CORRUPTION AND CRIMINAL FACTIONS: An outline for the state prison system of Rio Grande do Norte, violent crime and constitutional limits to state punitive power
Corruption. Violent crime. Unconstitutional State of Affairs. Criminal factions. RN prison system.
The central theme of this work is the existing correlation between corruption, in its broadest sense, and the activities of criminal factions, adopting the state of Rio Grande do Norte as geographic and temporal cutout, respectively, in the period from 2010 to 2022. The objective was to investigate how corruption, within the aforementioned framework, focusing on the actions of public agents, but including the dishonest practice of other actors, such as lawyers, contributed to the activities of criminal factions inside and outside prisons, promoting the State of Things Unconstitutional in the Potiguar prison system. I adopt as a methodology a qualitative, bibliographic and documentary research, not related to the central object of the study, corruption and criminal factions, but also in relation to the subjects that are related to it, such as violence, or punitive power, banality of evil, or ECI, the dignity of the human person and its ethical foundations. Still, the quantitative method was used, due to the analysis of statistical data available in official documents, in the public domain, such as the Atlas of Violence; as well as the investigation, through letters sent to DEPEN (National Penitentiary Department), to SEAP (Secretary of Penitentiary Administration) and to the Optical Court of the OAB/RN, with the purpose of collecting and analyzing data on procedures instituted on Face de servants/lawyers for the practice of corrupt acts and facilitation of the action of criminal factions within the scope of Potiguar prisons. I note that since the creation of the Corregedoria, in 2019, procedures regarding corruption outside the servers operating in this space have no longer been instituted; At the same time, it is clear that 80% of the two lawsuits filed from 2004 to 2019 were archived due to lack of evidence, indicating the difficulty of the investigation. At the same time, the investigations carried out by the MPRN, together with other bodies, through Operation Swiss Cheese, from 2017, and Operation Carteiras, from 2022, respectively, will result in the condemnation of servers of the prison system and lawyers, for corruption committed for facilitating crimes by non-RN criminal organizations. I verify that the aforementioned framework contributed to the significant increase in violent crime, further aggravating the Unconstitutional State of Things in the prison system of the state in question.