Film review: “Carandiru” (2003)

Introduction Federalism is the normative concept of self-governing society, which includes different ideas about the political organization of the states, communities and other forms of social entities. “Federalism is not just a form of government; it is a method for solving problems, a way of life”. In this paper, we will analyze how this ideology is implemented in the social structure of Carandiru, keeping in mind that formally it is an absolutely unitary penicitar institution. What kind of structures manage the diversity of the prison population? The movie starts with a demonstration of some informal agreement among the inmate’s community and the guards. “I'd like to ask our visitors to turn their backs…” says Ebony and the “visitors” (Doctor and the warden) listen to him. This clearly shows us that the legitimate power belongs to the certain prisoners, but not to the warden, whose role is more like the role of a border guard. Especially significant that Ebony in this scene acts as a victim, judge, executioner and prosecutor in one person. So the rulers there are only reputable inmates and the heads of gangs. Considering that as the form of federalism’s implementation, we may draw analogies with the issues in a modern federations related to shifting responsibilities between levels of government. As writes Erik Wibbels, “national governments that may be tempted to “offload”responsibilities onto decentralized governments, without increasing their access to funding”. In the film “offloading” responsibilities lead to much more cruel consequences. In circumstances of the weakness of the “central government”, a minor conflict between members of different gangs led to a riot, as a result of which many prisoners were killed, but the warden was not actually punished in any way. Following Steven Lukes’ three dimensions of power, we may see that for most of the movie we are observing the first face of power of R. Dahl. Almost all power manifests here are between specific individuals, that is, power as the ability or ability of one group or individual to influence the behavior, decisions and actions of other people or groups in a social environment, which can be easily traced from the standpoint of behavioralism and methodological individualism...