Pedro Scuro
Pedro Scuro (Neto) is an independent sociologist and jurist. He earned a Ph.D. (University of Leeds, 1989) under the supervision of Zygmunt Bauman and philosopher of science Jerome Ravetz.
Those projects introduced notions such as 'matrix of social transformation' ; evaluation of public policy efficiency (including the effectivity of policing) through scientific experiment; system of school protection and prevention of disorder, violence and criminality; restorative justicea; analysis of organizational culture of legal institutions through controlled experiment . Notions developed in collaboration with leading experts on restoration of justice systems, in Brazil (André Gomma de Azevedo, Afonso Konzen, Renato Socrates Gomes Pinto, Beatriz Aguinsky, and Leoberto Brancher) and abroad (Lawrence W. Sherman, Heather Strang, Denise Gottfredson, William F. McDonald, Daniel W. Van Ness, Michael E. Buerger).
Background
A student of sociology at the University of São Paulo, he lost his job as a secondary school teacher of history and was arrested after the AI-5, Institutional Act Number Five, one of major decrees issued by the military dictatorship in Brazil. Under political harassment, he left his country and enrolled at the University of 17th November, in Prague, to join a group of militant sociologists proclaiming the autonomy of sociology as a science against the official doctrine of Leninist political parties and regimes. Led by Miloš Kaláb and Zdeněk Strmiska, from the Sociological Institute of the Academy of Sciences, the group considered the monopoly of the official doctrine – historical materialism – as undesirable, restrictive and unilateral, and sustained the organising virtues of sociology in grasping the similarities, interdependences, convergences and connections of the social realm.
In crossfire
After graduating and completing a masters' degree, he left a job as speaker at Radio Prague to do a postgraduate course at Comenius University in Bratislava when his stay in Czechsolovakia was abruptly terminated, allegedly for political reasons. Compelled to leave the country at once, even though he was intensely persecuted in Brazil, he refused to become a political refugee and returned home. He succeeded to get in but after some months was arrested and tortured, surviving thanks to his father, a World War II veteran. Since the University of São Paulo would not recognise his degrees from a socialist state, with the help of Professor Kalab, from Prague, he started to research for a doctor's degree in West Germany under René König, mentor of the of sociology, a pioneer of empirical methods.
Since the Brazilian dictatorship continued to refuse to give him a passport, he left West Germany and went to England, where, with the help of Lord Boyle of Handsworth, vice-chancellor of the University of Leeds, he obtained a permit to stay in the United Kingdom, work as a lecturer - first at Corpus Christi High School then at Leeds City College - and complete his doctorate under Jerome Ravetz and Zygmunt Bauman.