Priority to adolescents
Concentrated hearings
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The room is adorned. A nice snack at the table and welcome posters decorate the place. The preparation was made the day before by socio-educational agents and adolescents who, together with a judge, begin to receive family members and professionals who will participate in the event known as concentrated hearing. According to Brazilian law, people under the age of eighteen can´t be criminally imputable and may receive socio-educational measures in response to infractions. Following the principle of full protection of the Estatuto da Criança e do Adolescente (Child and Adolescent Statute) of 1990, socio-educational measures should articulate accountability with guarantee of children’s rights, and should be reviewed periodically.
In the scenario described above, a concentrated hearing is underway to re-evaluate socio-educational measures at the Lindeia Socio-Educational Center, in Belo Horizonte, capital of Minas Gerais, a southeastern Brazilian state. “This is a welcoming moment, when the spirits appease,” explains Judge Afrânio Nardy, of the Violational Court of Belo Horizonte.
Disseminated by CNJ and UNDP since 2019, based on the identification of good practices in the country, the concentrated hearing proposes the periodic review of socio-educational measures by facilitating dialogue between adolescents, family members, reference people for this adolescent, professionals involved in policies for guaranteeing child and adolescent’s rights, technicians of the juvenile justice system and judges. Currently, six Brazilian states use the methodology and another ten are in the process of implementation.
As Judge Afrânio Nardy explains, the process begins with a prehearing adapted for each adolescent, to identify family references and the social care network. From there, the technical team contacts people from this network to invite them to the hearing. On the scheduled day, after the welcoming reception, the work begins with the presentation of the adolescent’s history and report of the technical team that follows his trajectory in topics such as education, work, psychology and health. Thus, together with the adolescent and his/her support network, strategies are thought to overcome the situation that put him/her there. On the day of the Lindean hearing, six of the seven teenagers were released.
Native from Belo Horizonte (MG), Nardy says he has always felt the need to resignify closed conditions and the culture of tensions between safety and socio-educational care. “Then there was a meeting promoted by this partnership between CNJ and UNDP, when the axis of action in the juvenile justice area was launched. I had contact with the concentrated hearings applied in the state of Amazonas by Judge Luis Cláudio Cabral Chaves, and I was completely touched”, he says.
“What we seek is to build life projects so that these teenagers can be happy, working with the whole state. We embrace the family, the network and the teenager.”
Afrânio Nardy — Judge of the Violational Court of Belo Horizonte
Mateus* was one of the adolescents who went through the hearings in Amazonas, northern Brazil. During their custodial socio-educational measure, the reports detailed enrollment and attendance at school, participation in sports and leisure activities, reestablishment and strengthening of family ties and therapeutic follow-up. The adolescent had access to civil documentation, was a scholarship holder of learning biology projects and the leader of educational projects aimed at the labor market. All the professionals who accompanied him indicated to the judge, during the hearing, that they felt that Mateus was prepared to be released. The adolescent said that he feels more confident and was welcomed by the family, in addition to having been able to develop a life project.
From the city of Londrina, the pedagogue Gloria Cardozo has been working in the juvenile justice system since 2006. She says that when she arrived, she was divided between enchantment and strangeness. “You get to know the severity of the situations that affect childhood and adolescence in Brazil. There are many violations in the lives of those who arrive here, especially with regard to the right to education. I’ve had teenagers who at 18 couldn’t even read”, she says.
Cardozo works with custodial socio-educational measures at CENSE Londrina II, where she monitors the issues involving the educational process of adolescents. She explains that concentrated hearings give them a better understanding of the whole process. “They are gaining elements to be able to understand exactly what is expected from them, what are the duties of the judge, the defense, the prosecution”, she explains. For the pedagogue, the insertion of adolescents and family members in the process is what makes the difference for the construction of a public policy that makes sense.
These stories are featured in the publication “Fazendo Justiça — Learn stories of real impact promoted by the program in the context of deprivation of liberty.” Produced by the Communications Department of the Fazendo Justiça program, this publication shares stories of lives transformed by the program’s positive impact. To access the full material, click here: https://www.cnj.jus.br/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/historias-fazendo-justica-en.pdf
Fazendo Justiça is a partnership between the National Secretariat of Criminal Policie (SENAPPEN), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Brazil, and the National Council of Justice (CNJ). All the individuals featured in the publication were interviewed between December 2021 and April 2022.
* Some names have been changed to protect the identity of individuals
