Critérios judiciais de aplicação das medidas socioeducativas

Abstract

This paper outlines judicial criteria related to social and educational judicial measures and analyses their similarities and differences in relation to criminal penalties. As a consequence, both constitutional rules and legal rules other than those within the Constitution have been studied, ranging from the so-called Ordenações Filipinas up to the Children and Adolescents Act; Brazilian jurisprudence of the past 10 years as well as the way Criminal Law relates to this paper s theme. The results attained demonstrate that (1) there is juvenile criminal liability with specific characteristics and a particular set of principles; (2) non-recognition of such juvenile criminal liability hinders the access and permanence of teenagers in the system of legal guarantees and prevents materialization and onset of public policies; (3) both the under ageoriented judicial way of thinking among Brazilian judges and their inclination towards punishment gives rise to legally arbitrary social and educational measures, based on judges personal views and their particular understanding of the Law, which, in turn, produces judicial decisions without any relation to their main goal, that is to say, teenagers pedagogical needs; (4) lack of infrastructure for the execution of social and educational judicial measures in Brazilian cities is also a contributing factor which leads to non-compliance to legal criteria whenever such measures are adopted; (5) interpretation and effectiveness of the Children and Adolescents Act currently face challenges that need to be overcome, be it through judges changing their mentality, be it through the creation of new structures that enable social and educational measures, in order to establish teenagers as legal subjects in a peculiar state of development