Entangled staff-inmate relations (original) (raw)

Inmate governance in Brazilian prisons

Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 52(3): 272-284, 2013

Prisons in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are run not so much by prison guards as inmates. In circumstances of severe overcrowding and acute staff shortage, prisoners are recruited or organise themselves not only to perform clerical and janitorial work, but also to provide for welfare, discipline and security. Such inmate governance is as much a defining feature of Brazilian prison life as inhumane living conditions. In recent years the roles played by inmates in managing the day to day of Brazilian prisons have been largely subsumed by prison gangs. However, staff-inmates relations remain characterised less by conflict and power as accommodation and reciprocity.

Managing without guards in a Brazilian police lockup

Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, 68(1): 55-67, 2014

Brazilian prisons are typically crowded and poorly resourced, yet at the same time may be active places. Of particular interest to the sociology of prisons is institutional reliance on inmate collaboration and self-ordering, not only to maintain prison routines, but, in the most low-staffed prisons, security and prisoner conduct as well. This article explores the roles played by inmates in running one such penal institution, a men’s police lockup in Rio de Janeiro. At the time of research the lockup had over 450 prisoners, but just five officers. Both on and off the wings inmates performed janitorial, clerical, and guard-like duties, mostly under the supervision not of officers but other prisoners. The lockup appeared to be operating under a relatively stable, if de facto and provisional order, premised on common needs and shared beliefs, and maintained by a hierarchy of prisoner as well as officer authority.

Formal and informal controls and punishment: The production of order in the prisons of São Paulo

In the last decades the growth of incarceration in Brazil deepened the precariousness of prison conditions and favoured the emergence of internal organised criminal groups established by inmates. These groups sought to create new relationship standards between inmates, prison staff and prison administrators, and between inmates themselves. One of the main groups, the First Capital Command (Primeiro Comando da Capital — PCC), gained hegemonic power across a large part of the state of São Paulo’s prison system. This meant great change in the ways prison order was built and maintained

The policy challenges of informal prisoner governance

2017

This becomes even more necessary in conditions of scarcity of staff and of basic amenities as Postema et al describe in Lurigancho prison in Peru (this volume) and Darke shows in his study of a police lock-up in Rio de Janeiro. Darke, S. (2013) 'Inmate governance in Brazilian prisons' Howard

The 'Prison-presence': prison culture beyond its walls

Rivista Antigone, 2020

The classic debate in the sociology of imprisonment was polarised between those that saw prison order emanating from the culture within the walls of prison or the culture in the streets. More recently researchers have taken a new look to what constitutes the walls of imprisonment, suggesting that the prison is a part of society as a whole or that the boundaries of imprisonment are fluidly extended beyond prison to those outside of it. Much less attention has been given to the agency of prisoners that react to the order and control of prisons by adapting, resisting or creating alternatives to criminal justice values in the prison and deviant street culture. Based on interviews and ethnographic data on prison and marginalized communities in Brazil, we argue that the rise of prison gangs, the new forms of communication from within prison to the outside (da Cunha, 2002) and the process of mass incarceration has shaped a new form of subjectivity and behaviour from below that we define as prison-presence.