Criminal punishment and "disposition" as native categories producing senses

Abstract

This is an empirical study built from the intervention as a defense lawyer in a case of criminal prosecution of a young man for the alleged commitment of a crime. It takes on an ethnographic perspective, analyzing the process through the police station and the judicial bureaucracy. This approach allowed to explore the way in which the police and judicial conceptions construct the native perspectives by which the agents of the field give particular senses to the confinement of young people in police stations. In this investigation, the detection of the native categories of “disposition”, the “confinement as punishment” or the “something has to be done” allowed to develop a reflexive analysis of the significance that these acquire for the actors of the field, as well as the scopes that in practical terms they trigger.