ESTUDIOS SOCIALES SOBRE DERECHO Y PENA

The Age of Criminal Responsibility in Legislative Debate

Sabina Renée Sepe — 2025-07-01

In Argentina, the Criminal Regime for Minors, Decree-Law 22.278 of 1980 and its amendment Law 22,803 of 1983, are in force. This law, which applies to adolescents considered to be criminal offenders from the age of 16, is a remnant of the last military dictatorship and is currently under discussion. The controversies have to do mainly, on the one hand, with questions related to the adequacy of the law to international human rights standards and, on the other hand, with its usefulness in dealing with juvenile crime and preventing it. Within the framework of these discussions, one of the issues debated is the age of minimum criminal responsibility. In this paper we will try to reflect on the debate on the age of minimum criminal responsibility in Argentina as a public problem. For this purpose, we will analyze the shorthand versions of the debate around the sanction of a new juvenile criminal regime in the framework of the hearings held in the Congress of the Nation during the year 2019, from the perspective of the sociology of public problems.

Vagrants and dangerous individuals.

Mariana Dovio — 2025-07-01

Between 1924 and 1928 in Buenos Aires, three legislative projects on dangerousness status without crime were presented in the National Congress and others were prepared on vagrancy, immorality and begging that were not sanctioned. They had an impact in Revista de Policía, with a recognized track record in the Capital, from which urban problems associated
with so-called professional crime were disseminated. From the study of the forms of circulation of ideas about how the police should act with those who were identified as suspicious or dangerous, the relationships and tensions between criminological and police knowledge can be analyzed. The modes of reception of criminal legislative ideas are also studied in this publication by renowned jurists such as Luis Jimenez de Asúa, especially to
justify the existence of dangerous states without crime, enabling punishment and police intervention before the occurrence of the legal infraction.

Dwelling on the margins.

Lucía Marina Pereyra — 2025-07-01

This article offers an ethnographic analysis of the everyday life of first-year cadets at the Escuela Penitenciaria de la Nación (EPN) in Argentina, with particular attention to the social dynamics that emerge among peers within the boarding regime. Using Frederick Bailey’s (1971) concept of “small politics” it examines informal forms of agency, recognition, and hierarchy that operate beyond the institution’s formal design. The analysis focuses on the liminal figure of the “ghost,” a category constructed by the cadets themselves to describe those who maintain a discreet presence and avoid exposure within the group. The article argues that these figures are neither exceptional nor marginal, but rather express legitimate modes of participation and belonging within the moral community of the EPN. Moving beyond an understanding of penitentiary training solely as a process of state-driven discipline, the article offers a situated reading that foregrounds peer judgment, the construction of reputations, and everyday practices through which individuals adapt, negotiate their place, and define their social value. In this sense, the margin does not lie outside the institutional order but constitutes a key part of its functioning.

Social representations in the prison contexts of Villarrica and Coronel Oviedo-Paraguay

Juan Carlos Decoud-Fernández — 2025-07-01

Criminal Execution in a penitentiary context presupposes processes that affect the reciprocal social representations between an inside and an outside. Based on these constructions, the therapeutic model on which Criminal Execution is based and the achievement of the purposes of rehabilitation, reintegration and protection of society is analyzed. Through interviews with people deprived of liberty and penitentiary officials from the Paraguayan districts of Villarrica and Coronel Oviedo, plus an online survey for Likert-type scaling answered by the external population, the results are analyzed and representations are inferred. As a result, predominantly punitive conceptions are observed, and the outside is viewed as a hostile entity. Faced with weak institutional frameworks and community participation from the outside, compensatory affiliations arise, for example, from a religious perspective. Around the prison, identification and differentiation are configured between inmates, officials, and, above all, with respect to the outside. Consistent with such otherness, the therapeutic model advocated by legislation is, in reality, viewed as a system of punishment and alien to social responsibility.

The sounds of confinement

Camila — 2025-07-01

This article arises from the construction of background and state of the question based on the research question: what meanings do people deprived of their freedom attribute to everyday sounds in confinement? Starting from the notion of sound as a social experience (Petit, 2022), we found a gap in relation to the realization of socio-anthropological sound studies in contexts of confinement. We understand the importance of sound in social and cultural research as an exploratory resource to expand the questions around the prison social space in general and the relationship and meanings that detainees attribute to sounds, in particular.