30 years ago Brazil had incarceration rates comparable to Scandinavia’s. It now has the third-highest prison population in the world. Over decades of economic growth and crisis, of rising and falling poverty, and governments from the centre-left to the far right, the growth of the carceral system has been a hard constant – but only since re-democratisation and neo-liberalisation. Why has the carceral system only recently become a central institution in the country’s inequalities and social control? In this talk, we present the results of an ongoing three-year project conducted by Graham Denyer Willis, Pedro Mendes Loureiro, Bruna Angotti, and Luiz Fernando Toledo, which asks: How and where has the carceral system expanded in Brazil? What are the political processes that have enabled this? How has this been legitimated? And who profits from this?
We argue that Brazil has become locked into a ‘prison consensus’. The carceral system is decried as a failure by agents of all political persuasions, but its growing heft entrenches a range of material interests, while its continual expansion is proposed as a solution to the very problems it creates, from dehumanising conditions for inmates to the proliferation of organised criminal groups that straddle its walls. Second, we delve into the federal and subnational politics that drive the expansion, governance, and policy diffusion of the carceral system across Brazilian states.
Bruna Angotti is a University Research Associate on the ‘The Prison Consensus: Incarceration, Investment and Inequality in Brazil’ project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, at the University of Cambridge. She is a lawyer and an anthropologist, having published award-winning books and articles in the field of legal anthropology. She completed her PhD at the University of São Paulo (2014-2019), with a doctoral period at the University of Ottawa (2017).
Pedro Mendes Loureiro is the Director of the Centre of Latin American Studies (CLAS) and Associate Professor at the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS). An interdisciplinary political economist, he is a scholar of inequality and of development strategies, striving to combat social inequalities wherever they might arise. He has researched and published on the political economy of development strategies in Latin America; on the changing dynamics of race, class and gender inequality; on social policies and their politics; on inequality measurement; and on the history of Latin American social thought. Pedro’s current research focuses on the expansion of the prison system and the political economy of incarceration in Brazil, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.
