Narrative disputes on prisons and pandemic: the Infovirus project in light of newsmaking criminology

Abstract

The arrival of the pandemic in prisons reinforced the historical complaints about the situation of health, food, clothing, and, of course, the routinization of state torture in the Brazilian prison system. This article aims to understand how the official narrative about the pandemic in Brazilian prisons was confronted through the extension project “Infovirus: prisons and pandemics”, through the construction of counter-narratives from civil society and disseminated through new media. To this end, it reports on how the initiative was structured to monitor data, check news and follow up on complaints. Still, it explains how the project fits within the proposal of building a newsmaking criminology, or journalistic criminology. Even though the project presented positive results, in order to produce information and analysis on COVID-19 in prisons from a counter-hegemonic place, it was possible to observe limitations in the face of the difficulty of accessing social movements. These difficulties reinforce the importance of deepening university extension and the channels that bring academic production closer to the prison reality, told by those who experience it daily.