THE BRAZILIAN JUVENILE SOCIOEDUCATIONAL SYSTEM IN CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE: BETWEEN JUVENILE ACCOUNTABILITY AND THE EFFECTIVENESS OF FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS

Abstract

This article critically examines the Brazilian juvenile socioeducational system through the relationship between juvenile accountability and the effectiveness of the fundamental rights guaranteed to adolescents who commit offenses. It is based on the understanding that the Brazilian legal order, especially after the 1988 Constitution, the Statute of the Child and Adolescent, and the normative consolidation of Sinase, established a legal model grounded in full protection, the exceptional nature of deprivation of liberty, and the central role of the educational purpose of socioeducational measures. In this context, criminal non imputability is not understood as absence of responsibility, but as the foundation of a specific legal regime compatible with the adolescent’s peculiar condition of development, which imposes substantive and procedural limits on state power. The article further discusses the legal nature of socioeducational measures, their declared purposes, and the distortions that emerge when the discourse of punishment overrides their formative function, affecting access to education, health, family and community life, due process of law, and protection against institutional violence. It concludes that the gap between legal normativity and actual implementation remains one of the greatest obstacles to the legitimacy of the system, demanding the reaffirmation of fundamental rights as the non negotiable core of socioeducation and as a legal, political, and ethical standard for controlling state action.