Tearing the threads, knitting inside out, building the weave

women, drug trafficking and prison

Abstract

Drug trafficking is the second most profitable business in the world, with characteristics of permanence and constitution of life parallel to the formal labor market. Economically, there is a new subsistence alternative, with its own characteristics and values. The adhesion of women, in this “activity”, is, in the last years, progressive, changing the statistics from 32.6% in 1988, to 56.1% in 2000. In the State of Ceará, in 1997, there was, only in Fortaleza , 1,452 men arrested and 105 women, 55 of whom were convicted of drug trafficking, representing 52.4%. Between October 2003 and August 2004, the period of our research, it was found that, out of 217 prisoners, 134 were arrested for drug trafficking, changing the statistics to 61.8%. This reality instigates the researcher to investigate and analyze the interrelationships of drug trafficking with the growing insertion of women in this practice considered illicit. The spatial focus of this investigation is the female penitentiary of the State of Ceará, Brazil, Instituto Penal Feminino Desembargadora Auri Moura Costa (IPFDAMC). The work now presented is a brief account of our field visit, our encounter and perplexity in the face of the aridity of the prison, data surveys, preparatory interviews to define the inclusion criteria of the research subjects, the applied methodology, theoretical framework, in short it is a little bit of the path we have taken to understand our object of study.