONFESSOR JUNIOR, Waldeci Gomes    DIMENSTEIN, Magda. From the discourse of power to the silence of madness: the judicial asylum and fetish of punishment. []. , 21, 50, pp.285-298. ISSN 2175-1390.

ABSTRACT Mentally ill lawbreakers are penally chargeable and subject to security measures, among which, institutionalization. Both Law and Psychiatry get articulated to define how the penal treatment should be applied. Psychiatry testifies the person's pathology and dangerousness. Law promotes their incarceration in a prison-hospital. This article reflects on the characteristics of these discourses along with their institutional and social functionalities. For this purpose, internal psychiatric reports and judicial sentences of a psychiatry custody and treatment unit have been analyzed, based on Institutional Analysis principles. The results have shown how the relation between psychiatric and judicial discourses has defined the institutional chronicity of the population of judicial mental hospitals. It has been found that this Law-Psychiatry articulation is on the basis of the explanation why mental hospitals are still present nowadays, despite innumerous criticisms regarding treatments relying on coercion and imprisonment strategies, that do not fit the ideal of care.

: Judicial asylum; Diagnosis; Dangerousness; Punitivism; Institutional Analysis.

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