Abstract
Throughout its history, the criminal group called the Capital’s First Command (Primeiro Comando da Capital – PCC) has constituted regulatory mechanisms aimed at conflict management, the exercise of social control, and the application of punishments, both in prisons and in the urban outskirts where it has reached hegemony. The devices known as debates express the configuration assumed by the mechanisms aimed at resolving conflicts and are of note due to the variety of demands that are reported on them. The cases involving “life and death” issues have been considered to be the more complex ones. In this text, starting from the analysis of a criminal process investigating torture practices in the city of São Paulo and related to the occurrence of a “life and death” debate, we discuss how these debates have resorted to the use of torture to operationalize the decisions taken by the members of the PCC for the purpose of obtaining a confession and, at the same time, punishing individuals accused of violating the “discipline of crime”. In addition, we emphasize how widely disseminated social and moral values underpin the regulatory ethics of criminal practices and are mobilized to guide the actions deliberated by these agents and, also, legitimize the use of violence as a way of resolving conflicts and punishment.
Keywords
torture; PCC; criminal groups; violence; debate