Pavilhão memória: história oral testemunhal do Carandiru

Abstract

This dissertation presents the results of an applied oral history project developed with individuals who share memories related to the former Casa de Detenção de São Paulo, a prison institution central to the history of incarceration in the state of São Paulo, known as Carandiru, during the period from the 1980s to 2002, when it was closed. By engaging with diverse and, at times, conflicting narratives, the research puts into tension the ways in which the prison past remains present, taking orally expressed memory as its primary analytical framework. The central aim was to understand how Carandiru remains socially active through memory work that, as demonstrated by the documentary corpus, gives shape to a community of fate. From a methodological standpoint, the study mobilized procedures from life history oral history and testimonial oral history, the predominant narrative genres that grounded the constitution of a corpus composed of sixteen oral histories. In addition to an introduction devoted to the trajectory of the project and to procedural definitions, the dissertation is organized into three interdependent parts. The first part, of a core nature and entitled Histories in Carandiru (1980-2002), is dedicated to the presentation of the oral histories, organized into networks of collaborators and privileging the centrality of narrated experience. The second part, From Flamínio Fávero to Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns: the history of the Casa de Detenção de São Paulo, seeks to situate Carandiru within its social and historical context by addressing its antecedents, its repeated use over approximately fifty years of operation, and the process of closure that enabled the construction of Parque da Juventude. This transformation is analyzed as an enterprise inscribed within a broader project aimed at erasing the prison past. The third part, entitled The Passage from History to Prison Memory through Testimony, is devoted to the analysis of the oral histories, drawing on the collective frameworks of memory. The dissertation argues that acts of memory carried out by former inmates of the Casa de Detenção de São Paulo contribute to an inversion in the regime of production of knowledge about the prison past, displacing its centrality from institutional history to memory in its testimonial expression. Prison testimony emerges as a practice of working through the past that intervenes in processes of resocialization by fostering the reconstruction of social bonds and the conditions for material survival. By demonstrating the organic character of a collective memory driven by survival, this research contributes to studies on prisons, memory, and testimony, as well as to an understanding of the forms of agency exercised by former prisoners under a democratic regime.