Insane offenders in prison

According to the Brazilian Penal Code, when someone criminally accused is diagnosed with a mental disorder, he or she must undergo compulsory psychiatric treatment in an outpatient facility or in a Psychiatric Custody and Treatment Hospital, an institution that, in the state of São Paulo, is part of the prison system. There is, however, a third way, mostly informal, which has expanded in recent decades: special wards for psychiatric treatment, located inside common prisons. In this work, I present the process of formalizing these wards in prison units in the state of São Paulo and discuss how parental grammars and gender inflections make up both State policies and prisoners policies that make the internal management of so-called insane offenders.

Keywords:
Prison; Asylum; Gender; Kinship; State