Making individuals visible, hiding institutions: a document analysis of government categories to address the phenomenon of confinement in Brazil

Abstract

Objective: to describe and analyze categories to refer to people and establishments adopted in the health and justice sectors of the Federal Executive Branch thus accentuating the political dimension of the phenomenon of confinement in Brazil. Methods: we developed an overview of the results, highlighting the number and frequency of these categories. Our document analysis focused on primers and other educational materials identified and characterized after consulting four websites. Results: we gathered 147 documents, most of them with the purpose of raising social engagement, and a few defining norms. In the justice sector we found 412 records of expressions to refer to populations, and 274 to refer to establishments, as well as 619 and 390 in the health sector so that the policy target audience is presented almost twice as often as the service offered in these educational materials. Conclusion: there are more categories to refer to the target populations of health and penitentiary policies than to the spaces in which it is recommended that they be allocated. In some technical areas, almost five times more, as if the process of formulating these forms of state action collaborated to make individuals visible while hiding institutions.