Justiça restaurativa: uma análise de práticas alternativas no sistema de justiça do RN

Abstract

Brazil has the third largest prison population in the world, accounting for 748 thousand prisoners – in a structure that only supports 442,349, as pointed out by the Brazilian Yearbook of Public Security (Forum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública - FBSP, 2020). Data such as the ones presented corroborate the perspective that the current justice system has not been efficient. In practice, institutions filled with demands, slow and selective, have been created over the years, restricting crime to the violation of the law, in which the main purpose is to penalize the offender, neglecting the relationships that were broken, the victims, the community and repairing the damage and, above all, the social issues involved. However, arising from an international agenda that the federal government has been following on the recommendation of the United Nations (UN), some initiatives have been discussed and developed against the reality of punishment as the only alternative, including in the justice system in Rio Grande North (Prosecutor's Office and Court of Justice). One of them is the central theme of this work, Restorative Justice (JR). JR can be understood as a set of practices, procedures, techniques and actions based on structured principles, in which the intention is to deal with conflicts in a consensual manner, with the participation of the offender, victim and community, in order to meet the needs of the involved, in order to repair the damage through accountability and the restoration of the social fabric broken by the infraction in a way that implies the future. Therefore, in an attempt to understand a practice considered an alternative in the justice system, this research aims to analyze the implementation of Restorative Justice as an alternative to traditional practices developed in the justice system in Rio Grande do Norte (RN): Public Ministry and Court of Justice of Rio Grande do Norte, considering aspects such as the history of development in the justice system of RN; the structure and epistemological theoretical basis used by the nuclei working with JR; as well as the difficulties of working with JR in RN from the perspective of professionals who perform restorative practices in both institutions and, finally, the flow of JR in articulation with the public assistance service. This work is a qualitative research, inspired by historical-dialectical materialism. In addition to the documentary research in public repositories about the implementation of the program, data collection was carried out via virtual means with the Self-Composition nuclei of the Public Ministry and the Court of Justice of RN, using semi-structured interviews (with the members of the nuclei who work directly with the JR practice - facilitators, judges and prosecutors). The information was submitted to thematic content analysis. Furthermore, the project was approved by the Ethics Committee and for its execution, all legal requirements were respected, including the use of the Informed Consent Form for the interviewees.