Violência policial, tortura e maus tratos: audiências de custódia e Política Criminal de Hiperencarceramento

Abstract

Custody hearings are defined by the Brazilian National Council of Justice’s resolution no. 212/2015 as a guarantee determining that all individuals arrested in flagrante delicto must be presented to the legal authorities within 24 hours for a hearing outlining the circumstances in which their arrest took place, in order to assess the legality, regularity, and need for the act, as well as to identify possible situations of torture or violence during the arrest. In other words, this aims to guarantee that the individual’s procedural rights will be upheld, based on the perspective of a clash both with Brazil’s rocketing rate of imprisonment and the practices of police torture and violence which may occur during an arrest, aiming to provide a minimum defense of Human Rights. The present work aims to analyze custody hearings in the metropolitan region of Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, problematizing the challenges it faces in terms of criminal policy in Brazil and mass imprisonment, as well as to analyze whether the custody hearings meet their proposed aim, in terms of reducing the practices of police torture, mistreatment, or violence during an arrest.