Sacha Darke

Informal Prison Dynamics in Africa and Latin America

Investigating prison dynamics across the global south would appear a matter of urgent scholarly and policy concern. For while notable transfers of bureaucratic and security technology — namely, human rights discourse and the control prison — have migrated from the former metropolitan centers to former colonies, in the postcolonial world itself informal prison dynamics remain curiously part and parcel of punitive enclosure. These unofficial, self-regulatory dynamics often turn into a source of deep-seated misunderstanding between criminal justice establishments and the local and international communities which house them. Here we seek merely to outline how exploding incarceration rates and human rights discourse, in countries as far flung as Ecuador, Brazil, and Uganda, exhibit a set of ‘undisclosed’ institutions and problems typically ignored in penological debate as well as in most calls for humanitarian prison reform.

Developing Convict Criminology Beyond North America

Despite its original vision of a community of ex-convict criminological and criminal justice experts, Convict Criminology (CC) has had difficulty with international expansion and has remained largely a North American movement. There are many reasons why this has occurred. This article reviews the efforts that have been made to internationalize CC in Europe and discusses some of the barriers it has faced. It also suggests prospects for moving the field forward in a truly international manner and the challenges that this entails.

The enforcement approach to crime prevention

When local government authorities began to develop criminal policies with the police in the 1980s, crime prevention was advocated as an inclusive, holistic approach to crime control that had the potential to challenge the prevailing justice paradigm. To date this new prevention paradigm has not been realized in England and Wales. The police and courts are being relied upon more than ever, and relatively few crime prevention initiatives are directed towards the underlying social and economic determinants of crime. Moreover, in the past 15 years crime prevention partnerships have increasingly resorted to administrative and civil law powers such as fixed penalty notices and injunctions. Rather than provide an alternative to the enforcement approach of the criminal justice system, in England and Wales crime prevention has so far proven to be an addition to, even an extension of criminal justice.

Co-producing Prison Order

The immediate and long-term aims of the current author adopting an interpretivist research framework in his research in Brazil have been to explore: (1) how and why everyday prison routines and staff-inmate relations are different in Brazil to other places; (2) how and to what extent changes can and should be made to the Brazilian prison environment; and (3) what, on the other hand, should be regarded as good practices that might possibly be adopted elsewhere. This monograph has focused on the first of these questions. Without further research, it is not possible to draw concrete conclusions concerning how the dynamics of Brazilian prison order compare with other countries. It is clear, however, that inmate collaboration and self-governance are global phenomena of both historical and contemporary significance, especially in the South. Prison co-governance appears to be the global norm. Ethnographers in other parts of Latin America have come to similar conclusions regarding the plurality and de facto legitimacy of the region’s co-produced prison orders, as well as the need to develop nuanced understandings of the extent to which they can be explained through Northern theories, for instance Goffman’s concept of the total institution or Sykes’ analysis of the pains of imprisonment. The starting points for a Brazilian sociology of prison life should be the effects of fused staff-inmate functions and entangled staff-inmate and prison-community relations, and inmate as well as staff hierarchies. Staff-inmate transactions traverse the boundary between accommodation and resistance. Prisoners and guards work together out of necessity, not convenience; the social order of the prison is neither imposed nor enforced. The second and third questions are matters for future research. It is difficult to reconcile the realities of the Brazilian prison environment with the existing critique of prison co-governance made by the United Nations, Human Rights Watch and other international human rights bodies. In the absence of further research, it would be irresponsible to recommend changes to prison rules and routines, prison officer training and so on in Brazil or anywhere else in the world. Still, a couple of observations can be made in the light of the observations made in this monograph. First, while possibly the right aspiration, the view that prisoners should never be employed in a disciplinary capacity is a long way from reality and certainly should not be implemented in Brazil without a corresponding investment in prison staffing. Peer-elected systems of inmate governance have been formalised in other parts of the world, including Latin America, with apparently positive results. Second, those interested in developing alternative models of detention that are human rights observing and genuinely rehabilitative might take note of a recent wave of voluntary sector prisoner and former prisoner managed community prisons in Brazil and other parts of Latin America. In these prisons, the power to discipline has arguably been appropriately devolved to inmates.

Law and Repression

Incarceration and inhumane prison conditions are endemic to Brazilian justice. The few positive aspects of Brazilian prison life (for instance, the relatively larger amount of unlock and family visits in comparison with Western European to Northern American prisons) should be understood first and foremost as situated responses to inmates’ suffering. Two key aspects of Brazilian punitivism are particularly pertinent: the country’s rapidly increasing prison population and its historically high levels of prison overcrowding. The former should be studied within the context of the international war on drugs and wider drift towards criminal justice militarisation. However, Brazil should be regarded less a follower as a setter of global punitive trends: in the context of prison, as the principle player in the emergence of a new, Latin American, mass carceral zone. Brazilian punitivism has roots in the Iberian colonial traditions of moral intervention, social exclusion, militarism and authoritarian violence. These are reflected in theories and practices of criminal justice in what have been described as a criminology of apartheid and a never-ending politics of fear and exception. Brazilian prisoners have always experienced inhumane conditions of incarceration. Brazilian prisons have always been institutions of corporal punishment and social defence, never of rehabilitation. As for rates of incarceration, the recent explosion in the prison population should be considered alongside trends in policing and extra-legal methods of crime control, both of which are likewise historically characterised by authoritarianism and violence. More generally, the war on drugs should be regarded as the latest version of a wider war on the poor, moreover a war whose target populations and excessive violence are blatant and open for all to see. Even more so today than in the past, Brazilian prisoners are aware the criminal justice system fundamentally discriminated between the lower and upper classes. They increasingly understand they have effectively been abandoned to their own devices.

The Northern Massacres

In January 2017, more than 100 prisoners died during a series of gang orchestrated rebellions in the northern states of Amazonas, Roraima and Rio Grande do Norte. The prisoners involved were directly or indirectly affiliated to Rio de Janeiro’s Comando Vermelho (the CV) or Sao Paulo’s Primeiro Comando do Capita (the PCC). Liberal commentary on the massacres and the Brazilian governments reaction to them focused on four major issues: the self-defeating, counter-productive war on drugs; the poor state of the prison system; the absence of guards on prison wings; and the failure of the countrys non-existent or corrupted securitisation agenda over the past decade to manage prison gangs, let alone deal with the fallout from the more recent breakdown in relations between the PCC and CV over the trade in cocaine. Each of these areas of critique is found wanting. Brazilian prison gangs are involved in a lot more than illicit drug markets, and neither the countrys impoverished prisoners nor overstretched prison managers could get by without them. The staff-inmate power dynamics that emerge in these abandoned spaces are complex and in constant flux. Disruptions or shifts in power may be accompanied by violence, some of which may not be intended or foreseen by its organisers. Finally, with no clear gang leadership to target, the governments purported decapitating strategy would make little difference even if it were to exist. To understand self-proclaimed criminal organisations like the CV and PCC, we need to shift attention away from the purported links between drug trafficking and prison gangs towards the historical role played by inmate collectives in providing inmates with alternative systems of governance and prison staff with informal systems of security: to study prison gangs from the bottom up (as emerging from everyday institutional practices, professional, social and interpersonal relations) and from the inside out (gang activity in the country’s poor urban areas, including control of the drug trade, depending on what goes on inside prison more than vice versa). Neither should the country’s prison gang phenomenon necessarily be regarded as a symptom of international organised crime. For the ordinary prisoner gangs operate as ideals as much as physical realities. Even the most advanced of Brazil’s prison gangs (the CV and PCC) should be studied as organisations of criminals rather than as criminal organisations, as loose heterogeneous networks of individuals that are just as vulnerable to being corrupted by police and prison authorities as the opposite. Like any other communities, prisoner communities seek institutions of governance to make their members’ lives more predictable, to protect them and provide for their material and psychological needs. To the extent, prison staff lack the resources to do so, and prison inmates are required to collaborate, organise and self-govern. The northern prison massacres represented a disruption in an increasingly dynamic and institutionalised system of co-produced order, symbolised by the historical figure of the faxina, which while fragile and varied has for decades kept most Brazilian prisons in better order and enabled most Brazilian prisoners to better survive. The immediate cause of the massacres may have been the CV and PCC falling out over their share of the eastern cocaine trail, but for most prisoners that had something to gain from the killings—few of who will ever make serious money from the drug trade—the fight was over territories of informal governance and survival, not territories of commerce.

Managing without Guards

In 2010, the author completed an empirical fieldwork study of an overcrowded carceragem (police lock-up; unit of holding cells) in Rio de Janeiro. It served as a detailed illustration of the futility of studying Brazilian prison order from the top down and from the outside in. Few police officers that worked at the carceragem (pseudonymised as Polinter) had delegated full responsibility for managing daily routines, prisoner and staff–prisoner relations to teams of trusty prisoners and inmate leaders on the two wings that made up its cell block. Trusty prisoners worked as administrators, janitors and guards. They were headed by former police officers, the most senior of who were referred to by other prisoners as Polinter’s administracao (administration) or chefia (management). Together with the wing inmate leaders, these two prisoners answered only to the governor and the general coordinator of Rio’s 16 carceragens. One of the most impressive things about governance at Polinter was almost identical systems of inmate representation operated on both wings, despite the fact prisoners held on the second wing, the seguro (insurance or vulnerable persons unit) did not consider themselves career criminals or their coletivo (the Povo de Israel: People of Israel) a criminal gang. The senior police officers (the governor and general coordinator) had instructed the Povo de Israel how to operate along the same lines as prisoners held on the other (CV) wing. Both wings had one representante da cela (cell representative) per cell and one representante geral (general representative). On both wings, prisoners’ families contributed to a caixinha (collection box), the proceeds of which were used to purchase common goods such as cooking equipment and toiletries. When disputes arose between prisoners held in the cell block or their codes of conduct were broken, representantes gathered together as a comissao (commission) to adjudicate and pass sentence. When they were unable to control a certain prisoner, representantes would inform the police he needed to be transferred to another carceragem. On both wings, most prisoners became representantes based on how long they had been there rather than the criminal reputation they had arrived with. Nor was there any real difference between the types of people that ended up serving time on the two wings, beside the fact prisoners in the seguro tended to be older, most having passed the age where they were expected to earn their living from the illicit economy and to be affiliated to a criminal gang. Prisoners were allocated to the CV wing based on where they lived rather than their being actively involved in gang activity. A number of key features of the balance of power and authority at the carceragem could be generalised to the wider Brazilian prison system. First, while the senior police officers retained the final word on how Polinter was governed, the carceragem effectively operated under a customary rather than legalised order, constructed from informal rules and procedures that had been developed and reproduced in situ. Second, order at the carceragem was achieved through a plurality of police officer and (mostly) prisoner roles and responsibilities. Finally, Polinter was not only co-governed by its inmates, but its order was considered legitimate by nearly everyone that worked or was incarcerated there. Of importance to this legitimacy, the order achieved at the carceragem complied with popular inmate notions of resistance, mutual respect and exchange: to respect to be respected, to share in order to share, the CV representante geral explained it. These three features stand in contrast to the established sociology of prison life literature associated with the classic work of Gresham Sykes and Erving Goffman. In place of defects in an otherwise bureaucratic power, I had encountered a negotiated order that was broadly to everyone’s benefit, and in place of division and disorder among inmates and normative distance between inmates and officers, I had encountered examples of solidarity and reciprocity. Much of this reciprocity was forced in the sense that prisoners and police officers could not manage without it. However, Polinter’s order was not just instrumental. It also included moral values, for instance around the treatment of inmates’ families.

Surviving through the Convívio

Brazil’s prisons have relied on inmates to collaborate and self-govern since its first modern penitentiaries opened in the mid-nineteenth century. Staff shortages and co-governance, in other words, are defining features of the Brazilian prison system as much as inhumane living conditions. In the absence of guards and prison rules, inmates have developed codes of conduct that govern relations between and among themselves and their keepers to the tiniest detail. Prisoners refer to these norms of co-existence and co-survival as regras de convivencia (rules of conviviality), regras de convivio (rules of collective living) regras de proceder (rules of procedure) or simply as eticas (ethics) or disciplina (discipline). They refer to themselves in the singular: as one (cell, wing, cell block or prison-wide) coletivo (collective). This collective prisoner identity is rooted in the everyday realities of living in such proximity to one another, and by prisoners’ views of themselves as a repressed group of people in conflict with the law. As a result, the oppositional cultures that arise in Brazilian prisons, and to a lesser extent poor, urban areas, are less destructive than is often assumed. Codes relating to inmate solidarity, for example, invariably include measures aimed at supporting the least fortunate and avoiding conflict not only among common prisoners, but also with faxinas and prison staff. Where necessary, inmate codes of conduct are enforced through quasi-legal systems of dispute resolution that, in states with more advanced prison gang systems, invariably aim to adhere to principles of procedural fairness and substantive justice. Equally significant, prisoners that rise through the ranks of inmate hierarchies are usually those with the most experience of prison and the best skills of communication and negotiation.

Self-Governing Prison Communities

Brazilian prison order is largely negotiated between inmates and staff. In his accounts of working as a doctor at Carandiru prison in the 1990s, Drauzio Varella draws attention to the Sao Paulo’s cell block faxina (housekeeper: trusty prisoner/inmate leader) system and to prisoners adhering to codes of conduct relating to inmate solidarity and dealings with staff. Comparable inmate codes and positions of cell block-wide authority exist to different and varying degrees in prisons across the country. These varieties in co-produced prison governance are explained in large part by the informal, clientelistic nature of Brazilian social and institutional cultures. However, the extent of co-governance from one prison to another correlates with poor prison conditions overall, including but not restricted to shortages in prison staff. Because of these situational adjustments, most Brazilian prisons contain complex social orders, moreover orders that are not as psychologically damaging as our (predominantly Northern) theories on prison life might lead us to predict. The most important question to explore is not why prison inmates and staff form reciprocal relations of mutual aid and protection—disorder only serves the interests of the most predatory of individuals—but rather the peculiarities of the Brazilian prison environment in which they are able to do so. The research completed for this monograph adopted an interpretivist comparative methodology. More specifically, it utilised a mixed methodology of primary and secondary research that included ethnographic, historical and first-hand, inside accounts.

Prison Life, Sociology of: Recent Perspectives from the United Kingdom

Prison life both fascinates and repels. As with many aspects of punishment, it attracts the interest of both academics and the general public. In this short and accessible article, the principal issues of prison life are presented in a historical context that traces the emergence of focused academic study of the way people live, and die, in prison. The most influential theoretical perspectives are clearly set out alongside a discussion of their influence on research and analysis in the UK and beyond. Questions of womens experience and that of black and minority ethnic prisoners are explored before a consideration of postcolonial prison studies is introduced. These studies of prison life beyond the axis of Europe and North America challenge some of the accumulated academic wisdom of Anglophone and European studies of prison life, indicating the potential of novel developments to come in an era which, unfortunately, shows no signs of declining to produce more and more prisons.