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The central theme of this article is the growing investment in combating crime by the current democratic governments in Brazil, which contributes to consolidate also among us, the figure of "punitive state." The current capitalist arrangement generalizes almost instantaneously across the globe, tying the success of the new economic businesses considering criminal policy. Accordingly, the punitive state characterizes an ambiguity that is symbolically the portrait of the contemporary political moment. Put another way, around this control, thoroughly contradictory concepts are mixed as democracy and authoritarianism. Present in recent sociological reflections of Loïc Wacquant, David Garland, Nils Christie, Zygmunt Bauman and Giorgio Agamben, among others, this theme also begins to be discussed by the national academic community. The paper therefore aims to address what has been called "punitive state," political figure who portrays the economic, social and cultural changes already underway in the last thirty years and that rises in Brazil as an increasingly hegemonic control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the experience of governance of the National Secretariat of Public Security (Senasp) to direct, coordinate and evaluate the actions and targets proposed by public policies in the area of security for the increment of a new paradigm - the public safety with citizenship - into the so-called "police education". To reach this, bibliographical research and field work were accomplished. The literature review included an examination of literature, nationally and internationally, on police professionalism, governance, public policy and democracy. The field work involved primarily an analysis of the official documentation of the National Secretariat of Public Security/Ministry of Justice (Senasp/MJ), especially addressed the area of "police education" produced in the period between 2003 and 2010. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for an interdisciplinary interlocution between social theory and social philosophy in order to recast the problem of normativity in social practices, especially within Brazil's democratic ethos. By resorting to insights from critical theory and social epistemology, the essay proposes to reexamine Bourdieu's conception of habitus so as to contribute to a moderate social constructionism that cannot be reduced to a postmodernist discourse or to a variant of relativism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]