SCHOOL AMBIVALENCE AND ADOLESCENT OFFENDERS

ABSTRACT

We propose a reflection about the ambivalence of the school about adolescents with infringing trajectory. Our problem is to demonstrate how the school operates as a place of exclusion, operating from the segregated logic of cultural privilege. The method was a critical review of the scientific production of psychology and sociology, using as descriptors “education” and “adolescent in conflict with the law” on the SciELO and Pepsic platforms. In the results, we found that school dropout rates coincide with the entry of adolescents’ trajectory in the criminal context, strengthening stigma and exclusion. We ask if even exclusionary and so precarious would this formal school not be better than the non-school. After analyzing the literature, we defend the hypothesis that the school can function as a loop that offers a point of support, protection and reference for adolescents with an infringing trajectory, even though its model is anachronistic in relation to the effective exercise of this possibility.

Keywords:
school; adolescent; delinquency

RESUMO

Propomos uma reflexão sobre a ambivalência da escola sobre os adolescentes com trajetória infracional. Nosso problema consiste em demonstrar como a escola opera como lugar de exclusão, operando a partir da lógica segregatória do privilégio cultural. O método foi a revisão crítica da produção científica da psicologia e sociologia, usando como descritores “educação” e “adolescente em conflito com a lei” nas plataformas SciELO e Pepsic. Nos resultados constatamos que os índices de evasão escolar coincidem com a entrada na trajetória infracional dos adolescentes, fortalecendo o estigma e a exclusão. Perguntamos se, mesmo excludente e tão precária, não seria ainda essa escola formal melhor do que a não escola? Após análise da literatura defendemos a hipótese de que a escola pode funcionar como uma alça que oferece um ponto de apoio, proteção e referência para o adolescente com trajetória infracional, ainda que seu modelo seja anacrônico em relação ao efetivo exercício dessa possibilidade.

Palavras-chave:
escola; adolescente; delinquência

RESUMEN

Proponemos una reflexión sobre la ambivalencia de la escuela sobre los adolescentes con trayectoria delictiva. Nuestro problema consiste en demonstrar cómo la escuela opera como lugar de exclusión, operando a partir de la lógica de segregación del privilegio cultural. El método fue la revisión crítica de la producción científica de la psicología y sociología, usando como descriptores “educación” y “adolescente en conflicto con la ley” en las plataformas SciELO y Pepsic. En los resultados constatamos que los índices de evasión escolar coinciden con la entrada en la trayectoria delictiva de los adolescentes, fortaleciendo el estigma y la exclusión. Preguntamos si, aún excluyente y tan precaria, ¿no sería aún esa escuela formal mejor de que la no escuela? Tras análisis de la literatura defendemos la hipótesis de que la escuela puede funcionar como un alza que ofrece un punto de apoyo, protección y referencia para el adolescente con trayectoria delictiva, aun que su modelo sea anacrónico en relación al efectivo ejercicio de esa posibilidad.

Palabras clave:
Escuela; adolescente; acto delictivo

PRESENTATION

This article presents a partial result of the transdisciplinary research on the abandonment of crime in adolescence, carried out between 2017 and 2019, entitled “Curso de vida e trajetória delinquencial”¹ (IEAT, 2017). Its general objective was to analyze the course of life of young people in vulnerability, taken in by the socio-educational system, in order to identify events that explained the entry, permanence and withdrawal, specific to the adolescent experience with delinquency.

The challenge of understanding the interactions between many complex and dynamic events and their consequences and impacts on the trajectories and narratives of adolescents in situations of vulnerability required an ingenious and innovative transdisciplinary approach, both theoretically and methodologically, capable of describing the set of narratives gathered, in their uniqueness and generality. In addition, it allowed to articulate the trajectories in the biographical, offending and judicial-socio-educational aspects, comparing them and identifying their main turning points and constraints in the adolescents’ life course.

The notions of trajectory and life cycle (Benson, 2012; Sampson & Laub, 1992; Elder, 1985), as well as memoir narratives (Guerra, 2017), were the starting point for the investigation and for the organization of the data collection and analysis. Three intertwined trajectories were prioritized at the beginning of the research to answer their hypotheses: the biographical, the offending, and the institutional. To this end, the research was organized in three phases: bibliographic review with theoretical and conceptual consolidation of the transdisciplinary premises of the investigation; collection and analysis of adolescent trajectories, based on documentary analysis of Individual Service Plans (PIA), territory mapping, application of questionnaires and collection of memorial narratives and construction of a transdisciplinary analytical device, with consolidation of the social methodology to be applied in the socio-educational field .

This article focused on the first phase, on the comparative and critical analytical review of the current bibliography on the educational aspect of the institutional trajectory of the adolescent offender, since this trajectory proved to be decisive for the installation of the offending conduct and consolidation of the criminal career, deserving an in-depth analysis. Our goal here is to demonstrate the state of the art on the subject, to analyze comparatively the results of previous studies, to compare these results with the situation of the target population of this research, namely: adolescents subjected to socio-educational measures in Belo Horizonte in 2015, and indicate political orientation plans for the socio-educational sector, through the analytical results achieved.

Methodologically, we started from the consolidated literature on educational processes to compose the field of theoretical and conceptual foundations of our research, promoting a dialogue between classical French literature and Brazilian critical literature. Next, on the SciELO and Pepsic platforms, based on the descriptors “education” and “adolescent in conflict with the law”, national scientific articles written after the promulgation of the Statute of the Child and Adolescent (Federal Law 8,069, 1990) were identified for comparative analysis. The six articles found were analyzed, namely: Silva and Bazon (2014), Cunha and Dazzani (2016), Moreira, Melgaço, Albuquerque, Rocha and Ribeiro (2015), Rocha (2015); Silva and Salles (2011), Padovani and Ristum (2013). This analysis served as a mainstay for a comparative study with data from the Court of Justice of the State of Minas Gerais of 2014, 2015 and 2016, as well as the results of the research by Veloso (2014) dedicated to the analysis of the topic of education in the context of the State of Minas Gerais.

The themes of non-recognition of schooling as a social value in the peripheral classes, of the school’s difficulties in integrating the adolescent offender, of cultural reproduction in the school environment of economic, class and race privileges, and of the strengthening the criminal stigma were identified. However, the main aspect found was related to the turning point that identifies the coincidence of age of school dropout with that of entry into crime - 14 years old -, showing the importance of the school institution in preventing infraction among adolescents.

In order to advance the discussion, we start from the conceptual transdisciplinary basis elaborated from the French and Brazilian literature on formal education. Then, we discussed and compared the results of the national scientific literature with the production of the State of Minas Gerais, as this retrieves the adolescent’s perspective in the scientific discussion. The comparative analysis raised the hypothesis of the school as a protective and preventive factor in relation to the criminal career.

THEORETICAL CONTEXT

Education, in a broad sense, is the process of socialization of the new members of a society - children and youth -, conducted by older generations. Such a process is essential for any society, since only through it individuals become part of a culture. In complex societies, this process takes place, first, in the domestic environment, and then at school. The school is, therefore, the institution responsible for transmitting everything that is considered necessary - in terms of knowledge and skills - for the individual to become a productive member of society. Moreover, in normative (standards and values) and structural (resources) terms, the school comprises a crucial element of social control in that it also transmits the exercise of behavioral self-regulation (Hunter, 1985). Thus, education, a broad and multifaceted process, receives specific outlines and functions as the institution “school”.

However, it is necessary to emphasize that the school operates on the basis of cultural privilege: not only by the network of social relations, but by the capacity of transmitting the cultural heritage that the disadvantaged classes do not have, that is, of a cultural capital and a family ethos that helps to define, among other things, attitudes towards cultural capital and the school institution (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 41)

We can affirm that there is a contradiction inherent to the school institution that, although adopting a universal and meritocratic discourse, promotes a selection strongly linked to the cultural heritage and social origin of the students. In fact, the ideology that underlies the modern format of mass education ignores - or denies - in its discourse and pedagogical practice, the cumulative effects of the advantages and disadvantages linked to social origin, and the school does little more than fulfill the function of social conservation and perpetuation of social inequalities.

Although Bourdieu’s analysis uses French society as a reference, economic and cultural capital are structural elements of any modern society (Souza, 2017). In the Brazilian society, as in the French society, it is the access to cultural capital that distinguishes the middle class from the working class, that is, its distribution in relation to “intellectual” and “manual” work.

The distinction between modern “advanced” (French) and “emerging” (Brazilian) societies is not really a qualitative difference but a quantitative one. In fact, social hierarchies impose themselves in all of them, with differential access to scarce resources and the unequal distribution of economic and cultural capitals that determine access to other capitals (social and symbolic). The difference, between a society like the French and the Brazilian, refers to the size of each class and the distance between them, and, in the Brazilian case, as in other emerging countries, to the existence of a significant contingent of people occupying subproletarian positions: it is the “rabble”, a term taken up by Jessé Souza (2012a) to name this portion of the population without access not only to socially valued capitals, but also without the prerequisites to access such capitals.

Souza (2012a, 2012b) also identified in the Brazilian society the emergence of a class - halfway between the rabble and the middle class - which he calls “fighting class”. The author distinguishes the rabble from the fighters, showing the hierarchies that serve as a basis for the legitimation of inequality and the way in which institutions maintain the condition of peripheral modernity (Souza, 2012a, p. 163). In this sense, he perceives the constitution not of a “new middle class”, but a “new working class” in Brazil.

Souza (2012b) marks the distinction between the “fighting class” and the rabble and as well as the middle class, especially on the acquisition of skills that do not undergo formal schooling, but the “school of life”. The fighters, caught between the prison of everyday necessity of the rabble and the privilege of the study as preparation time for the future life of the middle and upper classes, will constitute, through life experience, a more pragmatic work, linked to direct economic needs without the “privilege of choice” or institutional accumulation of cultural and scholar capital.

Although it is not unknown that, in the last two decades in Brazil, we have made progress towards guaranteeing universal access to school, at least until the 9th grade of elementary school (and in the largest urban centers until the end of high school), these data on the “fighters” seem almost fixed. In reality, today we live more acutely with another type of exclusion: exclusion within the school. There is the exclusion for letters not learned properly; for the numbers not operated beyond the elementary education; the lack of offers of public equipment that develop a taste for literacy and cultural practices; due to the precariousness of the training of educators and the continuous devaluation of the teaching profession. This seems to be aggravated when dealing with what is considered the most delicate of transitions, adolescence, present in schools from the 6th grade of Elementary School to the 3rd grade of High School and in the Youth and Adults modality. It is not surprising that levels of juvenile delinquency, for example, are resistant to giving in. This notorious Brazilian reality is not yet faced with utmost decision by the different spheres of the State - a fact that we believe contributes severely to the effect of conserving the social positions that we find in our surroundings.

The Theory of Reproduction (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1970), by pointing out the contradictions between ideology and educational practice, represented a step forward in the Sociology of Education, since it proposed a critical inversion of what had been enshrined in the Durkheim’s Sociology of Education (Barrère & Sembel, 2006). Although the school continues to manifest the beliefs and values that operate in a given society, it is clear that the contemporary model is strongly connected to the values of the dominant classes and, more specifically, does not have the capacity or willingness to break with the institutional mechanisms of reproduction of social hierarchies. This mismatch between the project of education for all and the exclusion of popular classes is even more evident when we think of teenagers involved in crime.

Ambivalence and paradoxes of the school as a paradigm for the interruption of the adolescents’ offending trajectory

The representation of juvenile delinquency as a result of insufficient or precarious internalization of dominant and legitimate norms and values is hegemonic in juvenile criminal justice (Rizzini, 2011). This conception underlies the elaboration (diagnosis), the application (sentence) and the execution of the socio-educational measures. Thus, the management and the judicial and socio-educational treatment propose to transform and re-enroll the adolescent offenders through education, which is inserted as one of the priority axes of the Statute of the Child and Adolescent (ECA) and the National System of Social and Educational Assistance (SINASE) for stopping the offending trajectory and to the construction of a new path.

In this perspective, the school is recognized in ECA and SINASE as an institution capable of enabling the formation of critical citizens and the development for social coexistence. This process occurs through socialization and learning, protective factors for adolescents and young people in vulnerable conditions. At the same time, the school is the space for the development of autonomy, critical capacity and for the construction of different identities and the confrontation of violence and exclusions (discrimination, oppression, racism and segregation).

There is a great pressure on the school institution to have an impact on adolescents who serve a socio-educational measure, which means that the school has to face a perverse combination: the trajectory of school exclusion, the trajectory of vulnerability and stigma of the territory and the offending trajectory. It is the pivotal social institution in the process of re-education and social reintegration of adolescents undergoing socio-educational measures.

However, the pedagogical strategies of teaching consider the obedience of the students, docility and acceptance of rules to be essential, and it is up to the adolescent offenders to understand the hierarchy in the school environment, to always show interest in the content, as if they were part of a homogeneous group. This pedagogical strategy does not consider the particularities of each person, the different cultural experiences, the different family, community and socioeconomic contexts. In addition to the adolescents’ experiences being disregarded, the school demands from them the mastery of conventional contents of the subjects, thus showing that there is a lack of creativity and innovation in the activities developed by the educators. In this perspective, the school remains rigid and resistant to the reformulation of pedagogical didactics.

Adolescents under intervention in the socio-legal field are not in a position to participate in defining the situation that concerns them. Their point of view is invariably disregarded or filtered, being reduced to the meaning that the law gives to it. This situation is reinforced by the fact that the logic and therapeutic strategies adopted in these contexts have been developed, for the most part, for implementation with individuals seeking voluntary adherence (Zanella, 2010).

The precepts and guidelines found in ECA and SINASE emphasize the capacity of the educational dimension with adolescents with the purpose of responsibilization and the development of personal autonomy. However, this desire is confronted with the organizational framework of schools that reflect, above all, a policy of permanent control over the behavior of adolescents.

These mobilized strategies end up reinforcing and further fixing the adolescent in a delinquent trajectory, since their reactions are interpreted by the group of school professionals as new violence and offenses committed within institutions. Adolescents in compliance with socio-educational measures become objects of containment and control mechanisms, especially those that identify them as “problem students”. The school replicates and reinforces the narratives of the media and political spheres about school contamination by the violence of the territories and the dangerous classes.

Above all, these “events” reinforce the idea that educational work is at an impasse, and reveal their inability to propose a way of subjectivation that allows these adolescents and young people to create a break in their offending trajectory, paving the way for primacy of repressive response to the detriment of an educational one. Thus, an adolescent who is already on this offending trajectory tends to lose interest in school as a place of learning and socialization. In a study carried out by the Center for the Study of Crime and Public Security (CRISP) of the Federal University of Minas Gerais in 2005,² the considerable effect of involvement in crime activities on school satisfaction is noted: the greater the criminal involvement of enrolled young people and adolescents, the lower the satisfaction with the school and, consequently, the greater the probability of future school dropout.

This scenario reveals an ambivalence of the school context in relation to adolescents serving a socio-educational measure. The school institution is responsible for receiving and including the adolescent serving a socio-educational measure, ensuring the right to education and socialization and thus contributing to his/her autonomy and protagonism. At the same time that the school is unable to generate protection mechanisms for these students, there are elements of the school context capable of contributing to the construction of deviant and delinquent practices and identities of adolescents in compliance with measures. The discrimination and rejection they experience in the school context reinforce their exclusion and increase their vulnerability.

Thus, there is a contradiction in the program for resocialization of juvenile criminal justice between training for autonomy as an alternative to the offense and the spoliation of that autonomy due to the continuous framing of the institutional life of the young offenders and the exclusionary trends of the institutions (Misse, 2007). This contradiction is denounced by researchers in the field of psychology who are dedicated to the theme of the relationship between adolescents in conflict with the law and the school.

Education, school and the adolescent offender in Brazil

The reproduction of the reality of class, race and gender privileges in the context of formal education in the Brazilian society is evident in regard to the relationship between the school and the adolescent involved in crime or with the possibility of being involved. The school seems to act in ways to expel these young people from the school environment and to exclude them even within that environment. As already explained, in an attempt to understand how Brazilian researchers think about this theme, we conducted a search for productions in the SciELO and Pepsic databases using the descriptors “education” and “adolescent in conflict with the law”. From the analysis of the material found, the views on the issue are summarized below.

Silva and Bazon (2014) carry out an important integrative literature review on the relationships between school education and offending behavior in adolescents. The researchers worked on the PsycINFO, LILACS and SciELO databases, from 2008 to 2012, and concluded that “despite methodological differences, research, in general, converges in pointing out the link between problems in the schooling process and the manifestation of offending conduct” (Silva & Bazon, 2014, p. 279). The systematic literature review on the theme of the link between education and offending conducted by these authors provided the field with a text that organizes the articles found into five categories:

1) the association between the quality of family experiences, school adaptation and conduct in adolescence; 2) the relationship with teachers and colleagues as a basic variable for school and protective bonding against crime practice; 3) school sanctions as a basic variable for school disengagement and risk of involvement with criminal offense; 4) the association between bullying, school problems and offending behavior in adolescence; 5) school dropout and offending conduct (Silva & Bazon, 2015, p. 279).

This research reveals a “predominance of international studies, carried out mainly in the United States, in contrast to the scarcity of Brazilian studies” (Silva & Bazon, 2015, p. 288).

Still regarding the Brazilian literature on the subject, Cunha and Dazzani (2016) present a theoretical study that aimed to point out and “discuss possible reasons for animosity that, in general, has characterized the relationship between the school and the adolescent in conflict with the law in Brazil” (p. 235). The authors conclude that one of these reasons refers to the classic repulsion of popular strata, which are seen in a stereotyped, stigmatized and prejudiced manner.

When making a review of theoretical texts on the topic of articulation between adolescents in conflict with the law and the school, these authors come to the following conclusion: “The literature is eloquent in showing that the majority of adolescents who commit criminal offenses did not attend school at the time of their apprehension, as well as placing school dropout and educational lag as predictors of juvenile delinquency” (Cunha & Dazzani, 2016, p. 436). This conclusion corroborates the hypothesis that the protective effect of the traditional school for young people and adolescents involved in a criminal trajectory is reduced and is demonstrated, above all, by the greater dissatisfaction with school and delay rate (age X grade).

The article also deals with important themes such as the mismatch between the education of these young people and the demands of the labor market and, therefore, the possible effect of this mismatch on the youth’s adherence to crime, and suggests that “the school does not accept students as they are, and students, in turn, do not accept school as it is. Result: dropout” (Cunha & Dazzani, 2016, p. 245).

The school dropout also worried Moreira et al. (2015), who discussed the dropout rate of adolescents in the open-free system in Belo Horizonte. The authors announce that dropout is the result of a two-way divestment: students are not interested in the school, and teachers find it difficult to welcome students serving socio-educational measures. In the wake of this reflection, Rocha (2015) conducted a master’s research on the imagery of elementary school teachers about adolescents serving socio-educational measures and concluded that there is great negativity in this imaginary, with adolescents being seen as outsiders, violent, rotten apples (Rocha, 2015, p. 60).

The study by Silva and Salles (2011) also investigated the “representations and images of education professionals and students about teenager offenders serving a socio-educational measure” (p. 353), privileging the measure of probation. The study, once again, points to the school’s difficulties in welcoming students serving a socio-educational measure and to the mismatch between the statement of these young people in relation to the importance of the school and their ability to remain in it.

In turn, Padovani and Ristum (2013) investigated the specificities of the functioning of a formal school on the premises of a Youth Detention Center. One of the conclusions that we can highlight is that “low education has been identified as a risk factor that makes vulnerable a population of young people who perceive school inclusion as something far from their reality” (p. 982). With regard to the analysis of the educators’ collective discourse, it was possible to conclude that they consider “that the school has a fundamental role in preventing and decreasing offense recidivism”, but “family, socioeconomic and personal factors constitute, according to educators, a risk for adolescents, making it difficult to discontinue offenses” (p. 969). Further, the authors cite reflections that denounce the inefficiency of schools in Youth Detention Center, as, for example, Rocha (2010, p. 208, quoted by Padovani & Ristum, p. 978), reveals that: “... the absence of effective educational actions in socio-educational centers results in one of the greatest evidence of the inefficiency of the system, proven in the fate of young people when they leave the center”.

In the wake of the aforementioned research, we sought data on the educational profile of young people in conflict with the law at the Integrated Center for Assistance to Adolescent Offenders of Belo Horizonte (CIA-BH), faced with the finding that age at which most school dropouts occur coincide with that of entry into the judicial system. With this in mind, we will try to extract our considerations.

School dropout and entry into crime: a deviation from the route or a predicted/pre-plotted course?

According to statistical data from 2013 to 2015 from the Integrated Center for Assistance to Adolescent Offenders of Belo Horizonte (CIA-BH), an organ of the Court of Justice of the State of Minas Gerais (TJMG), little has changed in the profile of juvenile offenders, especially regarding their relationship with education (Tribunal de Justiça de Minas Gerais, 2014, 2015, 2016). Data reveal that the majority of young people were between the 5th and 7th grade of Elementary Education: “In the total of cases analyzed [in 2013], the 6th grade had the highest percentage with 25.0% total, followed by 7th and 8th grades, with 21.7% and 17% respectively”. In 2014, the seventh grade had the highest percentage and, in 2015, no information was obtained (Tribunal de Justiça de Minas Gerais, 2015, 2016).

Not coincidentally, the average age of entry into the CIA, due to suspicions of involvement in crimes, is 14 years old, coinciding, according to Cunha and Dazzani (2016), with the most frequent dropout age. However, it is worth asking: How would the school be perceived or experienced by the adolescents themselves who are serving socio-educational measures?

In a survey carried out at a detention center for juvenile offenders in Belo Horizonte, Veloso (2014) attempts to x-ray the issue based on the speech of the detained juveniles. The author draws attention to the fact that their speeches repeat the common sense of considering that the formal school has a social role, or, more specifically, a social integration function. Adolescents “believe that studying can offer conditions to be better professionals and that, without this resource (the study), they could not be qualified” (Veloso, 2014, p. 67). Contrary to the author’s expectations when starting the research, young people did not show any greater rejection or criticism in relation to the school at the socio-educational measure - a Basic Education school known to be precarious in its structure, but still compulsory in relation to the possibility of being disconnected from the socio-educational measure.

The young people interviewed do not consider the possibility of serving the measure without attending school. It is clear, therefore, that the entire socio-educational system is successful in inculcating the idea of the need for schooling as a function of the measure and even of the dropout. There would be a clear tension between deprivation and education, as both are supported by abdications and counterpoints judicially imposed on the teenagers.

At a certain point, a young man affirms that “the school there [outside of the measure] was not a mess, it was a good school” (Veloso, 2014, p. 71). This perception is reproduced in the school within the measure, making the author deduce that, despite minimal complaints, such a school has an even more fundamental value because it is linked to freedom, as well as access to other activities that the measure imposes: “If you don’t go to class, you don’t leave your accommodation for other workshops” (2014, p. 68).

However, when paying attention to details, Veloso realizes that there is something beyond this relationship, say, a commensalism between the teenager and the juvenile detention center school. It can be seen how young people, under these conditions, are concerned with how they will be seen by the outside society when they leave the system. In a way, many seek some guarantee that will rid them of the signifiers that stigmatize and condemn them as offenders, bandits, delinquents, etc. Therefore, the school is admitted as one of the possibilities to be set free not only from the measure, but from a stigma. Although reproductive and excluding, it is nevertheless presented by the system’s discourse as a bridge to a possible social rise of the young man against his fixation on crime and the stigma derived from it.

Thus, the national literature brings together classic elements already known about school dropout and the inadequacy of the school institution in the educational treatment of the adolescent offender. The school is responsible for protecting and strengthening bonds, however research indicates that (1) the institution reproduces hierarchies based on a segregationist system; (2) it maintains an unfriendly relationship with the adolescent offender and (3) it strengthens prejudice and stigma, in the wake of the consolidation of the criminal career.

The preliminary results of this critical and comparative review add at least three innovations, or at least three new perspectives to the field of scientific literature on the subject, based on the studies by Veloso (2014) and data from Minas Gerais. As this research (Veloso, 2014) starts from the youth’s knowledge, it introduces a necessary refraction in the face of the research that comes from the school institution, since: (1) the young person is interested in the achievements that the school can bring to his/her education, recognizing its importance; (2) adolescents’ complaints about school are circumstantial, but they want to study and acquire skills; (3) they believe that education overcomes stigma. In this sense, contrary to what is currently stated, adolescence does not refuse school, but the educational system focuses on methods, reproduces hierarchies and excluding processes, and repeats, without criticism, the alienating social representation of the adolescent offenders, thereby strengthening their stigma.

In reality - and here is our hypothesis -, going through this delicate transition, the adolescent seeks other referents beyond his/her family, parental and primary references. When committing the offense, which is still an alternate appeal to this other referent, the adolescent demands an orientation, an ideal or a significant teacher who will deal with the anguish caused by this transition. Such anguish emerges from questions that he/she asks him/herself: “how will the world (society) see me when I leave here?”; “What am I going to be out there?”; “How will I be perceived?”; “How should I be?”.

Some questions gathered by Veloso (2014) reveal how much the adolescent offender - as well as anyone else - seeks a referent, analterity, that offers him/her significant beacons for regulating oneself. Within the measure, the young person will be attentive to the determinations arising from this regulatory alterity of his/her freedom to obey it (or not) in the sense of knowing what it is necessary to do or say in order to be granted the benefit of being immediately out of the detention center: “Look, there is a judge who determines this, and I have to leave here” (Veloso, 2014, p. 88).

In this way, telling the adolescent that “who serves the measure is him/herself”, as it is often perceived in the environment, can result in something harmful by the system operators. It would be nefarious precisely because they do not offer possible references that allow the young person to orient him/herself, to mark out and to gain educational and professional capital from socio-education. The adolescent can see him/herself left to his/her own devices and having to create his/her own goals and references by him/herself and still unable to do so. Although it is a desirable end, as required by politics, it can be complicated in the case of a subject who is not yet in a position to create these references.

Therefore, he/she can pay attention to the rules and what is offered, but without knowing for sure what to do with it: if he/she must go to school, he/she goes to school; if he/she ought to participate in workshops, they participate in them; if he/she must have a conversation with technicians, this is what he/she will do. But is it what it is being really required to know what must be done to be exactly what the norms expect and to be able to get rid of the place and the stigma? There is a risk of attributing to the adolescent a responsibility and autonomy that do not depend only on him/her and, more, that may not be achieved in such a short time as that of the measure.

Furthermore, as we saw earlier, the families of young people almost never have an orientation to be transmitted, of values - especially regarding formal school - to be passed on to young people, which comes to strengthen an ambivalent relationship between the teenager and his/her family. Education, when passing through informal systems, ends up finding a counter value in the school, or even a depreciated value, which appears in the movement to exclude difficult cases, promoted from within the school itself.

In this sense, when proposing to the young person a consented and shared responsibility, what is often reaped is the impotence on the part of all those involved, who are often unable to achieve it. Every young person knows that he/she will complete the measure, but maybe he/she will beg for a response coming from the other as a referent that could guide him/her, not leaving him/her in the impasse of not knowing what to do and still having to do it.

That is why the formal school in the socio-educational measure can have a function not only socializing, but subjectivating - a fact that does not differ from schools in general. In the case of the detention center school, there is an open window to welcome the idiosyncrasies, transgressions and symptoms of the young offenders, within their adolescent passage, without imposing empty obligations, nor contents disconnected from the real; without discrediting subjects with negative expectations about their future; and without exerting threats and moralism to them.

Once these young people have already taken (and even in a positive way) the school as a bargaining chip for the socio-educational measure, it would be up to the institution to take advantage of this legitimacy and not to shy away from the place of an element capable of offering signifiers to young people to orient themselves and put them back into the world. May that school be able to conduct itself in the sense not to enforce another obligation of commensalism in the system, but to serve as a guideline so that each adolescent, one by one, can choose to follow (or not) their signifiers, their north, regarding the difficult path taken by the subject to become an adult. Therefore, this is what lead us to conclude that a school in the socio-educational system can be much better than a non-school. It is a political decision, as well as a decision of policy , to get it guided and not to depart from this principle.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

As we can see - both in the classic literature and in the current scientific data about the relationship between the school and the adolescent offender -, there is a recurrence of the school’s expulsive and stigmatizing role, which operates in a non-integrative and non-protective way in relation to this young person, reproducing the hierarchies and logics of powers that be. As families also neglect or inconsistently exercise the function of socialization, discrediting school education, we have a deficit in this education as an inevitable result that favors adherence to crime. It is not by chance that the prevalent age of adolescent entry into crime coincides with that of school dropout in the country.

Nonetheless, adolescents point to a belief in the transformative and inclusive potential of the school, despite suffering the consequences of abandonment and dropout. There is also a legislative direction and a social and technical expectation that the school can operate as a loop in the youth’s socio-educational process, with a view to their reintegration into society. Garcia (2010) proposes looping as a strategy for the production of new forms of knowledge, with a view to building a more favorable position for young people.

In this project, we will take as a reference the logic of “looping” - lifting, shifting (leaving) from a more subordinate position to a more favorable one ... Privileging practical actions that may or may not be added with theoretical content, the interest is that the meeting of (coexistence with) experiences - with knowledge - lived by instructors and students produces, by looping, a new form of knowledge, unprecedented until then for those involved in this work. This new knowledge would serve to expand the resources already available to these young people. (Garcia, 2010, s.p.).

However, different elements are opposed to the practical implementation of this re-socializing ideal: 1) The family and the youth (family ethos) rarely include school, and even formal education, as a positive value; 2) These young people lack an instrumentality in the use of knowledge (cultural capital), habitual in dealing with the formal knowledge transmitted in and by the school; 3) From the institution’s perspective, the school operates on the basis of cultural privilege; 4) The school is far from the reality, language and logical way of functioning of the young person; 5) There is a difficulty for teachers and the school institution to perform its role of reference and loop with the adolescent, in the process of crossing towards adult responsibility.

In this sense, we can conclude this article by showing that the relationship between entering crime and leaving school is not yet clear or explained in its details. The hypothesis constructed from the analysis undertaken here indicates that if the school is able to operate as a loop or referent for young people in the transition to adulthood, providing new ways of knowing, it may be that, effectively, it is possible to collect more positive results from this institutional experience.

For this, a deeper analysis about these correlations would be necessary, as well as an update of what is known about the methodologies of school functioning and the reality of young people and families from the periphery and their ways of operating in the world. Little has been discussed about the affective, symbolic and instinctive aspects that articulate the body and knowledge of the adolescent offender in the transition to adulthood, in these analyses and researches. Hence the need to advance on the knowledge about the ways of appropriation of the subjective, family, community, educational and cultural spaces for these young people.

With this article, nevertheless, it is evident that the loops in the process of crossing from the tutored infant body to the autonomous adult body can and should also be articulated by the school. However, this institution is still, in most cases, inefficient and outdated in relation to the youth’s know-how and the way in which peripheral families operate, barely tackling the system’s selectivity, cultural privileges and social difference.

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• 2
  Conducted in 2005, the research “Social losses caused by violence: violence in schools” involved public, state and municipal schools, and private schools in the cities of Belo Horizonte, Betim, Contagem, Santa Luzia, Ribeirão das Neves and Ibirité.

• Financial support: CNPq, Fapemig, IEAT.
• This paper was translated from Portuguese by E.M.T. Alencar
• 1
  Life course and delinquent trajectory.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  18 May 2020
• Date of issue
  2020

History

• Received
  17 Apr 2018
• Accepted
  29 Oct 2019