ABSTRACT
This final chapter focuses on the youths’ experiences of the Liberdade Assistida measure and on their trajectories through the Brazilian juvenile justice system. It is divided into three sections. The first examines the various ways in which the youths resist or comply with the ‘government through speech’ that prevails in these measures. The results show that the more the youths play by the institution’s rules, the more they are subject to a continuous yet negotiable form of control. The second section explores the hypothesis that the discontinuous, individualized, and contractual control specific to the LA measure produces particular forms of inequality, linked to the youths’ resources and trajectories. Verbal and relational skills, the ability to follow implicit rules, and the capacity to handle diffuse forms of surveillance all significantly determine the progress they make while in Liberdade Assistida. Finally, the third section examines the desistance dynamics at work in the trajectories of 12 young people who were at one time deeply involved in criminal activities but had completely (or partly) disengaged from them by the time they were interviewed. This analysis leads to the identification of three types of desistance from crime, which result from the combination of the youths’ relationships to delinquency and to juvenile justice institutions: desistance through identity transformation, desistance through skills transfer, and desistance despite penal institutions.
