(IN)DEFESA

The article explores the paradoxical nature of the work of public defenders in sentencing enforcement courts. After considering the role of public legal assistance in the Brazilian criminal justice system, the article explores the role of public defenders at decisive moments in sentence enforcement proceedings. In this procedural phase, it is possible to see how the intervention of the public defender's office is essential, as it unleashes rights that make the prison population flow through the spaces of confinement, while at the same time it is incapable of making the justice system duly observe the most basic subjective rights of a sentenced person.