Introduction for Where the Sun Rises Square

INTRODUCTION

Prison Is Just a Question of Time

Hi my friend, or better yet, my new friend, David. It’s around one in the morning and I can’t sleep because of the heat, but I’ve been thinking about your workshop until today, everything that we talked about. Anyway, I hope everything’s well [. . .]

David, I believe in my ideas, because I know that many never had a chance, but some day someone will come to recognize me, and just like God brought us together that day, I believe that I will be in front of someone who can listen to me, who will believe in my dreams and who will give me all that I need—a chance! I don’t mean to get out of here, I committed a crime and I have to pay for it, but a chance to invest in my project and a chance that my work will be felt in the destroyed society that we see today, and you know what else David? Prison is just a question of time, the forgotten people on this side of the wall are going to be tomorrow’s society, and if nobody changes the way that they live and think, when they return they will be even worse.

[. . .]

Sincerely,

Your new friend, Diogo

“Even when everything goes wrong, God is in control”

I got this letter a few days after it was written. I was at a daylong event that the psychology department of Rio de Janeiro’s prison administration had organized to reflect on the successes and the current state of a volunteer program called Project Life, which aimed to promote “health and citizenship” among the incarcerated population. As usual, the head of the administration failed to appear for his scheduled presentation. In his place, we had just heard from Colonel Gilson,¹ the “Subsecretary of Treatment,” who spoke about new initiatives to be implemented at some unspecified later date. The Colonel’s speech started with a refrain that I heard many times over the course of my research, mostly during events like this one:

Here in Brazil we have no death penalty and we have no life sentence. Every person inside prison, every single one, will leave one day. It is our responsibility, together, to make sure that they leave in a better state than when they entered, and that they have an opportunity to prove their worth to our society.

This is a lie. Rio’s police enforce a de facto death penalty in the thousands that they kill every year. Hundreds also die while held in the state’s prisons. Based on the administration’s own data, those incarcerated in Rio are six times as likely to die of infectious disease than the general population.² But the repetition of the phrase was important. It suggested that the project of incarceration and the work of those of us sitting in the audience—mostly white, mostly women, mostly trained psychologists and social workers—were united by a responsibility to cultivate human potential, to reform those in prison for the sake of a better tomorrow.

There was a short coffee break after Colonel Gilson’s talk. Pastor Bruno, who was sitting a few rows in front of me, stood up and came over. He was a white man in his early forties who had worked for years as a prison missionary; now he was volunteering in a men’s unit that I will call René Dotti, where he ran cultos (worship) and Bible study each week. This was the same prison where, one week ago, I had met Diogo during a Project Life workshop that I facilitated. Diogo’s letter started a correspondence that ultimately lasted two years, as we wrote to each other between my visits to René Dotti and discussed my project, his own work, and the questions that lay between them. Diogo had passed it to Bruno the day before. Bruno handed it to me; I sat reading during the break while the other attendees gathered around the coffee table.

Something was shared between Diogo’s letter and Gilson’s speech, some future moment that they saw on the horizon. Both had their gaze firmly planted on the date of release as the point from which incarceration should be oriented and judged. If prison is just a question of time, the Colonel had made this question a rallying call. But Diogo, writing in the heat of a crowded prison cell at night, had carved it into a threat.

The transformation of punishment took a specific shape in the state of Rio de Janeiro.⁴ Successive governments decommissioned penitentiaries in the urban center and the once infamous, now touristy island of Ilha Grande. In their place, a ring of prison complexes emerged around Rio’s urban peripheries. Both the scale and scope of policing expanded through a set of security policies that governments and media justified in the name of building a new Rio, ready for its global debut at the 2014 FIFA World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games. Black, windowless vans known as camburões crisscrossed the city’s new thoroughfares every day as they trafficked hundreds from police stations into the prison system. But when they arrived at their destinations, each van would pass through a gate emblazoned with the promise and the mandate to “Resocialize to Conquer the Future” (Ressocializar para o Futuro Conquistar).

This phrase, the ever-present motto of the prison administration, seems out of place. It insists on a sense of optimism in the midst of a notoriously violent and punitive set of institutions. It justifies imprisonment as an intervention into the lives and futures of those held in custody, an attempt to transform them from criminal-objects into citizen-subjects. I don’t think that anyone believed that it was the main function of imprisonment. And yet resocialization was stamped on gates, walls, and official letterheads; it was cited by judges to justify another denied parole application; it was a constant, yet elusive talking point among those whose work in prison fell under the broad umbrella of “treatment.” It circulated, seeping into disparate areas of prison life and governance, while people like Diogo and Colonel Gilson took the idea and the aspirations that it represented and put them to use.

This is a book about what is made and unmade under resocialization’s sign. My claim is that resocialization animates Rio’s prisons, that it continues to shape a punitive landscape that appears detached from and often antithetical to any coherent project of reform. It marks out and codifies a trajectory of reform against which those held captive are classified and judged. At the same time, prison workers and incarcerated people mobilize its vision of change to make meaning of the positions they are forced into, or to mark out new ones for themselves. As a concept, resocialization holds out the possibility of a future within the violence of the present. As a set of practices, it fractures and bends this possibility toward different ends. As an institutional critique, it somehow both attacks and affirms the project of incarceration in Brazil. The collective hopes and anxieties that stick to those in prison, as well as fundamental questions about the nature of human change and the possibilities for individual and social futures, all coalesce around resocialization and the domains of punishment that it calls forth.

Another way to say this is that Rio’s prisons are anticipatory machines. They continually anticipate a moment—release—and a subject who is both worthy and capable of inhabiting it: the resocialized person. These horizons stalk the present, setting up a field of intimacy, suspicion, and hope that encircles the institutions and their captives. Speaking from radically different points within this field, Colonel Gilson and Diogo oriented themselves toward this mode of anticipation, where the promise and the supposedly inevitable fact of release made the imperative to reform self-evident. But something also slipped between the two. Gilson’s speech recruited his audience into a fight against crime. Diogo’s letter was a dispatch from a fight for survival. Those two projects met among the legal and discursive ground of reform, brought forth by federal legislation and by a longer history of tutelage, colonialism, and redemption in Brazil.

By following resocialization, I move through Brazil’s unfolding landscape of punishment, oriented by the question of how the future has become a resource within the carceral present. The result is just one among many possible stories about confinement. But it reveals the variegated and often perverse relationship between prisons, punishment, and hope, a relationship that deserves to be interrogated. It was not always as explicit as Diogo’s letter or Gilson’s speech. Sometimes it appeared in behavioral classification regimes, or in the collective concern over the wording and punctuation of a report. Sometimes it emerged in a psychologist’s warning that any discussion of structural violence could serve as an excuse for imprisoned people to avoid their personal responsibility to change. Sometimes it was held in the anxious tenor of a mother worried if her son was “ready” to leave prison. Sometimes it wrapped around a recently released man as he tried to sleep in a van outside the hospital while waiting for the birth of his child.

The word resocialization is never far from these spaces, but it doesn’t bear their weight alone. It sits within a broader family of reformative narratives, including recovery, social reintegration, and redemption—what Diogo once described to me in a letter as a “philosophy of ‘re.’”⁵ Both in conversation and in writing, he showed a profound ambivalence to these ideas, painfully aware of their hypocrisies even as he remained invested in the futures that they laid out. At the same time, these were the only futures—or at least, the only ones held up by the institution—that remained tangible for him within a space of confinement. Resocialization was both a part of his captivity and a pathway out of it.

One of the most critical shifts in Rio de Janeiro was the implementation of Police Pacifying Units (Unidades de Polícia Pacificadora or UPPs), which transformed the scope of policing in the city. Starting in late 2008, the program saw militarized police “retake” favelas—informal, impoverished neighborhoods in Brazil’s cities and icons of the nation’s startling inequality—by establishing permanent occupations of these communities. These units were justified as an effort to both “liberate” residents from the de facto control of organized crime networks known as factions (facções)¹⁰ and to fold the favelas back into the broader urban fabric. The World Cup and Olympic Games provided further justification for establishing UPPs across the city and pouring resources into policing. Coming after the sustained economic growth of the previous decade, particularly under the first presidency of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the two events were planned and publicized as the culmination of an optimistic tale of national development in which Brazil would, finally, emerge as a modern, transformed country. In some cases, UPPs served as a pipeline for new infrastructure, social projects, and government services, at least in the first few years of their operations. But they also extended the reach of state security into areas that had previously been subject only to sporadic police operations. Despite promises of peace, many UPPs also terrorized neighborhoods through armed conflict, exposing residents to state violence and drawing them into the orbit of courts and prisons.¹¹

FIGURE I.1. Map of prisons within the municipality of Rio de Janeiro (highlighted) and surrounding municipalities.

The project to produce a new, modern Rio de Janeiro was the dream of a security state, one that funneled tens of thousands into prisons. The incarcerated people with whom I worked were part of this wave of arrests and convictions. They had been apprehended by UPP police, or else by the patrols that increasingly occupied tourist areas in Rio’s center and South Zone. From there, they were taken to the nearest police station, where they were held for up to two days. Next, they were brought into the “triage” unit, where they would wait at least a week before being sent to yet another unit to await trial. For those headed to men’s prisons, this was also the point at which they were segregated, divided between units that were designated for and internally governed by different collectives. These include the factions, paramilitary militias,¹² and the ostensibly “neutral” prisons, which were destined for those unaffiliated with either of these groups, but where a new organization known as the People of Israel had begun to emerge.¹³ The division was not based on an incarcerated person’s previous formal membership within these groups. Instead, it was largely decided by which collective laid claim to the neighborhood where they had lived. From that first moment of confinement, it could take anywhere from three months to a year to finally receive a court hearing and a sentence.

Those most directly exposed to the mix of legal and extralegal strategies that constitute “security” in Rio are young and Black. In the state of Rio de Janeiro, 72 percent of those held in prisons are identified by SEAP as preto (“black” or dark-skinned) or pardo (“brown” or mixed), compared to 51 percent of the state’s general population.¹⁴ Their families and communities also bear the economic and social costs of captivity. But prisons do not just act on a preexisting racial order; they create and maintain it by marking out Blackness as a sphere of rightlessness and by reinforcing racial boundaries.¹⁵ Most of those whose lives and deaths are quantified in incarceration statistics are legally identified as male, and 92 percent of Rio’s prison population are confined in units designated for men.¹⁶ These numbers obscure the criminalization of trans people and travestis—who cultivate and inhabit feminine subjectivities but do not necessarily identify as trans or as women—who are rendered invisible in statistics. At the same time, the rate of incarceration for those the state identifies as women rapidly grew in the decade leading up to my research. Black women, in particular, are also caught by the system as family members of those held captive, and as prison visitors subject to strip searches and other routinized assaults in the name of preventing contraband.¹⁷

This convergence of urban renewal and anti-Black violence is nothing new. As anthropologist João Vargas argues, what unites the different permutations of national optimism across Brazil’s history are their commitments to the eugenic project of whitening the nation.¹⁸ But even as I began my fieldwork in 2014, the future that Rio was apparently pulling itself toward began to crumble. First came a wave of popular discontent and protests against the incumbent government and its president, Dilma Rousseff. Then the combined weight of a deep economic recession and political turmoil turned hopes inside out, producing a deep national pessimism. The undoing of these aspirations was on display for the world when Rio’s new buildings and infrastructure literally buckled under the weight of the Olympic Games. By this point, a narrative of crisis had already been well-established within the country. Crisis captured the sense of collapse as unemployment, homelessness, and gun violence—all ostensibly markers of the “old” Rio—returned to permeate daily life in the city. The term crisis also signaled the vacuum that stood on the horizon as the aspirations of Brazilian families, communities, and governments suddenly seemed unviable.

In the following years, a rising authoritarian movement, led by Jair Bolsonaro, would come to occupy and (for a time) monopolize this space with a new vision for Brazil’s future. But the period of my fieldwork was still entrenched in both the reality and the rhetoric of crisis. What it might mean to imagine and pursue a future for oneself, and to prove that one was “ready” for this future, was far from clear for many, if not most, Brazilians. But this is precisely what the nation’s prisons and courts demanded of their captives.

The axiom “Resocialization does not exist” was firmly established in Rio long before I began my research. I heard it most from those who were directly charged with a responsibility to reform: social workers, psychologists, public defenders, missionaries, and other staff or volunteers whose labor fell under the broad umbrella of “treatment.”¹⁹ Incarcerated people and those who had recently left prison would also repeat the phrase back to me. Nobody was waiting for a foreign anthropologist to demonstrate what had already become an article of faith. In fact, many prison workers were already well-versed in the history and the social science of punishment, both of which trace a transformation over the last century in which the rehabilitative impulses that had first justified the construction of the penitentiaries were gradually abandoned in favor of punishment and containment.²⁰ Rio’s social workers and psychologists used this literature to make sense of their position within prisons and to maintain a critical distance from the institutions they worked for. Social work interns would read theorists of punishment including Loïc Wacquant and Erving Goffman as part of their training to work inside prisons.

But even when they argued that resocialization did not exist, nobody claimed that it was meaningless, unimportant, ineffective, or undesirable. In fact, by denying resocialization’s existence, these actors continually reaffirmed it as an ideal. “Resocialization does not exist” only works as a critique of prisons if you assume that it should exist, that any functioning or “humane” prison must necessarily be a rehabilitative one. In fact, there was little doubt among prison staff and volunteers that resocialization was both desirable and effective, that properly organized and funded projects could transform the life trajectories of those in prison. The value of resocialization as a social good and a practical goal was never in question. Instead, the gesture toward its absence was an attempt to make prisons and courts accountable to their own objectives, holding out hope for some future model of imprisonment that would be legitimate precisely because it was, finally, reformative.

At the same time, my interlocutors also continually ran up against the explanatory limits of resocialization’s nonexistence. The formerly incarcerated author Samuel Lourenço Filho exemplifies and confronts this dilemma in his book Resocialized in the City of Chaos, a reflection on his experiences during and after the twelve years he was held inside Rio’s prisons.²¹ Across the account, Lourenço grapples with the inadequacy of claiming either that resocialization exists or that it does not, even veering between positions within the same sentence: “It seems like this resocialization business doesn’t even exist. If it doesn’t exist, let’s end it here—but it doesn’t end, let’s debate this term. And if it does exist, when does it begin?”²² That tension drives the account forward, as he continually cycles between describing resocialization, critiquing it, denouncing its nonexistence, and offering a kind of ironic detachment from the concept. There is no resolution. Instead, the author lets the contradiction hang, turning it back onto the reader with the provocation to “answer me, before the end, was I resocialized or not?”²³ As Lourenço’s narrative reveals, and as I describe here, resocialization routinely failed—failing to work, failing to cohere into anything close to a framework of support or care, and failing even to exist. But it did many other things. So much of Rio’s prisons operated as if the concept were both real and viable that its presence, phantom or otherwise, defined how confinement was governed and experienced.

This is resocialization, not as a substantial program of support but as a set of unfulfilled promises. On the one hand, it offers a defense of the incarcerated person, affirming them as worthy of care, respect, and support not because of who they are but who they might become. That future person becomes the justification for the present one’s claims to humanity, citizenship, and rights. They look a lot like a wage laborer, a responsible parent in a nuclear, heterosexual family, and a churchgoer—but above all, like someone who has turned their back on the “world of crime”²⁴ and built a stable life within the bounds of social respectability. The person in the present is essentially an incubator, the keeper of a potential waiting to be discovered, cultivated, and brought out into the world. This is the promise that self-actualization and security are fundamentally the same thing, that the two might have diverged, but could still rejoin at some point on the horizon, if only the prison system could properly prepare them for this reunion.

Then there is the promise of incarceration itself, the insistence—almost two centuries after the construction of Brazil’s first penitentiary, and forty years after legislation marking a new, “progressive” model of punishment—that the continuing, systematic violations of law in Brazil’s prisons, as well as the harms it has dealt to its captives, their families, and their communities, are not evidence of its failures or its true purpose but signs of its unrealized potential. It is the stubbornly persistent quest for the prison yet to come, for a better, more “humane” kind of captivity, constantly frustrated but always renewed; the insistence of a prison psychologist that, if only she had the resources to do her job, she might actually make a real difference to the lives of her imprisoned clients; or the placard reading The System Must Be Resocialized, held in the grip of the mother of an imprisoned man as she marched in protest around Rio’s Justice Tribunal, surrounded by other family members holding up citations of prison law.

These promises also bring forth a demand: that the incarcerated person continually prove their commitment to becoming the version of themself that law, bureaucracy, and prison staff have foretold. Judges, prosecutors, public defenders, and staff repeat this demand in different forms. It both fuels and feeds off their concern that they might be duped, that their imprisoned clients or patients are just putting on a show, following the script of resocialization without ever meaningfully dedicating themselves to it. Demands and doubts are wired into penal bureaucracy through a set of psychosocial instruments that claim to measure, analyze, and evaluate the incarcerated person’s aptitude or willingness to change. To be imprisoned in Brazil is to be caught by these instruments, to be taken hostage by the promises of reform.

To understand this, we might begin with the basic shape of a prison sentence itself, the way that people move through and out of captivity in Brazil. This is the typical path that someone follows as they “progress” through their imprisonment. Figure I.2 represents, in a simplified form, the basic stages of a sentence in Brazil. After the criminal trial, most are assigned to either a “closed” or “semi-open” prison unit, a decision that rests on length and nature of the sentence. From that point until the end of parole, their sentence is characterized by a slow “progression” through successive stages that ostensibly relax the binds of confinement, in accordance with the law’s vision of “harmonious social integration.”²⁵ None of these movements are automatic; instead, they rely on the incarcerated person’s capacity to demonstrate that they have reformed, that they no longer present a danger to society.

This is Brazil’s version of “progressive” imprisonment, a model that finds other expressions across most prison systems in the world. While some of its elements were established in Brazil before 1984, that was the year they found their most cohesive expression in the Law of Penal Execution (Lei de Execução Penal, or LEP), which attempted to modernize the administration of punishment across the country. Chapter 1 explores the idea of progress and the impact of the LEP in more detail. For now, I will highlight that this law cemented the presence of a set of actors who were responsible for both evaluating imprisoned people and providing “assistance” to them, “with the objective of preventing crime and orienting the return to coexistence with society.”²⁶ Social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists had been employed within prisons across the country before this point, but the LEP was the first legislation that outlined their professional responsibilities and mandated their presence. The new guarantee of religious freedom within the LEP also brought in a stream of evangelical missionaries who reshaped the landscape of punishment in the country. Finally, the LEP reinforced the right of imprisoned people to legal representation, giving Brazil’s Public Defense Office a clear mandate for work within the system.

FIGURE I.2. Typical stages of “progression” through a prison sentence. Source: Author.

In this book I sometimes use the phrase resocialization workers to refer to the group of actors recruited into Brazil’s prisons by the LEP. There is a limit to its utility, since it glosses over critical differences between the professions. Social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists—collectively referred to as “technicians” (técnicos)—were paid employees of Rio’s prison administration, and their work was split between treating and evaluating imprisoned people, although the demands of the latter often pushed the former to the sidelines. Public defenders worked inside prisons but were not employed by the administration itself, and their responsibilities largely involved advocating for their clients within a progressive sentencing model. Religious assistance was volunteer-based and largely untethered from any legal responsibilities, although it still fell under the auspices of “treatment” and was overseen by social workers. Across these positions and the traditions of knowledge or intervention that were unevenly distributed between them, fault lines emerged over both the nature and the stakes of reform. But despite their differences, they converged at two key points. First, all worked under the LEP’s mandate for providing “assistance” to incarcerated people. Second, they shared a sense of solidarity with one another as defenders and advocates of both imprisoned people and the project, or at least the idea, of resocialization.

The fact that those charged with reforming imprisoned people would also be personally invested in such a mission is hardly surprising. But for someone caught in the system like Diogo to do the same—to speak of himself as an unfulfilled promise, to couch his own humanity in the invocation of a future, reformed self—poses a different kind of problem. When those in prison seem to share, even partially, in the self-proclaimed objectives of their captors, scholars often describe these dispositions with discomfort, isolating them in a cocoon of qualifiers before attempting to explain them away.²⁷ Some suggest that any positive meaning found within prison indirectly reflects a trauma suffered outside its walls, an injury so great that confinement provides a sanctuary against it.²⁸ Others have argued that attachment to redemptive narratives represents an almost desperate attempt to rescue something of value from the otherwise mortifying experience of imprisonment.²⁹ Then again, these expressions of penitence and rehabilitation might also be a learned and enforced “script” that those in prison reproduce and potentially subvert for their own purposes.³⁰

Such interpretations maintain a distance between the incarcerated person and rehabilitative discourse, attempting to “rescue” the former from the latter. They also mark a refusal on the part of the researcher to be seduced by rehabilitation, an effort to build analysis outside the self-serving categories and frames of reference served up by governments, prisons, and courts. They therefore rely on what we might call, following Paul Ricoeur, a “hermeneutics of suspicion”—an approach to knowledge that takes the form of uncovering hidden truths from the veil of misrecognition.³¹ These analyses hold back on any endorsement or affirmation of the commitments that some people in prison make to projects of self-transformation or reform, and instead search for truth against the grain of what they say and do. But in doing so, they also replicate, in both form and content, the incredulity that animates prisons themselves. Criminal justice demands to know the captive person but can never entirely believe the confessions that it extracts.³² To understand rehabilitation as a façade, something that must be seen past or beyond, reproduces that disbelief, drawing us into the same modes of suspicion that emerge out of the concept itself. This is the same stance taken up by lawyers, judges, prison psychologists, and parole officers, who study incarcerated people’s narratives of self-transformation for markers of insincerity or misplaced confidence in an attempt to uncover the person hiding underneath.

In highlighting these similarities, I am not building an argument for, or an endorsement of, resocialization. This book makes no claim about whether Brazil’s prisons are “truly” reformative, nor does it evaluate the successes and failures of specific projects and protocols. It takes its cue from decades of prison abolitionist work that has pushed us to think through the uses of reform beyond the question of whether it “works.” This scholarship has underscored how the historical back-and-forth between “more reform” and “more punishment” is underwritten by a common refrain—more—that has justified a continued investment into punishment.³³ At the same time, rehabilitative, educational, and therapeutic programs have been deployed within prisons to preempt and blunt more radical demands for change by channeling outrage into ameliorative policies.³⁴ Rehabilitation also inevitably forces a triage, cleaving between those who are deemed worthy of redemption and those who are punished for their supposed incapacity to change.³⁵ My aim is to build on these insights with a focus on the routine processes of punishment, grappling with resocialization as it unfolds from one moment to the next. I chart a path through Rio’s prisons to understand what resocialization does—the temporalities that it folds into the operations of punishment, and the predicament of those bound by its promises and its demands. I don’t think that resocialization is an as-yet unrealized vision that, upon its arrival, will either free us or redeem us from the violence wrought by incarceration. Instead, I am grappling with a different kind of problem: namely, that resocialization is already here.

The action began below, on our level: Two actors walked down the central aisle of the audience toward the stairs leading up to the stage, where another pair, playing the role of prison guards, patted them down.³⁶ This same action was mirrored above, as the play’s protagonist, a young travesti, entered from backstage and raised her arms to receive a body search from a third guard. The three found each other at the front of the stage, now transformed into the visiting area of a prison, and embraced. The acoustics of this hall were awful, and while some actors were able to project their voices, others were lost in the whir of the fans mounted along the side walls, even for those sitting at the front row like me. But the audience followed the gist of the story through the words that pierced the buzz, the actors’ expressions, and their familiarity with the scene itself. Luana, the protagonist, had recently been imprisoned. In this opening scene, we were witnessing the first visit of her parents, who held their arms over her shoulder and tried to comfort her. But for the moment, Luana was inconsolable at the prospect of serving her twenty-three-year prison sentence, and pushed back their words of encouragement, her own voice crackling with despair.

After a short while, they left (and were patted down again by the guards waiting at the bottom of the stairs) while Luana sat in the center of the stage, alone and struggling with her own despair. Diogo and another actor emerged from the curtains on either side and began to circle her, hissing out her own internal monologue: “It’s hopeless”; “You have nothing to live for”; “Why don’t you just kill yourself?” But Luana picked up a book from the floor and used it to wave them off, blowing them back behind the curtains. Then she opened its covers and started reading in silence. Gradually, a smile came over her face. In the final scene, Luana’s mother came up the stairs and joined her in the visiting area. Luana told her that she had begun to hope again, not only that she could change but that she could also transform other people. The two sat down in the same place onstage where Luana had once broken down; she opened the book, and they began to read together.

As the audience applauded and music began to play, the other actors returned to the stage and began to dance energetically, facing us. Once the noise died down, they stood off to the sides—except for Diogo, the director, who wiped tears from his eyes, thanked God for the opportunity to be present today, and expressed his gratitude for our attention. “Who would have thought,” he asked, “even two years ago, that this little Black kid from the favela would be here today, writing, making theater? Everyone here, every single person, has the capacity to change.” When he finished speaking, he hugged his fellow actors, and a band set up in front of the stage to play “The Girl from Ipanema.” A few hours later, back in my apartment, I would write in my field notes that the music “seemed liberatory in a way that was completely out-of-place with the space.” But the moment didn’t last for long. The school director took the microphone again and told us all to pack up and leave—repeatedly, so that her voice drowned out the band, who had now switched to gospel music. A guard ushered us out of the hall. Diogo, the actors, and the imprisoned audience returned to their cells. I was escorted out of the prison with the other visitors.

When Diogo spoke of himself from the perspective of “two years ago,” he was referencing the moment he was first imprisoned. It must have looked something like the experience of Luana, the protagonist in his play. Both had been given a sentence of twenty-three years. Unlike Luana, Diogo had lost his father to police violence at age ten; soon after, he found himself estranged from the rest of his family and living on the streets. A sister had come to see him once or twice when he was first imprisoned, but he hadn’t received any visitors for a while. Diogo was also illiterate when he entered prison, although he quickly became an avid reader and writer. The counterpoint between past and present allowed Diogo to position himself as living proof of the capacity for change. When I saw him in René Dotti, he would speak to me emphatically and quickly, aware that our time together was limited. Project Overcome was one of a few ongoing plans of his that also included building a small library, putting together a prison band, and a constant fervor for writing. This energy emanated from an increasingly (and, at one point, alarmingly) gaunt body, a result of the food he was forced to eat, as well as a tuberculosis infection that had taken far too long to diagnose and treat. But when he cast a travesti to act out his story, when he asked “who would have thought” that a young Black man from the favelas could become an icon of human potential, he was also responding to a question of legibility: In whose lives, whose families and communities, is the capacity for reform located?

Like Diogo, Brazilian legislation treats the potential for resocialization as universal. Criminal and prison law outline the convicted person as a law-abiding citizen in potentia, to be judged and treated according to their future as much as their past. As Colonel Gilson and many others noted, the country has had no legislated death penalty and no life sentence since 1890.³⁷ Prison staff and administrators would often recite these facts as evidence of the progressive virtues of Brazil’s legal system and as signs of the nation’s commitment to redemption. And yet Brazil is also extraordinarily violent toward those marked as criminal. Most Brazilians endorse the popular phrase “A good criminal is a dead criminal.”³⁸ Television channels broadcast live footage of people being gunned down by police, while reports of these killings routinely identify which victims had a passagem, a record of “passage” through the criminal justice system. Passagem circumvents the need for any other information about the victim; it communicates that these killings were not only comprehensible but legitimate, regardless of their legality. Popular discourse and “talk of crime” treat criminality as malignant, a force that must be excised from the social body and destroyed.³⁹

To affirm resocialization is to counter the assertion that the only possible redemption for those marked as criminal is in death. Resocialization workers and volunteers in Rio’s prisons inverted the Brazilian adage by claiming in conversations and public engagements that “a good criminal is a resocialized criminal.” They understood that they were pushing against a tide of popular hostility against their clients, students, or congregants. So did imprisoned people like Diogo, who carried the added awareness that this tide could very well kill them. The promise of Diogo’s potential, and of that held by those inside Rio’s prisons generally, turned upon a “future anterior” mode of ethical engagement—a judgment of the present from the perspective of some future point when suffering and struggle might be seen, in retrospect, as having been worth it.⁴⁰ But it seemed particularly difficult for the “little Black kid from the favela” to be reconciled with this horizon, and the burden of proving otherwise fell on them most heavily.

“To be human within developmentalist frames,” as anthropologist Deborah Thomas observes, means “to be perfectible, and therefore always measured against the ideals of Western liberalism.”⁴¹ In Rio’s prisons, this perfectibility took the form of a reorientation of one’s life toward the acquisition of a set of markers of social respectability. But it was also framed in contradistinction to Blackness, and specifically to Black families and territories like Rio’s favelas—sites that the prison and court systems still both saw as causes or vectors of crime. The Black majority within prisons were therefore caught between the expectation of reform and an institutionalized association between Blackness and crime in which they were “simply not imaginable as perfectible.”⁴² The impasse had immediate, material consequences for their sentences, restricting the possibility for house arrest or parole. The result was a routinized deferral, a “not yet” that permeated these institutions and that often took the form of the denial or postponement of early release.

The legal and moral impulse to resocialize thereby carries and recapitulates another unfulfilled promise: that of Black emancipation. In the wake of the formal abolition of slavery, it delays the possibility of Black freedom to some point on the horizon, and continually extends the juridical imposition of “terms and conditions” for Black life after the abolition of slavery, as well as the interdiction of those who might attempt to move beyond them.⁴³ Rinaldo Walcott identifies this condition as part of an ongoing historical era: the “long emancipation,” a period characterized not by freedom but by the continual experience of its limit. The law reinscribes its own authority, as well as its domain over Black life and death, through the breach between freedom’s assurance and its constant deferral. My argument is that prisons, in all their violence and their hope, are one institutional form that this breach takes.

Across the book, I follow people caught up in this breach, as well as some of those responsible for cultivating and enforcing it. But I also argue that this it is open to disruptions and reconfigurations, to being projected upon and appropriated toward different ends. People found ways to live both within and against it, forms of life that are not easily parsed as accommodation or resistance. Many, like Diogo, were invested in following through on resocialization’s narrative arc, and saw their reform as a triumph of the will. This did not blunt their critiques of imprisonment. Instead, it became the vehicle through which they demanded recognition from the state and claimed authorship over their own futures. Others refused to be drawn into a redemptive vision that was stacked against them. Divine time, prophecy, and rebirth also crept into the breach, as Christian salvation reworked and, in some cases, eclipsed the conditional promises of reform. Finally, those who studied the progressive structure of imprisonment would occasionally find in its crevices a foothold to escape.

This treatment of crime as an anachronism endures, both within and outside the social sciences. Rising crime rates in Brazil are portrayed by politicians and the media alike as signs of social regression. Brazilians often speak of specific crimes—most often robberies, drug commerce and corruption—as both root causes and symptoms of the nation’s underdevelopment. Resocialization workers never openly referred to their clients as primitive or vestigial, but they explicitly spoke of and to them as children caught in a state of arrested development. In fact, many of these workers argued that resocialization was a misnomer, since most imprisoned people had “never been socialized to begin with.” Within this reformative telos, the incarcerated person was an untimely, asocial (rather than antisocial) figure, someone who needed to be brought back into the contemporary moment.

There is an uncanny similarity between the cross-temporal encounter of the resocialization worker with the incarcerated person, and the ways my discipline, anthropology, has constructed its objects of study. Johannes Fabian famously describes the anthropological version of this encounter as the denial of coevalness: “a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse.”⁴⁶ For Fabian, anthropology framed social and cultural difference as a form of distance by conceiving its own knowledge through a “temporal slope,” denying the possibility of coexistence within the same present. The same kind of temporal slope emerged in the psychologist’s or social worker’s written evaluations of clients, or in a penal judge’s written justification for a denied application for parole.

This isn’t the only affinity that anthropology shares with the methods and forms of knowledge that circulated through Rio’s prisons. Many resocialization workers used the same scholarship that I read as a graduate student to reflect on their own positions, and they quoted it back to me during our conversations. Their suspicions of both the institution that employed them and the imprisoned people assigned to them mirrored the kind of “critical” stance I had been encouraged to take up as a scholar in training. Like the ethnographer’s traditional toolkit, prisons and courts relied on semistructured interviews and life histories as methods of evidence-gathering. Currently and formerly incarcerated people met me only after passing through a string of interrogations from lawyers, judges, psychologists, and social workers, all of whom demanded that they trace out their pasts and futures so they could be known and judged. Their experiences with these representatives of criminal justice, and with the interview form itself, shaped how we could relate to one another. These are more than superficial resemblances. Brazil’s prisons are social scientific institutions, drawing on its tools of analysis, shaped by various strands of social thought and expertise, and driven, in part, by a similar will to knowledge. The points of contact and the overlaps between these two disciplinary projects shed light on their overlapping histories and objectives; they are also an opportunity for anthropology to rethink the place of each within the other.

Although this is an ethnography of men’s prisons, it is not an ethnography of men. For the most part, it centers the relationships between those imprisoned in Rio and resocialization workers, who were mostly white cisgender women.⁴⁷ I also worked with travestis and trans women who were held in men’s prisons. Across these groups, questions of gender, femininity, kinship, and family constantly surfaced. But the experiences of those imprisoned in units designated for women are largely absent from this account, and the perspectives of family members of imprisoned people are limited. Families of those in prison are painfully aware that their actions on either side of the walls can result in reprisals for themselves or their loved ones, including having their visiting cards revoked. While a few of them appear in this book, many others were unwilling or uninterested in taking part in the project.

Most prisons in Brazil are named after prominent judges or legal scholars. Many of those figures sought drastic reforms to prisons over the last century and a half but ultimately found themselves memorialized by its expansion, with their names now adorning the hundreds of prisons built across the country in the last thirty years. In keeping with this tradition, I have named two of the prisons in which I conducted my fieldwork René Dotti and Tobias Barreto. The first is a “closed” unit and the site of Diogo’s captivity during my fieldwork; the second is one among roughly a dozen “semi-open” penitentiaries in the state. These differing designations of closed and semi-open mean that the people imprisoned in René Dotti were generally held under longer sentences, while those in Tobias Barreto were often close to the date marking their eligibility to apply for parole or house arrest.

I first visited Tobias Barreto in 2014, after receiving authorization from SEAP for a series of one-day visits to different penitentiaries. I was given a tour by the deputy warden and was later left with the prison’s social workers to pass the day. Two years later, I returned to spend twelve months working as an intern for the two public defenders responsible for the unit, Lívia and Ângela. Each spent one or two days a week working directly in the prison. I entered with them, alongside either their paralegal assistant or another intern. I spent most of my time in their office and in the surrounding administrative rooms, including the “classification” office, the offices of the warden and deputy warden, and those of the prison psychologists and social workers.⁴⁸ On other occasions, I visited the prison school, the soccer field outside, and one of the prison’s two temples. I also spent time in Lívia and Ângela’s shared office in the city center, where they filed petitions and met with family members of their clients.

By contrast, I accompanied two different groups in René Dotti. The first were members of Pastor Bruno’s evangelical church, whom I joined during the services and events they ran within the prison. While I was with them, I spent most of my time in the evangelical temple located at the back of the prison. Second, I obtained preauthorization in late 2016 to work as a volunteer within a program known as Project Life. This status allowed me to quickly organize and receive permission to run activities as part of the project. Chapter 2 includes more detail on the structure of the project and the role of volunteers. While Project Life operated in many prisons across the state, and while I visited a dozen other prisons at least once as a volunteer, most of my work as part of this project was in René Dotti. After organizing a few events, the prison psychologist invited me to participate in what she called the LGBT Group, described in Chapter 5, which arranged regular meetings for incarcerated trans women, travestis, and cis gay men in the prison. Both groups met in the same large yellow hall with the stage and the bad acoustics.

I have chosen to keep the real name of the third prison discussed in the book, Crispim Ventino. During my fieldwork, it was the only “open” unit operating in the state of Rio de Janeiro, which makes it easily identifiable regardless of any pseudonym. I also never entered this prison. The unit was reserved for those who had been granted day release; I spent my time with them in the surrounding neighborhoods, or else traveling with them through the city. As the names of these security regimes suggest, each prison sits at a different point along the progressive scale of imprisonment, part of this process of “opening” up to the outside world. But none of them is any more or less of a prison than the other. Instead, each one spotlights different aspects of resocialization, and of the project of incarceration more broadly.

My letter correspondence with Diogo was one among a variety of documentary forms of research. As I explore in the following chapter, prisons operate through a constant production and circulation of files: case records, sentencing certificates, federal and state laws, writs of habeas corpus, reports, catuques (messages requesting assistance scribbled on scraps of paper or cardboard), documents stuffed in cabinets or stored in electronic databases. Through my work with the Public Defense Office, I followed the production and circulation of these files, particularly those that crossed the threshold between the prison administration and the court system. My own presence and movement through Rio’s prisons is also now written into this archive: My applications for research authorization were filed by both the prison administration and the VEP, while the logbooks I signed at the front gates for every prison visit are now sitting in storage.

I never asked for, nor was I offered, entrance into the cells of any prison. More broadly, the ways I moved through each institution were shaped by who I was with. On the days I worked as an intern for the two public defenders, my presence was never questioned by guards, and I was rarely searched upon entry (and never when leaving). Working for Project Life, by contrast, I kept authorizing documents with me at all times but was still forced to wait for up to an hour outside prison gates and repeatedly explain the basic premise of the project to a series of skeptical correctional officers. On more than one occasion, despite showing all my authorizing documents, guards barred my entry. Similar limits are placed not just on researchers but on certain prison staff and volunteers. Still, it is important to recognize that my movements were less restricted than those of imprisoned people and visiting family members, at least in the prisons where I conducted research.

While I worked with both resocialization workers and those held in the prison system, my focus on one or the other, in both my fieldwork and my writing, depends on the context. Given the limits to maintaining ethical working relationships with incarcerated people, the bulk of research that I conducted inside prisons concentrated on resocialization workers. Many of these workers were trained in the social science or adjacent fields. They tended to see me as an ally, someone who shared their perspectives on punishment. That affinity was also underwritten by a form of class and racial solidarity, the assumption of a common purpose and shared benevolence between me and other white, university-educated actors within the prison system, one that I interrogate across the book.

The experience of imprisoned people emerges largely from my fieldwork with formerly incarcerated people or those held under an “open” (day-release) regime of punishment. They also come through in artifacts like Diogo’s letters—which, as far as either of us knew, were never opened or interfered with during our correspondence—as well as diaries, letters, and photos that people shared with me from their time in prison. Theater performances like the one described earlier, as well as Project Life workshops and music performances, offered another avenue to engage with the aspirations of incarcerated people and their relationships with resocialization workers. Many of those whom I met during their imprisonment were also released in the following months and years. In a few cases, I gained their permission to discuss our earlier interactions in prison at this point.

Brazil’s prisons are sites of routinized physical violence, beatings, and torture against both incarcerated people and visitors. That mode of violence rarely pulls into focus in this book; instead, it sits along the edges, its traces running through many of the moments that I describe throughout. As an ethnographer, I was never a witness to it. I am also wary of the repeated and often sensationalized emphasis on violence that dominates accounts of imprisonment in Brazil and Latin America, one that leaves little room for understanding other dynamics of power and governance at play.⁴⁹ These narratives so often linger on the spectacle of Black suffering; in doing so, they tend to reinscribe its supposed inevitability, even in the attempt to denounce it.⁵⁰ One source of counternarratives can be found in the published works of currently and formerly incarcerated people in Rio de Janeiro, who reckon with torture while refusing to be subsumed by its logic.⁵¹ Here, by contrast, I remain with another set of questions—including how the idea and the threat of physical violence is never far the work of resocialization.

This is not a systematic framework or blueprint for how, or whether, to conduct prison research. Instead, it was the product of an ongoing, uncomfortable negotiation of what was possible and what I saw as ethical within an overlapping array of regulatory frameworks and in the context of an institutional politics that was itself constantly shifting. Those tensions, and my provisional responses, cannot be quarantined here, since they are constitutive of the entire research project. Instead, they continually resurface across different chapters, and in different guises.

Chapter 2: Prison Psychology’s Praxis turns to the work of psychologists through Project Life, an educational program in which I participated as a volunteer. This program envisioned participants as empty vessels waiting to be filled, as part of a broader pedagogy of tutelage. Whereas Project Life offered space for psychologists to elaborate and enact a criticism of incarceration, these same workers suppressed imprisoned people’s own critiques, marking them as potentially violent “hate speech.” But those confined in Rio’s prisons were still able to use Project Life to produce another kind of intervention, one that presented resocialization as a triumph of survival.

Chapter 3: Faith and the Weight of the World considers how evangelical life and labor support resocialization, even as they reshape its horizons. Evangelicals overturned the juridical precepts of criminal responsibility and personhood, even promising those who converted that their case files would literally combust. This is, I argue, a spiritual geography anchored in three coordinate points of prison, church, and world. But unlike secular resocialization workers, evangelical volunteers and imprisoned people saw the world as a fallen landscape rather than a space of belonging. The chapter also considers how missionaries came to understand and articulate the hope of salvation through discourses of whiteness.

Chapter 4: If I Were His Mother asks why both resocialization workers and imprisoned men articulated the relationships between themselves through the figures of mother and son. Motherhood provided a metaphor and a paradigm of resocialization, a domain marked by care, violence, and infantilization. I survey these invocations of motherhood and consider the paradoxical centrality of maternity within men’s prisons, arguing that both are grounded in Brazilian anxieties surrounding the family, including the ability of Black women to act as caregivers. The chapter also underlines the role that social science played in buttressing and giving form to these concerns since the early twentieth century.

Chapter 5: Evasion follows the path of travestis through men’s prisons—a path that demonstrates how resocialization’s vision of social life holds no space for trans futures. Travestis became rendered by resocialization’s plot as incorrigible, a classification that often trapped them within the system, yet they also demonstrated how the nominally progressive structure of confinement could provide footholds for escape. In particular, I consider evasion, the practice by which travestis and others routinely fled captivity, often only for a few days or weeks, before returning to prison of their own accord. This cycle of escapes and returns brings the incomplete nature of Black emancipation into focus. While evasions offered no definitive escape from Brazil’s project of incarceration, they produced an alternative model of inhabiting its predicament.

Finally, the Epilogue: Resocialize to Conquer the Future examines how resocialization took new forms, and often unraveled, after release from prison. Whereas imprisonment was driven by various forms of speculative labor, these kinds of anticipation encountered other temporal horizons outside prison and directly collided with an atmosphere of crisis that seemed to evaporate individual and collective futures. The epilogue, and the book, ends with a reflection on the narrative impulse toward redemption in both prisons and ethnography and asks what other conclusions we might reach for instead.

Notes

1. Most people referred to Gilson with the title “Colonel,” even though he had never worked in the military. But the term was used as an honorific within the prison administration because many of those appointed at higher levels were, in fact, also current or former members of Brazil’s armed forces.

2. Sánchez et al., “Mortalidade e causas de óbitos nas prisões do Rio de Janeiro, Brasil.”

3. Secretaria Nacional de Políticas Penais, “Relatório de informações penais.”

4. The state and its capital city are both named Rio de Janeiro. Almost all prisons in Brazil, including those I discuss in this book, are administered at the level of the state.

5. The term reabilitação is not used as a synonym for resocialization in Brazil. In the context of criminal and prison law, it has a far more narrow, technical meaning: the sealing of criminal records two years after the completion of a criminal sentence.

6. Their use of the term sistema offers a counterpoint to the arguments of Luiz Claudio Lourenço and Hollis Moore, both of whom suggest that Brazil’s prisons “cannot be understood as a system,” given the autonomy of individual penitentiaries and the lack of standardization or oversight. Although sistema was used most often by incarcerated people and their families, prison staff, volunteers, and administrators also referred to Rio’s prisons as a system at times. In doing so, they drew attention the systematicities that shaped incarceration, from shared bureaucratic processes to widespread illegalities to the systematic targeting of Black Brazilians and residents of Rio’s favelas. I also suggest that, in contrast to Bahia where Moore and Lourenço both conducted research, Rio’s prisons were subject to a greater (though still limited) degree of centralized oversight. See Moore, “The Gender of Inmate Governance in Northeast Brazil,” 343; Lourenço, “O jogo dos sete erros nas prisões do Brasil.”

7. Infopen, “Levantamento nacional de informações penitenciárias.”

8. Caldeira and Holston, “Democracy and Violence in Brazil.”

9. Khan, “Judges as Agents of Coloniality.”

10. These groups are often glossed as “gangs” in English, which tends to understate their scope and to flatten the multiple valences of the original term. Factions are simultaneously (1) collectives of survival and forms of political self-organization for those incarcerated in Brazil, particularly within men’s prisons; (2) consolidated networks of organized crime that are generally centered in the commerce and exportation of narcotics but have also spread to arms dealing, extorsion and deforestation; (3) providers of infrastructure and social and cultural programs within Brazil’s urban peripheries, where they claim and compete for territory; (4) organized, armed opposition to police forces and to state violence; and (5) parallel systems of justice, security and punishment that operate within and outside prisons.

11. Franco, “UPP—A redução da favela a três letras”; Machado, “The Church Helps the UPP, the UPP Helps the Church.”

12. Militias (milícias) refer to paramilitary groups, founded and largely formed by security agents (including military and civil police, correctional officers, and firefighters). Like the factions, militias claim and dispute territories within Rio de Janeiro and its satellite cities. Initially justified as a mode of resistance against factions, militias have diversified from racketeering and extrajudicial killings to service and infrastructure provision (including forced monopolies on utilities), drug trafficking, and real estate. They increasingly hold influence in state and federal politics, particularly in Rio de Janeiro. See Lessing, “Milicianization.”

13. Members of the People of Israel (Povo de Israel) offered multiple origin stories for the collective’s name. Most suggested that it was a reference to the biblical Israel as a nation surrounded by enemies. An older name given to the group, which had mostly fallen out of usage by the time of my fieldwork, was Enemies of Enemies (Inimigos dos Inimigos), which was itself an inversion of the name of one of Rio de Janeiro’s factions, Friends of Friends (Amigos dos Amigos).

14. Here I use the official terms within the Brazilian census and other statistical instruments that refer to categories of color (cor), which are considered as a proxy for race (raça) but not identical to it. Today, many social scientists consider as Black (negro) those who identify or are identified as preto or pardo. However, Indigenous scholars and activists have argued that the practice erases Indigenous (including Afro-Indigenous) identity and ancestrality within the category of pardo. In addition, those caught by the criminal justice system are virtually all racially profiled by police, rather than through self-identification; one result is the registration of many Indigenous people as pardos at the moment of their arrest. As in the case of gender, statistics thus tend to obscure specific patterns of criminalization and racism. Nevertheless, most imprisoned people I met during my fieldwork identified themselves as Black, and the visual impression of Rio’s prisons as sites of Black confinement was clear to me and most of my interlocutors. See Silva, “O Índio, o pardo e o invisível.”

15. Alves, The Anti-Black City; Smith, Afro-Paradise.

16. Infopen, “Levantamento nacional de informações penitenciárias.”

17. Moore, “Extralegal Agency and the Search for Safety in Northeast Brazil”; Biondi, Sharing This Walk.

18. Vargas, “Gendered Antiblackness and the Impossible Brazilian Project.”

19. The main administrative division within Rio’s prison system was between the subsecretaries of treatment (tratamento) and custody (custódia), although the latter was far larger and better resourced than the former.

20. McLennan, “America’s Human Rights Crisis in Historical Perspective”; Wacquant, Punishing the Poor.

21. Lourenço Filho, Ressocializado na cidade do caos.

22. Lourenço Filho, Ressocializado na cidade do caos, 31.

23. Lourenço Filho, Ressocializado na cidade do caos, 79.

24. The Brazilian phrase world of crime (mundo do crime) is not synonymous with illegality. Instead, it refers to a social landscape that largely orbits around the lower rungs of Brazil’s drug trade, as well as the forms of self-fashioning that this “world” makes possible. In Rio, it is also closely tied to the physical space of favelas. People can be in crime (no crime), or even of crime (do crime). Rather than signifying a specific act, crime points to a place and a set of social relations, somewhere you can enter, inhabit, leave and return.

25. BRAZIL. Legislation no. 7.210, July 11, 1984 (Lei de Execução Penal). Article 1.

26. BRAZIL. Legislation no. 7.210, July 11, 1984 (Lei de Execução Penal). Article 10.

27. Crewe and Ievins, “The Prison as a Reinventive Institution.”

28. Wacquant, Punishing the Poor; Sufrin, Jailcare.

29. Comfort, Doing Time Together.

30. Carr, Scripting Addiction; Fassin, Prison Worlds.

31. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy; Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading.”

32. Foucault, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling.

33. Gilmore, Golden Gulag.

34. Burton, Tip of the Spear.

35. Meiners, For the Children?

36. Throughout this book, I alternate between the terms guard and correctional officer to refer to those who were known during my research as either Inspetores de Segurança e Administração Penitenciária (Inspectors of Security and Prison Administration, or ISAPs) or, more informally, agentes penitenciários (prison agents). After the conclusion of my fieldwork, a 2019 constitutional amendment reclassified these guards as a police force, the Polícia Penal (Penal Police).

37. Life sentences and the death penalty were outlawed under the 1890 Penal Code, and these prohibitions were reaffirmed in Brazil’s most recent constitution, alongside others for forced labor, banishment, and “cruel” punishment. The maximum legal penalty for a single conviction is thirty years, the upper limit codified in the Penal Code for a small set of crimes including homicide, kidnapping resulting in death, and rape. Multiple convictions can stack, producing sentences that can, hypothetically, reach into the centuries. But when those penalties are “unified,” the time exceeding a legal ceiling is effectively disregarded. During the time of my fieldwork, that ceiling was thirty years; in 2020, under the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, it was raised to forty. The Brazilian constitution also outlines a single exception for the death penalty prohibition: for military crimes committed during times of war, and only with the authorization of the Brazilian president. The measure has never been used.

38. Forum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública, Anuário brasileiro de segurança pública, ano 10.

39. Caldeira, City of Walls.

40. Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment.

41. Thomas, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation, 129.

42. Walcott, The Long Emancipation, 72–73; Shange, Progressive Dystopia.

43. Walcott, The Long Emancipation.

44. Lombroso, “Illustrative Studies in Criminal Anthropology III.”

45. Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves.

46. Fabian, Time and the Other, 31.

47. Throughout this book, I use the terms cisgender and cis in line with the use of cisgênero/cis by Brazilian trans and travesti scholars and activists. But I also recognize a tension between this use and the critique within Anglophone scholarship that such terms represent a “categorical ruse disingenuously hailing those who nevertheless do not and cannot sit comfortably within it,” particularly since they are propped up by white standards of gender that Black people, among others, do not inhabit. Bey, Cistem Failure, xiv.

48. One defining characteristic of prison architecture in Brazil is that administrative offices are always located in their own building, close to but physically separated from the wings or galleries holding incarcerated people. See Cordeiro, Até quando faremos relicários?

49. Godoi, Fluxos em cadeia.

50. McKittrick, “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place”; Silva, “To Be Announced.”

51. For example, Lourenço Filho, Ressocializado na cidade do caos; Nascimento, Pensamentos livres; Silva, Eu sinto julho.