Disparidades econômicas e processos de exclusão social : estudo comparativo das populações carcerárias de Cachoeira do Sul e Santa Cruz do Sul.

Abstract

This descriptive study aimed to examine the ways in which the economic differences between two counties – Cachoeira do Sul and Santa Cruz do Sul – are reflected in the prisoner's profile, on their process of exclusion and on their perception about quality of life. The participants of this study were prisoners who were born in these two counties and were in these counties prisons during the months of March to June of 2004. Closed questionnaires were applied with sixty-one questions. Each questionnaire took approximately thirty-five minutes to be administered. The questions explored the prisoners' profile, their observed and perceived mobility, and their perception about the place where they were born. Results showed that: 1) the Regional Prison of Santa Cruz do Sul housed about 290 prisoners, and 36% of these people were born in Santa Cruz do Sul; 2) at the State Prison of Cachoeira do Sul, 125 prisoners were serving a prison term, and among them 76% were born in that county. A total of 156 prisoners were interviewed (70 from Cachoeira do Sul and 86 from Santa Cruz do Sul). Our goal was to describe the reality of the excluded people, and mainly to verify the differences and/or the similarities between the prisoners who belong to different regional social economic contexts. As general characteristics of the research population, we found in these two contexts that: 99,4% of prisoners were male, and only 0,06% were female; 43,6% of them were single; and 60,3% had children, of which 55,9% had families with up to two children. Through the perception of the prisoners about the process of exclusion, we observed a preponderant aspect in the relation between the economic growth and the exclusion: the presence of both in the same time. This was illustrated by the fact that even with divergent economic characteristics, there were not significant statistical differences among some of the prisoners’ aspects in both counties, such as: the precocity of prisoners' age, the period of work with signed working papers, and the mean age in which they started to work.