The article explores the possibility of defending a society without secure psychiatric hospitals in Brazil. These hospitals have been sustained by persistent legal and psychiatric paradigms, including the notions "safety measure" and "dangerousness," in conjunction with particular social and historical circumstances. The open repression of so-called dangerous individuals is still practiced in the name of the principle of social defense, outdated concepts notwithstanding. Together, law and psychiatry constructed spaces of power/knowledge within these workings of social control. Addressing this topic from the transdisciplinary field of social memory means identifying the struggles within particular power/knowledge arrangements, which play out in a state of ongoing tension.