In recent years, the Brazilian criminal justice system has witnessed a movement focused on changing, or expanding, the trend of punitive agencies to punish subjects targeted by their actions. Criminalization processes have been intensified towards subjects whose positions were historically untouched by the punitive justice and, mainly, by the prison system. Such intensification process highlights the need of analyzing and investigating an alleged change in the understanding about the (undeclared) role played by criminal law as instrument used to socially exclude and neutralize unwanted groups. Based on the criminological-critical perspective, we collected and analyzed data about the actions taken by agents participating in control instances involved in the secondary criminalization of people who, despite their political and/or economic power, have been targeted by the punitive justice power for committing white-collar crimes. Factors contributing to the social construction of “criminality” were also analyzed, with emphasis to aspects associated with the public perception about the criminal matter, with the media, with criminal policies, as well as with social, political and economic contexts. The present research enabled reading and understanding about the aforementioned problem by taking into consideration elements of historically-based punitive endeavors. It was possible concluding that the movement witnessed in recent years towards the increased criminalization of individuals who hold political and/or economic power, and commit white-collar crimes, does not represent a punitive turning-point that tends to equal the incidence of criminal interventions. On the contrary, it integrates the logic that has outlined the exercise of punitive power, which was reinvented to suit the criminalized-subject conditions and the contemporary context.
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