The present study aims to analyze childhood in legal proceedings in Belém do Pará, based on
the problem of crime, from the perspective of legal-assistentialist discourses for the education
of underprivileged children from 1890 to 1930. Cases of minors: Joaquim Manoel da Silva,
13 years old, and Manoel dos Santos, 16 years of age, accused of various crimes. The judicial
process is inserted in the context of the socioeconomic transformations of Belém in the
passage from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century, which contributed to the
increase of crime in the capital of Pará, due not only to the commercialization of rubber, but
also to the project to modernize the city of Belém and of a new educational proposal of justice
for poor children involved with crime in Brazil. However, this proposal was fostered in a
work oriented education model, whose initiatives were based on the understanding of the
alliance between Justice and Assistance, inserted in the philanthropic model logic, aiming at
the moral sanitation of the society to focus on the poor, abandoned child ; and in the first code
of Minors "Mello Mattos", implemented in 1927, thus enabling the system of assistance and
protection for underprivileged minors. Thus, the questions that guide this study are: What
discourses are present in the judicial processes of minors, Joaquim Manoel da Silva and
Manoel dos Santos, on crime in Belém do Pará from 1890 to 1930? In view of this central
question, we propose to raise some specific questions: What senses and meaning in the
discursive statements are present in the judicial processes of minors, Joaquim Manoel da Silva
and Manoel dos Santos? What ideological formation is contained in the discursive statements
of the victims, witnesses and curators in the judicial processes on child crime in the capital of
Pará? What is the educational proposal for the underprivileged minor in Republican Brazil
from the legal-assistance discourses? In order to try to answer such questions, from the main
objective of this study, I intend to: 1 - identify the meanings and meanings in the discursive
statements present in the judicial processes of minors, Joaquim Manoel da Silva and Manoel
dos Santos; 2 - to point out the ideological formation contained in the discursive statements of
the victims, witnesses and curators in the judicial processes on child crime in the capital of
Pará and; 3 - analyze the educational proposal for the underprivileged minor in Republican
Brazil from the legal-assistentialist discourses. Child crime was directly linked to poverty,
abandonment of the family, the demographic explosion and the modernization project of the
city of Belém, which looked at the social, economic and political convergences and
divergences that occurred in several capitals of the country, contributing to the emergence of
less criminal. Against the Pará elite, which emerged in the Belle Époque, there was a
population of poor children assigned to commit vagrancy, vagrancy, and theft crimes. The
corpus of this research encompasses two judicial proceedings, collected in the archive of the
Memory Center of Amazonia and belonging to the documentation of the Court of Justice of
the State of Pará. The analysis of this corpus was thought from the Discourse of Bakhtin,
where it was possible to identify the senses and meanings that constituted the case records
based on the Penal Code of 1890.
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