"Being a family is not a crime!: struggles of relatives of people deprived of liberty as a production of legal knowledge".
Relatives of persons deprived of their liberty; Legal epistemologies; Criminal Justice System; black families;
Pandemic, Penal Abolitionism.
The present work discusses “how the collective organization of family members of people deprived of liberty, within the National Agenda for Extrication movement, has promoted the production of legal knowledge, social control and transformations within the Brazilian Criminal Justice System?”. Thus, the data were collected and discussed through a qualitative approach with participatory research inspired by virtual ethnography, digital discourse analysis and in-depth interviews with the organizers of the National Agenda for Extrication movement, during the years 2020 to 2022, a period crossed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Through this information, we seek to understand how the practices and discourses carried out by such movements consist of the production of legal knowledge even when facing epistemic logics (CARNEIRO, 2006) and epistemic injustice (FRICKER, 2007). Also, as the notion of family rises, and is disputed in these tensions and claims for political and legal recognition before the State, in which we highlight the notion of black families, as an analytical concept, in a dialogue with black feminist epistemology (GONZÁLES, 2020 ; COLLINS, 2019; HARTMAN, 2022; CARNEIRO, 2003; SOUSA, 2021) as an approach to interpret the broader and collective impacts of the exercise of punitive power in Brazil governed by genocide and racial violence (FLAUZINA, 2006; VARGAS, 2010; ROCHA, 2014; WERNECK, 2017) denounced by the research interlocutors. We discuss the confrontation with authoritarianism (BATISTA, 2001) of the Criminal Justice System from the exercise of social control practiced by the research interlocutors, their epistemic contributions in the combat and prevention of torture in prison, and for acting as agents for the extrication and intellectuals in the field of penal abolitionism (DAVIS, 2018; MATHIESEN, 2015; HULSMAN, 1989; STEINERT, 1989), in the proposition of horizons of social justice, in an anti-racist perspective. Thus, in this research we go through several pre-pandemic and pandemic events, episodes and campaigns carried out by the National Agenda for Extrication movement, based on practices located in the names, faces and voices of their articulators as insurgent dialogues and producers of legal memory..