Trade classes at São José Prison: the training of prisoners in the First Republic

Abstract

This article deals with the debate on the proposal to create trade classes at the São José Prison, presented by Father Frederico Costa to the Pedagogical Congress of Pará in 1901, in Belém. This is a historical study in which we used as sources the minutes of this Congress published in the magazine A Escola, an educational periodical that circulated in the state between 1900 and 1905. We used content analysis from Franco’s (2008) perspective to interpret the collected data, through which we decoded the messages contained in the texts, aiming to extract information that would provide an understanding of the existing discourse on prison education and its relationship with the ideas in vogue at the beginning of the 20th century. Our study dialogues with Michel Foucault’s (2014) reflections on prisons, especially in his work Discipline and Punish, as well as the discussion by Rusche
and Kirchheimer (2004), who link the birth of prisons as an institution to the very birth of the capitalist mode of production. Frederico Costa was a prison chaplain and believed that prisoners had a better chance of reintegrating into society through a profession established by training given in the prison. However, his speech proposed rehabilitation according to the economic interests of the ruling classes, for whom certain people should not be educated, but adapted to the social reality of industrialization. The proposal was endorsed by the third committee, presented and discussed in plenary during two sessions, and approved in a format that was structurally different from the original.