Filling a significant gap in our (Brazilian) scientific production about prisons and detention societies, at the interface of disciplinary knowledges, Fernando Salla's Prisons in São Paulo - 1822-1940 is, besides a socio-historical work on punishment within the state's context (nevertheless valid for the whole country, given São Paulo's then already outstanding position in the national scene), the report of a thorough research effort and a detailed presentation of data and analyses. It shows the permanent socio-legal-punitive wound (and its permanence) in our reality, expressed in the distance between discourse and practice, in the unequal treatment of social levels and categories, in the conflict between legal and medical knowledges as well as between them and management practices, and in the confrontation between the demands by the political field and the claims of the scientific one.
penitentiaries; prisons; São Paulo