When Psychology Meets Hunger: Insurgent Cartographies in the Prison System

Abstract

In the present article, we present three encounters with hunger during research and extension activities performed by psychologists and psychology students from Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and the State University of Rio de Janeiro, within the scope of Service for Assistance to Incarcerated Individuals. In the first instance, we present discussions about our "encounters with hunger", arguing in the text about the services provided by the team to people who enter the penitentiary system in a situation of recent food insecurity, sometimes without ingesting food for days. The "second encounter" is with prisons due to thefts out of basic necessity (mainly, thefts of food). Finally, the third encounter leads us to a discussion about the perpetuation of hunger among people who are incarcerated by the state, in a phenomenon that has come to be known as "starvation sentence." The analysis of the connections between hunger and the prison system helps us recognize movements of colonialism and racism in Brazil over the past centuries, locating the prison as a modern operator of mechanisms of domination and violation of the rights of the black and poor population in the country, as well as some embarrassments faced by professionals who occupy this public policy in the face of a context of total disruption of traditional possibilities for action.