Social emancipation vs. actuarial criminal policy

the left’s political project held hostage by the representative democratic institution

Abstract

Institutional politics has proven to be the main arena for resolving conflicts and making collective decisions. However, decisions concerning public security and the implementation of actuarial criminal policy – characterized by the exclusion of individualities and the State’s operation through abstraction – have shown themselves to be exclusionary, creating tension with the concept of social emancipation and human liberation upheld by the political left. This article seeks to answer the following question: How does the relationship between actuarial criminal policy and the manner in which left-wing governments have implemented it within the framework of representative democracy unfold? It starts from the hypothesis that, in addition to generating internal tensions within the left, representative democracy itself imposes filters that make structural transformations of the legal order unfeasible. The hypothetical-deductive method is adopted, and alternatives are presented for overcoming the current state of affairs, such as proposing an epistemic turn in criminal ideology, grounded in decoloniality. From this perspective, historically excluded social movements come to occupy the position of producers of the State’s knowledge-power. Such an approach, however, could only prevail within a radical democracy, whose core is not based on exclusion, but on the incorporation of these groups as the foundation of a permanent constituent power.