This article presents a research about the producer factors of criminality done in the beginning of 80s which, with the support of long interviews with female prisoners, elaborated a group of hypotheses to the understanding of the established relations that this phenomenon keeps with the poverty, with the police/prison violence and with the own specialized knowledge through which their acts and actors become object of knowledge. Its presentation, today, has two aims: the first is, in honor of recognition and gratitude to Sylvia Leser de Mello, to offer a simple example of one of many research adventures propitiated by her orientation. The second is to share with researchers the subject in study that, polemic and innovative to its epoch, keeps importance to its characteristic specially serious, nowadays, shown by approached issues.
Criminality; Violence; Socioeconomic condition