Abstract:

Following the empirical study on the perception that law school students at the Portucalense University had about the respect for human rights, with regard to the subject of prisoners and the manner in which penalties are enforced, we had the opportunity to inquire a law class, composed by Brazilian students from the most diverse states of Brazil and who went to the Portucalense University in Oporto, Portugal, for the sole purpose of attending the Master of Law course, in the area of specialization in Political-Legal Sciences. The study had the purpose of analyse this class considering the peculiarity of the sample, with unique characteristics. The surveys were distributed and were answered freely, individually and anonymously by students who were present in a classroom environment. This is a group of students with a middle age ranging between 30 to 40 years old and who already had professional experience in working at a forensic area (notaries, judges, lawyers, etc.).

We wanted to know to what extent these students were sensitized towards the human rights issues related to prison sentences, their purposes and ways of execution. We also wanted to verify if the students had in their luggage of knowledge, from the teaching of legal subjects acquired in Brazil, the notions of basic principles regarding to the execution of prison sentences.

We concluded that these are students receptive to the principles of human rights related to prisoners and their penalties, unanimously defending the end of preventive penalties, even though only one of them said that he felt safe in his country, besides the remaining demonstrated insecureness, and most of them have already been victims of crime in Brazil. On the other hand, we recorded curious outcomes, sometimes somewhat inconsistent, results that we crossed over so that we related them to each other and this can be seen in the full paper.

Keywords:

Human rights education, prison sentences, purposes of the penalties, execution mode of penalties, insecureness, victims of crime.