"It is fragrant, your excellency, doctor"

Carla Akotirene offers a feminist and decolonial critique of legal procedures, exposing the institutionalization of racism and the punitive persecution of the Black population.

"Your Excellency, Doctor, is a blatant escape" is Carla Akotirene's main criticism of the Brazilian legal system, represented here by the Custody Hearings Division of the Bahia State Court of Justice. Custody hearings provide an opportunity for people arrested in flagrante delicto to state the reasons for their detention and the conditions of treatment they are subjected to by police and judicial forces.

This type of hearing is a right guaranteed by law to those caught in flagrante delicto and, in theory, should protect the opportunity for self-defense for those accused of a crime. In her original approach, Carla Akotirene presents these hearings in "colonial scenes," in which legal actors—judges, public defenders, prosecutors, and police officers—perform in custody hearings as if following a pre-established ritual. In these "colonial scenes," the old slave-owning order, in which white landlords arbitrate over Black lives, continues to be the rule of the new "democracy." These actors and actresses are subject to vertical pressure from public opinion regarding the legality of arrests, granting public trust to the police officers executing the arrests and imposing their due diligence on the accused.

Custody hearings, as Carla Akotirene reveals, are crucial to the exorbitant incarceration rates of the Black population in Brazil. With little room for self-defense and often poorly informed about their rights, many of these individuals are registered and flagged by the prison system through planted evidence, i.e., fabricated arrest warrants. This type of criminal induction by the police is not uncommon, as Akotirene's interviews with those caught in the act indicate. Her work with prisoners transforms field research—the fruit of years of working with the Bahia prison system—into wisdom.

By invoking Xango's epistemology, Akotirene presents a profound critical review of social thought and the punitive stigma that hangs over the Judiciary. She draws, for example, on Black feminist tools of intersectionality, the legal instruments of the philosophical worldview of the Bantu and Yoruba, and the declarations of innocence of Ancient Egypt through the philosophy of Maat. With these African examples of justice, Akotirene is able to cast a distant eye on the Brazilian Judiciary and observe that the role of custody hearings is the path to the release of the Black population, who must ultimately find their destiny of freedom.

For Carla Akotirene, prison is racism itself, and racism is colonial. Freeing the Black population from mass incarceration must be seen as one of the greatest challenges of contemporary abolitionism, a victory to be achieved by the Black movement that will represent, in the near future, the end of "colonial scenes" and the overcoming of the segregating order in Brazilian society.