O direito à educação nas prisões: da política educacional ao acesso e permanência na Escola Estadual São José (Amapá-BR)

Abstract

Education is legally recognized as a social right for everyone. Despite being guaranteed in legal documents, this right is still denied to vulnerable populations, such as people deprived of their liberty. The right to education for people in situations of incarceration has remained invisible, with some sparse legal provisions and the absence of a specific policy. At the end of the first decade and the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, education policy for this group takes place with the publication of the National Guidelines for Education in Prisons (Resolution 03/2009 and Resolution 2/2010) and the Strategic Plan for Education in the Prison System (Decree 7.626/2011). Given this regulatory scenario and the history of drawing up a policy for education in prisons in the state of Amapá, located in the far North of Brazil, this research question the following problem: What barriers to access and permanence limit the right to education of people deprived of their liberty at the São José State School (Amapá-BR)? To this end, this research aims to analyze the barriers to access and permanence that hinder the right to education for people deprived of their liberty at São José State School. In terms of methodology, this is a documentary and field research with a qualitative approach, using unstructured interviews that were analyzed using content analysis. The results indicate that although there are legal instruments that guarantee the right to education in prisons, the access and permanence of people deprived of their liberty in school is limited by what we call Obstacles in the School System (comprising documentary, structural and financial, communication and administrative-pedagogical obstacles) and Obstacles in the Prison System (including obstacles in institutional and operational relations). Within the School System Obstacles, the findings reveal a weak regulatory and pedagogical institutionalization due to the absence of documents such as: curriculum; calendar; matrix; pedagogical political project; regiment and the personal and schooling documents of the students; reduced access capacity, as the School serves only 17.9% of the population deprived of liberty held in custody at IAPEN, since the School's physical and material structure is insufficient and precarious, making it difficult to expand vacancies; deficiency in communication between the school and prison systems; lack of na initial/continuing training policy for teachers who work at the School. Among the Obstacles in the Prison System, the research identified a dynamic of overlapping power of IAPEN in relation to the actions of the School, which submits to its demands in order to continue operating within the Institute; there is no transparent regulation on the criteria that the prison system uses to select the people who will be able to study, allowing particularisms and, consequently, the exclusion of a large part of the people deprived of their liberty from studying, also depriving them of their right to education.