Prisons, Inmates and Governance in Latin America: Edited by

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Prisons, Inmates
and Governance in
Latin America
Edited by
Máximo Sozzo
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Máximo Sozzo
Editor
Prisons, Inmates
and Governance
in Latin America
Editor
Máximo Sozzo
Faculty of Social and Juridical Sciences
National University of Litoral
Santa Fe, Argentina
ISSN 2753-0604 ISSN 2753-0612 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology
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Contents
Introduction: Inmate Governance in Latin America.

Context, Trends and Conditions 1
Máximo Sozzo
Emergence and Transformations

Governance and Legitimacy in Brazilian Prison: From
Solidarity Committees to the Primeiro Comando Da
Capital (PCC) in São Paulo 35
Camila Nunes Dias, Fernando Salla, and Marcos César Alvarez
Tales from La Catedral : The Narco
and the Reconfiguration of Prison Social Order
in Colombia 63
Libardo Ariza and Manuel Iturralde
Provós, Representantes, Agentes: The Evolution of Prison
Governance Arrangements in the Dominican Republic’s
Prison Reform Process 93
Jennifer Peirce
v
vi Contents
Dynamics and variations

The Carceral Reproduction of Neoliberal Order: Power,
Ideology and Economy in Venezuelan Prison 129
Andrés Antillano
Enduring Lock-Up: Co-Governance and Exception
in Nicaragua’s Hybrid Carceral System 155
Julienne Weegels
Co-Governance of Dialogue: Hegemony in a Brazilian
Prison 187
Vitor Stegemann Dieter
A Decolonial and Depatriarchal Approach to Women’s
Imprisonment: Co-governance, Legal Pluralism
and Gender at Santa Mónica Prison, Perú 233
Lucia Bracco Bruce
Evangelical Wings and Prison Governance in Argentina 259
Lorena Navarro and Máximo Sozzo
Alternatives?
The “Prisoner-Entrepreneur”: Responsibilization
and Co-governance at Punta de Rieles Prison in Uruguay 297
Fernando Avila and Máximo Sozzo
Radical Alternatives to Punitive Detention 329
Sacha Darke
Epilogue
Inmate Governance in Latin America: Comparative
and Theoretical Notes 367
Máximo Sozzo
Index 399
Contributors
Marcos César Alvarez University of Sao Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

Andrés Antillano Central University of Venezuela, Caracas, Venezuela
Libardo Ariza University of Los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia
Fernando Avila University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
Lucia Bracco Bruce Research Group in Forensic and Penitentiary
Psychology, Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, Lima, Peru
Sacha Darke University of Westminster, London, UK
Camila Nunes Dias Federal University ABC, Santo André, Brazil
Manuel Iturralde University of Los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia
Lorena Navarro National Council of Scientific and Technological
Research, Santa Fe, Argentina
Jennifer Peirce John Jay College & CUNY Graduate Center, New
York, USA
vii
viii Contributors
Fernando Salla University of Sao Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

Máximo Sozzo Faculty of Social and Juridical Sciences, National
University of Litoral, Santa Fe, Argentina;
National University of Litoral, Santa Fe, Argentina
Vitor Stegemann Dieter ICPC, Curitiba, Brasil
Julienne Weegels Centre for Latin American Research and Documenta-
tion (CEDLA), University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
List of Figures
Introduction: Inmate Governance in Latin America.

Context, Trends and Conditions
Fig. 1 Evolution of incarceration rates per 100,000
inhabitants—Latin America—1990/2020 (Source World
Prison Brief, International Center for Prison Studies,
Birbeck University of London. Data are for 1990 and 2020
or the nearest year available) 4
Fig. 2 Percentage of growth of incarceration rates—Latin
America—1990/2020 5
ix
Introduction: Inmate Governance in Latin
America. Context, Trends and Conditions
Máximo Sozzo
This collection addresses the specific issue of inmate governance in Latin

American prisons, within the framework of the more general question
of the power relations that structure life in the contexts of confinement
in this region of the Global South today. These are governance schemes
that have a strong level of variation, both in their forms and scope and
with respect to the relationships they entail with state actors (authori-
ties and guards), acquiring particular characteristics in different settings.
In fact, in the recent literature in the social studies on the prison in
the region—as well as in the contributions in this book—different ways
of conceptualizing these governance roles of the prisoners have been
produced, which in part reflect the different variants that have been
M. Sozzo (B)
Faculty of Social and Juridical Sciences, National University of Litoral, Santa
Fe, Argentina
e-mail: msozzo@fcjs.unl.edu.ar
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
M. Sozzo (ed.), Prisons, Inmates and Governance in Latin America,
Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98602-5_1
2 M. Sozzo
emerging through time and space—such as the differentiation between

“self-governance” and “co-governance”, to which we will return in the
Epilogue of this book. Rescuing the notion raised by Darke (2013, this
volume), we can initially define this diverse group of schemes as “inmate
governance”, as a broad and basic notion that identifies mechanisms in
which some prisoners assume governance roles of other prisoners, “con-
ducting their conduct”, acting on the possibilities of their action and
ordering their possible results (Foucault, 1982, 221, 1994, 125, 1998,
284). We could argue—amplifying the scope of an assertion in Darke’s
pioneering text in this regard, referring to Brazil—that currently “inmate
governance is as much a defining feature of Latin American prison life as
is inhumane living conditions” (Darke, 2013, 278).1
In this Introduction, we seek to draw a regional contextualization in
which to inscribe the operation of these inmate governance schemes
addressed by the authors of this book specifically in relation to some
countries. In this panorama, we dwell on two fundamental components:
on the one hand, the “punitive turn” experienced since the 1990s and,
on the other, the resulting paroxysmal deterioration and precariousness
of life in prison. Within this general framework, there has been a strong
multiplication and expansion of inmate governance in Latin America’s
prisons. Here also some keys to understanding this process are presented,
pointing to factors that operate both “from inside” and “from outside”,
both “from above” and “from below”. Finally, the structure and contents
of the volume are briefly described.
Punitive Turn
Over the last 30 years there has been an impressive punitive turn in
Latin America. In the early 1990s incarceration rates in the region were
relatively low in comparison with other regions. Some of the countries
covered in this book had incarcerated population levels similar to those
1 Similar inmate governance schemes are also present in other regions of the Global South.
There have been only incipient advances in comparative work across Southern contexts. Inter-
esting indications in this regard can be seen in Garces, Martin and Darke (2013), Martin,
Jefferson and Bandyopadhyay (2014) and Darke (2018, 294–296).
Introduction: Inmate Governance in Latin America … 3
of the Scandinavian countries. For example, the incarceration rate in

Argentina at that time was 62 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants and
70/100,000 in Brazil, while in Finland and Denmark it was 69/100,000
and 67/100,000, respectively.2 Certainly, this did not imply that the
levels of pain or suffering produced by these institutions of legal punish-
ment in Latin America at that time were equivalent to those experienced
in the confinement contexts of that region of Northern Europe, if the
respective living conditions and levels of violence experienced by inmates
are taken into account (Sozzo, 2017a, 135–136, 2017c, 1–9).3 But this
significantly marked difference in terms of “intensity” of the pain or
suffering produced through imprisonment, does not mean that, in terms
of its “extent”, the scope was similar. (Sozzo, 2018a, 49–50).4
2 But within Latin America it was also possible to identify countries with much higher incarcer-
ation rates, such as Chile (171/100,000), the Dominican Republic (143/100,000) or Venezuela
(133/100,000). In the early 1990s, incarceration levels varied widely across Latin American
national borders.
3 It is also important to underline the extraordinary diffusion at that time—and also at
present—in Latin American countries of other penal practices that generated—and continue to
generate—high levels of pain or suffering, beyond incarceration, that did not seem—nor do
they seem—to have an equivalent presence in those Northern European countries. In this sense,
the use of force by police institutions stands out, which generates not only very high levels of
harassment but also injuries and deaths among economically and socially marginalized groups.
It is necessary to remember here that the pioneering comparative investigations produced by
critical criminology in Latin America and developed from the beginning of the 1980s were
dedicated to describing and explaining the massive nature of “human rights violations” and
“announced deaths” generated by the penal systems of the region (Zaffaroni, 1984; Zaffaroni
et al., 1993). These practices of police use of force had at that time—and also today—a strong
degree of official concealment, which in most Latin American contexts prevents building reli-
able data in this regard that would allow observing its evolution over time through statistical
indicators similar to the incarceration rate (Aimar, et al., 2005).
4 Also, the reasons for these relatively contained levels of the incarceration rate were very
different in these two regions of the world at that time. It would be difficult to interpret these
levels as the product of similar penal policies, related to a horizon of penal moderation (see
in this regard on the Scandinavian countries, Lappi-Seppala, 2007; Pratt, 2008a; 2008b; Pratt
and Ericson, 2013). However, it should be noted that in the 1980s, hand in hand with the
processes of transition to democracy in some Latin American contexts, this orientation in penal
policy had a certain presence, generating in some cases effects on the levels of punitiveness. For
an exploration of Argentina, see Sozzo (2011; 2013; 2016). On the Brazilian case, see Salla
(2007); Teixeira (2009); Paiva (2009; 2014); Barros (2012); Alvarez, Salla & Dias (2013); Higa
(2017) and Dias, Salla & Alvarez (in this volume). In any case, for Latin America, the levels
of incarceration that were registered before the 1990s continues to be a topic to be explored
in depth. A great difficulty is the absence in many contexts of reliable official data in this
regard. To what extent were the relatively contained levels of the incarceration rate in many
Latin American settings at the beginning of the 1990s the product of a decrease that had been
4 M. Sozzo
700
600 572
500
416
400 357 374
337 332
290
300 241 237 243
224 209 224
193 178
200 171 164 166
133 135 139 143
95 96 109 112 110
62 70 82 76 82 82 71
100 51 54
c. 1990 c. 2020
Fig. 1 Evolution of incarceration rates per 100,000 inhabitants—Latin

America—1990/2020 (Source World Prison Brief, International Center for Prison
Studies, Birbeck University of London. Data are for 1990 and 2020 or the nearest
year available)
This has radically changed in three decades. Currently, all Latin Amer-
ican countries5 have an incarceration rate of more than 150 prisoners per
100,000 inhabitants, with the sole exception of Guatemala. And there
are six jurisdictions that exceeded the 300/100,000 threshold—among
those addressed in this book, Brazil and Nicaragua. The Scandina-
vian countries, on the other hand, maintain their relatively low levels,
even experiencing a decrease in the incarceration rate in some cases
like Finland, which currently has 50 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants,
almost a third of Guatemala, the Latin American country with the lowest
level (Fig. 1).
The growth in incarceration rates in the region over this period
has been truly extraordinary. Within the countries specifically explored
in this book, in only three decades, Brazil has had a growth greater
operating in previous years (for example, the result of democratization)? Or was it instead, a
continuity with the past?
5 There are no official data on incarceration in this period about Cuba and Haiti.
El Salvador 511%
Brasil 510%
Paraguay 473%
Costa Rica 456%
Nicaragua 405%
ArgenƟna 361%
Uruguay 355%
Perú 354%
Panama 308%
Bolivia 304%
Ecuador 295%
Honduras 217%
Colombia 201%
Guatemala 96%
República Dominicana 70%
México 51%
Venezuela 34%
Chile 22%
0% 100% 200% 300% 400% 500% 600%
Fig. 2 Percentage of growth of incarceration rates—Latin America—1990/2020
than 500%, Nicaragua greater than 400%, Argentina, Uruguay and

Perú greater than 300% and Colombia greater than 200%. Only the
Dominican Republic and Venezuela6 register a level of growth below
100%, but in the second case it is linked to the fact that the extraordinary
volume of prisoners in police headquarters is not currently counted in
the official incarceration data. Apparently now in Venezuela this number
is equivalent to that housed in prisons and if included it would take the
incarceration rate to much higher levels and, therefore, to a much higher
level of increase in the last 30 years (Antillano, 2016; Antillano, in this
volume) (Fig. 2).
The USA, the archetypal example of a national context that experi-
enced an impressive punitive turn used in studies on punishment and
society, had between 1970 and 2000—the period in which said dynamics
was most marked—a growth of 424% in its rate of incarceration, which
went from 161/100,000 to 683/100,000. In comparison with the last
6 In addition to Mexico, Guatemala and Chile, which are not addressed in this volume. Except
for the case of Guatemala, in all the other cases these are countries that had the highest
incarceration rates in the region at the beginning of the 1990s, above 100/100,000. However,
that did not prevent others, such as Honduras, El Salvador and Panama, which had the same
starting point, from experiencing much more important growth levels.
6 M. Sozzo
available year (2019 against 2000), there has been, on the other hand, a
decrease of 8%. If we use the same period that we are analyzing for Latin
America, 1990/2020, the growth in the incarceration rate in the USA
was 38% in the last three decades—only Chile (if we discard Venezuela
for the reason indicated above) had a lower level of growth in Latin
America.7
In any case, it is necessary to recognize that this common trend toward
the growth of incarceration in Latin America over these last three decades
has had a high level of variation: from 22% in Chile to 511% in El
Salvador. And, as was the case in the early 1990s, the resulting incar-
ceration levels in the region are also very different: from the rate of
572/100,000 in El Salvador to that of 139/100,000 in Guatemala.8
Paroxysmal Deterioration and Precarization

of Prison Life
In general terms, in this context of strong growth in incarceration,
certain long-term problematic features of life in prisons in Latin America
underwent a process of accentuation, reaching paroxysmal levels in some
scenarios—for descriptions in this regard, at a regional level, see Darke &
Karam (2016, 464–465), Darke & Garces (2017, 3–4); Ariza & Tamayo
Arboleda (2020, 90–91); Macaulay (2019, 253); Skarbek (2020, 23–
28); Bergman & Fondevilla (2021, 140–142). As with the increase in
incarceration itself, there is also a high level of variation with respect
to the magnification of these problematic traits across jurisdictions and
within jurisdictions—among regions and even, among prisons. In any
7 If we take the same period (1990–2020) for other English-speaking countries, the picture is
similar (44% growth in England and Wales, 49% in Scotland and 25% in Ireland). In Australia
(90%) and New Zealand (62%), the growth is more significant, but it is still lower than that
experienced by most Latin American countries. In turn, some English-speaking countries have
experienced a decrease in the last three decades such as Canada (−14%), South Africa (−21%)
and Northern Ireland (−35%). Source: World Prison Brief, International Center for Prison
Studies, Birbeck University of London.
8 On the punitive turn in Latin America there are a handful of studies that have tried to advance
explanatory keys. See: Chevigny (2003); Beckett & Godoy (2008); Dammert & Salazar (2009);
Iturralde (2010; 2019; 2021); Muller (2011); Hathazy & Muller (2016); Sozzo (2017a, 2017b,
2018b, 2021); Bergman & Fondevilla (2021, 28–86).
case, these features have been repeatedly evidenced by critical voices in

the academic field, as well as from activism and human rights organi-
zations and from state and international bodies that control detention
conditions.9
First, the increase in overcrowding. The statistical indicators in this
regard have many problems, as they are based on the officially deter-
mined accommodation capacity for the different prisons, which is
usually much higher than what international standards would advise
in this matter, and open to various manipulation exercises. Even in
this way—only taking into account the countries addressed in this
book—Peru recognizes officially an occupancy level of 212.2% (2021),
the Dominican Republic of 183.2% (2018), Nicaragua of 177.6%
(2018), Brazil of 146.8% (2020) and Venezuela of 143% (2020)—
always without counting prisoners in police headquarters—Uruguay of
130.9% (2021), Argentina of 122.9% (2019) and Colombia of 118.6%
(2021). Second, this has frequently resulted in the intensification of
state abandonment and the deepening of unworthy and precarious
living conditions for inmates. This implies, in many cases, difficulties
in accessing drinking water and hot water, living environments that
are not even minimally hygienic (for example, lack of bathrooms, poor
functioning of the sewers, etc.), scarce food and of poor quality, little
and inadequate health care and spread of different types of diseases
(tuberculosis, HIV, etc.).
It has also been repeatedly pointed out as a problematic feature of
Latin American prisons that has experienced an intensification in the
recent period, the widespread violence by state agents against prisoners,
as well as violence among prisoners—for a recent example of this type
of assertion, at the regional level, see Macaulay (2019, 253). However,
it seems necessary to be cautious about the production of generaliza-
tions in this regard, among other things, due to the lack of reliable
statistical data relevant to this matter, such as deaths and injuries in
9 For example, in the case of Argentina, see: Daroqui et al. (2006), Sozzo (2007, 2009),
Daroqui, Lopez & Cipriano (2012), Daroqui (2014); Gual (2015); Rodriguez & Viegas (2015);
Ferreccio (2017); Guala (2021); annual reports of the Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales
since 1995, of the Comisión Provincial por la Memoria de la Provincia de Buenos Aires since
2004 and the Procuración Penitenciaria de la Nación since 2006.
8 M. Sozzo
confinement contexts over time (Skarbek, 2020, 25). In some juris-

dictions, the increase in incarceration seems to have been plausibly
accompanied initially by growth of these different types of violence—
for the Argentine context, see Sozzo (2007, 107–108). But in certain
cases, despite the continuity of the growth of incarceration over time, a
reverse process of decrease in violence in prisons has subsequently been
registered. This seems to have happened in the important case of São
Paulo—accounting for a third of the prison population in Brazil—which
in the 1990s and early 2000s experienced remarkable degrees of violence
inside prisons—with its maximum expression in the 2006 revolt. After
the consolidation of the Primeiro Comando da Capital as the dominant
organization in the world of São Paulo prisoners—and different types
of informal negotiations and agreements with state authorities—there
seems to have been, in recent times, a significant reduction in the levels
of violence of different types, despite the continuity of the growing trend
of incarceration (Adorno & Salla, 2014; Alvarez, 2013; Biondi, 2010,
2018; Darke, 2018, 161–162; Dias, 2013; Dias & Darke, 2016; Dias
& Manso, 2017; Dias & Salla, 2013, 2017; Macaulay, 2019, 254–255;
Salla, 2006).10 Of course, this does not imply questioning that, beyond
the potential upward or downward trends in the recent period, prisons
in Latin America present a very high level and frequency of different
forms of violence (Ariza & Tamayo Arboleda, 2020; Ariza & Iturralde,
this volume; Bergman & Fondevilla, 2021, 163).
10 Recently, using responses to surveys by inmates in different Latin American countries

(including the state of Sao Paulo), Bergman and Fondevilla have found that there is no corre-
lation between levels of overpopulation—although as it is recognized by state authorities—and
the self-reported levels of violence, perceived and suffered, by prisoners—although the questions
in these surveys do not include those forms exercised by state agents (Bergman & Fondevilla,
2021, 162). This evidence would seem to suggest that there is no automatic and direct relation-
ship between the growth of the incarcerated population—and, therefore, a frequent worsening
of overcrowding—and violence in prisons in the region.
Multiplication and Expansion of Inmate

Governance
Within this general context, over the last decades there has been a process
of multiplication and expansion of schemes for inmates’ participation
in prison governance tasks in Latin American prisons (Dake & Garces,
2017, 3; Darke & Karam, 2016, 465; Hathazy & Muller, 2016, 121;
Macaulay, 2017, 51; 2019, 253; Skarbek, 2020, 27–28).
Like the other aforementioned features of the contemporary landscape
of prisons in Latin America, these forms of inmate governance do not
necessarily constitute a radical innovation of our present.11 It is possible
to find descriptions of the existence of some of these schemes at various
times in the past in different national contexts—at different times in the
history of the prison in Brazil since the late nineteenth century (Darke,
2014, 57; 2018, 140, 144–145; this volume; Macaulay, 2017, 55); in the
1960s in Argentina (Navarro and Sozzo, this volume); in the 1970s in
Venezuela and Colombia (Birkbeck, 2011, 315) or in the 1980s in Peru
(Perez Guadalupe, 2000, 173). However, this is still a theme that has not
been specifically explored by the history of the prison in Latin America
and, therefore, there is a whole series of questions about its forms and
scope in the past that still need to be adequately addressed.12
Despite this, it is plausible that in recent decades these schemes of
inmate governance have multiplied in their forms and have expanded
in scope in the region, becoming “endemic” (Skarbek, 2020, 28). A
forceful piece of evidence has been the consolidation of organizations of
prisoners—many times defined, importing the term used in the prison
studies of the Global North, as “prison gangs”—that have acquired an
11 On the continuities in relation to overcrowding, state abandonment and the unworthy and
precarious living conditions of inmates and the different forms of violence, during the period
1800–1940 in Latin American prisons, see the important essay by Aguire (2007), based on
a detailed review of the historiographic production in the last decades on these contexts of
confinement in the region. See also, the preceding compilations by Salvatore and Aguirre
(1996) and Salvatore, Aguirre and Gilbert (2001).
12 Aguirre, in his review of the historical literature on prisons in the region, does not make
specific reference to this type of schemes, although when referring to the “prisoner’s agency” he
points out that in some circumstances they “negotiated” with “weak prison administrations”,
seeking higher levels of “autonomy” (Aguirre, 2007, 36, 40).
10 M. Sozzo
extraordinary power, not only within a sector of a prison or a prison

as a whole but through different prisons of the same jurisdiction or even
across different jurisdictions. In turn, some of these inmate organizations
have a great impact outside prison walls, particularly in economically and
socially marginalized urban areas, through their dominant positions in
certain illegal markets and activities. The examples in this regard that
have attracted more attention from social researchers working on prisons
in the region have been those developed in the Brazilian context such as
the Comando Vermelho and, especially, the Primerio Comando da Capital
(Adorno & Salla, 2014; Alvarez, Salla & Dias, 2013; Biondi, 2010, 2018;
Castro e Silva, 2008; Darke, 2018, 101–137, 235–277; this volume;
Denyer Willis, 2009; Dias, 2013; Dias & Darke, 2016; Dias & Manso,
2017; Dias & Salla, 2013, 2017; Dias, this volume; Lessing & Denyer
Willis, 2019; Salla, 2006; Siqueira & Paiva, 2019; Setegemann Dieter,
this volume). Now, beyond these extreme examples due to their scope,
there is also in Latin America a vast variety of forms of governance of
the imprisoned population that have inmates as agents, many of which
have also arisen in the last decades—from those deployed in the “evangel-
ical wings” of the Argentine provincial prisons (Navarro and Sozzo, this
volume) to the “community-run prisons” organized and developed in
Brazil by various non-state and state actors (Macaulay, 2013, 376–377,
384–385, 2015; Darke, 2015; this volume).
This multiplication and expansion of various forms of inmate gover-
nance have clearly taken place hand in hand with the growth of incarcer-
ation and its various effects. It has also been associated with a consequent
marked decline in the state’s capacity to effectively control incarcerated
life, preferentially evidenced in the decline in the proportion of prison
officers in relation to the number of prisoners over the last 30 years—
in the framework of a broader limitation of state resources dedicated
to confinement contexts—as has been repeatedly pointed out by social
researchers who have addressed this phenomenon (Antillano, 2015, 32–
34; 2017, 29–30, this volume; Antillano et al., 2016, 209; Bergman &
Fondevilla, 2021, 141–143; Birkbeck, 2011, 312; Darke, 2013, 274–
275, 2014, 56–57, 2018, 140–149; Dias & Darke, 2016, 214–215;
Darke & Garces, 2017, 3; Darke & Karam, 2016, 465–466; Dias,
Salla & Alvarez, this volume; Hathazy & Muller, 2016, 121; Macaulay,
2017, 51, 2019, 243–245; Skarbek, 2020, 25–27). Surely this is a factor
that plays a crucial role in a large part of Latin American scenarios. In
some countries the ratio of prisoners to prison officers is extremely high,
such as—according to official data from 2015—in Ecuador (17.3) or
El Salvador (14.7) (Skarbek, 2020, 24), in comparison with ratios of
Global North prisons assumed as ideal (Birkbeck, 2011, 312; Bergman
& Fondevilla, 2021, 141–143; Darke, 2018, 140–141).13 But this does
not necessarily happen in all contexts, since the ratio of prisoners to
prison officers has an enormous level of variation in the region. Thus,
in Uruguay in 2015 it was 3.8 or in Argentina it was 1.6 (Skarbek,
2020, 24), levels similar to those in many contexts in the Global North.
However, also in these scenarios with lower ratios, it is possible to observe
the emergence of various forms of inmate governance in recent years
(Avila and Sozzo, this volume; Navarro and Sozzo, this volume).14
From my perspective, there are other conditions that have also played
a role in the emergence and diffusion of these mechanisms of inmate
governance. A significant element, which is in turn a long-lasting trait, is
the wide level of “informality” that characterizes incarcerated life in Latin
America and strongly marks the relationships between prison officers and
prisoners, in turn connected with precariousness and the poverty of living
and working conditions within these institutions of legal punishment.
13 It should also be emphasized that this ratio is built on the total number of existing prison
staff in each jurisdiction, including those in charge of different administrative tasks who do
not have direct contact with inmates, which in many Latin American contexts is usually an
important proportion. It should also be noted that prison work in the region tends to have high
levels of absenteeism and sick leaves, which also affects the volume of prison officers who are
actually in a given prison on any given day. And to this is added that those who actually work
in direct contact with prisoners usually do so in shifts. In other words, considering what actually
happens in contexts of confinement, the ratio is usually much higher (Darke, 2018, 141–143;
Skarbek, 2020, 26–27; Bergman & Fondevilla, 2021, 143). Added to this, it is necessary to
consider the poor working conditions of prison officers and their scarce and inadequate training
for the development of their work (Darke & Karam, 2016, 465; Bergman & Fondevilla, 2021,
143–144).
14 Always underlining the level of variation in the situation of prisons in the region and being
careful to recognize the existence of significant differences, it should be noted that in the case
of the Dominican Republic it can be argued that, by opposition, the state’s capacity to control
incarcerated life intensified during the last decades, despite the growth of the prison population,
as a consequence of the reform promoted since the beginning of the 2000s, encompassing not
only the “new model” prisons but also those of the “old model” in which state presence was
intensified and a scheme of “representatives” was structured (Peirce, 2021; this volume).
12 M. Sozzo
The formal rules—legal and administrative—are applied in an extremely

flexible way by prison officers, who are themselves endowed with wide
levels of discretion. However, these state agents, in any case, constantly
cross the borders of those same formal rules, within the framework
of relations with prisoners strongly marked by irregularity and person-
alism, reciprocity and mutual dependence, dialogue but also violence.
In this scenario with a high level of informality, the accommodations
that are built in incarcerated life generate a certain amount of autonomy
for inmates in exchange for a series of benefits for the authorities and
guards—both material and immaterial. Within the framework of this
autonomy—greater or lesser, depending on the case—the way can be
opened to the development of schemes and practices of governance of
other prisoners (Antillano, 2015; 2017; Antillano et al., 2016; Birkbeck,
2011, 318; Darke, 2018, 19, 149; Darke & Garces, 2017, 5–6; Darke
& Karam, 2016, 467–468; Garces, Martin & Darke, 2013).15
Another significant condition, which is also a long-lasting feature in
Latin American prisons—although deepened as a consequence of the
growth of overcrowding—and which is a condition of possibility for the
inmate governance, is the high dose of “collectivism” that structures the
lives of prisoners (Avila & Sozzo, 2020, this volume; Darke, 2018, 8,
149–168, 284–285, this volume). The fact that individual cell accom-
modation is an extremely rare situation in these penal institutions in the
region makes the experience of living with others a constant, both in
the past and in the present. This occurs both in cells designed as indi-
vidual that have become collective as a consequence of overcrowding and
in cells directly designed as collective, whose occupation may also be
found beyond the limits initially planned as a consequence of growth of
imprisoned population. To this is added that, in general, Latin American
prisoners spend a lot of time of their days in collective spaces such as the
“patios” or the “corridors” of the wings, since the cells tend to have long
opening hours—to which can be added, in certain cases, other collec-
tive spaces such as schools or workshops in which some inmates spend
15 Lucia Bracco (2020, this volume) interestingly proposes—from her exploration of a women’s
prison in Peru—that the “formal” and the “informal” interpenetrate in incarcerated life, building
a “hybrid” regime, a “multilayered normative order”, which she interprets using the notion of
“interlegality”.
a certain number of hours per week. This collective, forced and intense
coexistence also contributes to the fact that, within the framework of the
relationships between prisoners, many times marked by mutual aid and
protection in pursuit of survival—although not for that reason free of
conflicts and violence16 —, schemes and practices of inmate governance
emerge, more or less distant—depending on the case—from the gaze and
intervention of prison agents.
These three conditions of possibility of the inmate governance operate
essentially “from within”, they are dynamics that are linked to what
happens inside the Latin American prison walls, even when they have
different connections with external processes. Now, at least in relation
to certain forms of inmate governance, there are also various conditions
that operate more directly “from outside” prisons. For example, to under-
stand the emergence of governance schemes related to evangelical wings
in Argentine provincial prisons, it is essential to take into consideration
the social diffusion of evangelism, especially in the economically and
socially disadvantaged populations, and the initiative of various pastors
to enter contexts of confinement and develop their religious activities
with inmates (Navarro & Sozzo, this volume). In the same way, to under-
stand the type of governance that the figure of the “narco” embodies in
Colombian prisons, the emergence of that position outside the prison
and its economic and political capacity linked to a dominant role in
the illegal drugs market is essential. (Ariza & Iturralde, this volume).
Or to understand the governance schemes of the prisoners associated
with the “maras” in various Central American countries, it is essential
to understand the preceding and parallel trajectories of these organi-
zations outside the prison walls and the multiple effects they generate
(Bergman & Fondevilla, 2021, 172–176; Carter, 2014, 2017; Gutierrez
Rivera, 2012).
16 In Darke’s important work on Brazilian prisons in this regard, reference is made to these
“collectives” emphasizing their “homogeneity” (Darke, 2018, 297). This “homogeneity” cannot
be taken for granted, at least in prisons in other contexts of Latin America, where there is a
higher level of fragmentation between various “collectives” that may have conflicting relation-
ships with each other and where there are also many examples of volatility and fragility of
them through time. In any case, this seems to be a very important issue that also requires more
in-depth and comparative analysis in the future.
14 M. Sozzo
These various examples of conditions that operate “from outside”

the prison walls, generate reactions on the part of the state authori-
ties, which contribute to a greater or lesser extent to the fact that this
type of governance schemes on the part of the prisoners are installed
and work, in some cases with some official reluctance, in other cases
without it. Therefore, finally, it is also necessary to incorporate as another
condition of possibility that plays a significant role in the installation
of some of these forms of inmate governance, the production of prison
policy decisions that tolerate or try to generate these schemes, justifying
these governmental roles of prisoners themselves in various ways and
to a greater or lesser extent. In certain cases, these governance schemes
even go through formalization processes that may be more or less impor-
tant and rescue pre-existing practices or not. This clearly happens in the
“community-run” prisons in Brazil (Darke, 2015, this volume; Macaulay,
2013, 376–377, 384–385, 2015), in the “solidarity committees” of the
São Paulo prisons of the 1980s (Dias, this volume), in the Nicaraguan
“prisoner councils” (Weegels, 2017, 2019, this volume) and in other
experiences in the region (Postema et al., 2017).
Recently David Skarbek has ambitiously sought to generate an expla-
nation of the existence of the diverse variants of prison governance at
a global level, including forms of “inmate governance”—differentiating
between “co-governance” and “self-governance” (Skarbek, 2020, 9–10).
For this author, the emergence of these forms of inmate governance is the
result of the nonexistence or insufficiency and “low quality” of “official
governance”, which he associates exclusively to the governance practices
of state actors. In his perspective, prisoners have needs of order mainte-
nance and since in some cases this is not satisfied by state actors, they
themselves construct ways to do it (Skarbek, 2020, 10–18, 42–43).
Certainly, weakness in the state’s control capacity is a central variable
to explain the birth of various of these forms of inmate governance, as
we have already indicated. But it is necessary not to lose sight of the
fact that many times it is state actors themselves that promote these
schemes, whether they generate their formal recognition or not. This
usually happens within the framework of processes of reciprocal accom-
modation with certain prisoners, crossed not only by agreements but also
by tensions and conflicts, which give rise to transactions and compro-

mises. But in any case, the schemes of inmate governance are not the
product solely of the inventiveness and agency of the prisoners. In fact,
this is somehow recognized by Skarbek himself when he argues that in
the forms of “co-governance” —using the previously mentioned case
study by Darke () on a Brazilian jail—the tasks of some prisoners are
assigned “from above” and these actors are presented as collaborators of
state agents (Skarbek, 2020, 28–32, 43). It may even happen, although
rather exceptionally, that some of these schemes are born directly and
immediately as a consequence of a government strategy generated by
prison authorities, as shown by the case explored in Avila & Sozzo (2020;
this volume) and in the “community-run prisons” in Brazil explored by
Darke (2015, this volume). In these cases, from my perspective, it is more
difficult to speak of a weakness in the capacity to govern of the prison
authorities. In any case, I consider that it is not enough to focus on this
single element—although its importance is undoubtedly crucial—when
considering the emergence, multiplication and diffusion of the schemes
of inmate governance in Latin America.
These varied mechanisms are the result of a complex web of condi-
tions of possibility, which operate both “from outside” and “from
within” the walls of these institutions of legal punishment but also both
“from below"—from prisoners themselves—as “from above”—from state
authorities and agents.
Contents of the Book

This collection identifies and analyzes inmate governance in Latin
America, in an attempt to make this phenomenon as relevant to the
academic field as it already is in practical terms in the region, placing
it as a central theme of social studies on Latin American prisons. The
volume rescues and dialogues with a whole series of previous contribu-
tions that have been made in this regard, especially in the last decade—an
16 M. Sozzo
important part of which has been generated by the authors of its various
chapters—on various national contexts.17
The chapters of this book carry out a detailed exploration of some
of the main forms of inmate governance, in different countries of
the region—Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela,
Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic—, based on empirical inquiries
conducted by social researchers who have diverse disciplinary roots as
well as theoretical and methodological perspectives. It is precisely this
diversity that I consider to be one of the fundamental sources of the
richness of its contribution as a collective exercise.
The volume is structured in three sections. Part I. Emergence and
Transformations gathers a series of works that rescue a diachronic vision
and analyze the emergence and transformations of these schemes of
inmate governance in different national contexts of the region. Thus,
the Chapter 1 by Camila Dias Nunes, Fernando Salla and Marcos Cesar
Alvarez, “Governance and Legitimacy in Brazilian Prisons: From Soli-
darity Committees to the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) in São
Paulo” proposes an analysis of these schemes in the Brazilian case through
the study of two political and institutional contexts in different periods,
each of which is characterized by the existence of groups of prisoners
claiming to represent the prison population through different discur-
sive, normative and ideological frameworks. On the one hand, prisoners
being recognized by the authorities as legitimate interlocutors in the
handling of prison matters. On the other hand, groups of prisoners
whose authority is founded on the codes and logic of the criminal world,
without the support of or explicit recognition by institutional authorities.
To a large extent, the latter groups are founded on a discourse of opposi-
tion to the State. In both cases, what is at play is prison governance in its
17 Some books have previously been published that have worked on this issue, but on a specific
national case, Brazil, such as Dias Nunes (2013); Biondi (2010, 2018); Darke (2018) and Dias
Nunes & Paes Manso (2017). A very interesting collection has also recently been published that
centrally addresses this issue in many of its contributions and refers to various countries in the
region (Darke et al., 2021). And several special issues of scientific journals on prisons in Latin
America included articles that address the issue of inmate governance (see Crime, Law and
Social Change, 65, 3, 2016, The Prison Service Journal, 229, 2017 and International Criminal
Justice Review, 30, 1, 2020). However, there have been practically no comparative efforts on
this topic. The only attempt that has been done so far has been the book by Perez Guadalupe
(2000).
verticality—that is, the relationship between custodians and prisoners—

as well as in its horizontality, in the relationships established among
the prisoners themselves. The two “cases” refer to the prison system of
the state of São Paulo. The first case was observed in the 1980s, when
the formation of Solidarity Committees among prisoners was encour-
aged and supported by state authorities within the context of a “prison
humanization policy”. Despite its brief formal existence, this case was
very significant as it provided an unprecedented experience in Brazilian
prisons by creating formal and legitimate forms of representation for the
prison population, who could communicate directly with the Depart-
ment of Justice, the upper echelon of São Paulo’s prison administration.
The second case refers to the emergence of the group of prisoners who
called themselves the First Command of the Capital (Primeiro Comando
da Capital, or PCC), and which expanded during the 1990s and consol-
idated itself in São Paulo prisons during the 2000s. Unlike the Solidarity
Committees, the PCC explicitly defined itself as the “party of crime”
and promoted the struggle for prisoner rights based on a discourse of
confrontation with the State. The chapter concludes with some general
reflections on these different forms of prison governance .
Chapter 2 by Manuel Iturralde and Libardo Ariza is “Tales from La
Catedral : the Narco and the Reconfiguration of Prison Social Order
in Colombia”. The chapter departs from acknowledging that, recently,
anthropological, sociological and socio-legal studies on Latin American
prisons have opened a promising line of research, which focuses on the
effect of the punitive turn and the war on drugs on social order and
governance in prisons. However, the chapter highlights that little has
been said of the instrumental and symbolic role of the Narco in Latin
American prisons social order, as the archetypical figure that embodies
the immense power of drug barons and the cartels they lead. Through
the case study of Pablo Escobar and La Catedral (the prison where he
was held for a brief period), the chapter shows how, in many instances,
the Narco plays similar roles to those performed by prison groups and
gangs regarding social order in prisons, also replacing the State in their
government and the provision of goods and services. Nevertheless, due
to his immense power and number of resources, the Narco takes some
of the features of social order in Latin American prisons, as well as its
18 M. Sozzo
relationship to state authority to a different level. Also, the Narco has

fostered new dynamics, which have reconfigured prison spaces, markets
and power relations. The chapter finally presents an interpretation of the
transformation of Latin American prison spaces and social order during
the last decades based on the description of what may be regarded as the
foundational episode of a new prison era in Latin America: the construc-
tion of La Catedral as a symbol of the emergence of a particular prison
culture characteristic of the Narco era.
Chapter 3 by Jennifer Peirce is “Tigres, Representantes, Agentes:
The Evolution of Prison Governance Arrangements in the Dominican
Republic’s Prison Reform Process”. This chapter explores the evolution
and variety of social order and governance arrangements in prisons in
the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic provides a unique
case study for prison research because it is a high-crime, and low-
resource context, but has made a major investment in reforming prisons
to align with international human rights standards. Half of its prisons
are “new” and reformed—with new buildings, staff and programs—
and half remain in the “old” conditions, with deteriorated infrastructure
and police/military authority. In the “old” prisons, governance arrange-
ments have shifted over the past decade, from a “provó” system where
individual powerful prisoners ran facilities with near-total control, to
a form of negotiated authority in which both prisoner “representa-
tives” and prison staff share power. In contrast, in the new prisons,
the new corrections professionals have dismantled all forms of prisoner-
led governance and have imposed formal authority on every aspect of
daily life. These contrasting governance arrangements stem from mate-
rial and social circumstances and from deliberate policy decisions by
government officials. In each setting, prisoners expressed appreciation for
certain aspects of daily life under a given regime, and express frustration
with other aspects. Based on surveys and interviews with prisoners and
interviews with staff and other actors, this chapter describes the history,
key components and mechanisms of the current governance arrange-
ments in old and new prisons. It also explores the reasons for prisoners’
mixed perceptions. The chapter argues that the Dominican examples
show the need to integrate key insights from the principal theoretical
frameworks of prison governance. Specifically, the Dominican case illus-

trates the salience of blending two frameworks: Skarbek’s emphasis on
the provision of material goods and safety and of Pérez Guadalupe and
Nuñovero’s emphasis on the nature of dialogue between prisoners and
formal authorities.
Part II. Dynamics and variations bring together a series of works on
various national contexts that explore in detail the dynamics of diverse
schemes of inmate governance, pointing to different crucial dimensions
of its ways of functioning. Chapter 4 by Andres Antillano is “The
carceral reproduction of neoliberal order: Power, ideology and economy
in Venezuelan prison”. This chapter tries to account for the similarities
between social relations and political devices within a prison controlled
by the prisoners themselves, and practices and discourses typical of the
neoliberal creed (privatization of prison management, exhaustive control
and supervision, rigorous and labor-intensive disciplinary regime), or
even of its more general premises (conservative values, commodification,
individualistic ethic, hierarchization and inequality, overexploitation and
dispossession). This is made through the results of an empirical research
of one prison in Venezuela. These similarities, where a group of socially
excluded prisoners duplicates and reproduces the same devices that lead
to their exclusion, are an even greater paradox if they are considered to
occur within the framework of a political project seeking to overcome
the neoliberal legacy and dignify the poor, including those locked up in
prison. The chapter understands neoliberalism not only as a doctrine, a
set of policies or a rationality but above all as a social arrangement, in
this case, constituted by the effect of the continuity of the use of prison
as mechanism of segregation and control of the surplus population (key
to neoliberal governance, as Wacquant pointed out) and the emergence,
within the prison, of an economy based on dispossession (Harvey), as a
result of double exclusion (social and institutional) that prison implies
for this surplus segment of the population.
Chapter 5 by Julienne Weegels is “Enduring lock-up. Co-governance
and exception in Nicaraguan’s hybrid carceral systems”. Publicly, the
Nicaraguan police and prisons system are prided for their humanistic and
communitarian stance. While they project the moral high ground in the
fight against “the corruption of our youth”, they nonetheless appear to
20 M. Sozzo
have a highly ambiguous relationship with both violence against crim-

inalized youth and illegal markets inside prison. In effect, Nicaragua’s
prisons are characterized by overcrowding and extra-legal governance
techniques in which corruption and the use of violence (both among
prisoners and between prisoners and authorities) produce precarious,
yet systemic co-governance arrangements. As such, this chapter seeks
to grasp the intimate relationship between governance, violence and
collusion in the Nicaraguan prison system—a relationship managed and
guarded as a public secret as it is revelatory of the shared nature of power
within the system. While prison is publicly projected to be governed
solely by the authorities through the privilege system, the facilities are
neither exclusively governed through this system nor by the authori-
ties alone. Prisoners effectively participate in prison governance as they
order and govern their cells according to their own norms. Prisoners
and authorities, moreover, collude to make particular prohibited and
illegal goods available inside prison (such as cellphones and drugs), both
reaping the economic benefits of such collusions. Violence, in turn,
appears to be deployed by both authorities and prisoners as an ordering
mechanism that establishes the limits of their collusion. Drawing from an
extensive ethnographic engagement with prisoners and former prisoners,
this chapter explores the joint (dis)organization of “prison as usual”
through the violent exchanges that authorities and prisoners engage in
to balance prison governance by effectively, yet secretly, sharing power.
Chapter 6 by Vitor Stegemann Dieter is “Co-governance of
‘Dialogue’: hegemony and governance in a Brazilian maximum-security
unit”. Classic prison studies have emphasized the importance of prisoner-
staff relationship for the maintenance of prison social order, yet the
rise of an administrative criminology in prison changed that orienta-
tion to seek “good management” increasingly from the perspective of
governors and staff practices. Subsequent prison studies in the Anglo-
sphere have followed that top-down line of inquiry pointing to the
importance of criminal justice legitimacy, prison architecture, penal
philosophies or administrative styles. However, recent literature from a
“Southern criminology” perspective has found that “Southern prisons“
rely more on the participation of inmates for prison governance due
to its precariousness, overcrowding, staff-shortage and the presence of
gang organizations, resulting in forms of “shared prison governance”,

“informal governance”, “co-governance” or “prisoner self-governance”.
An important part of this research in Latin America has been based
in minimum-security units, more “open” prisons and remand jails,
but a gap still remains to be covered in better-organized maximum-
security units in the Global South. Based on ethnographic research in
a maximum-security prison in Southern Brazil and street ethnographic-
interviews with drug addicts, ex-convicts and “street criminals”, this
chapter stresses the important role of the most widespread prison gang
in Brazil, the Primeiro Comando da Capital , as a key organization to
promote inmate influence in prison governance in spite of the hard “con-
tainment” prison practices of a maximum-security unit. Through the
development of licit, illicit and violent “resistance strategies” to the “con-
tainment governance”, the PCC managed to challenge the authority of
“hard” administrations to push for a “dialogue”. “dialogue” with “prison
leaders” and the perception of the PCC as key representative of prisoners
in the unit transformed “hard” into “soft power” governance, in which
inmates actively demanded to have a “voice” in administrative decision-
making. The chapter concludes that co-governance, in the particular
form of “dialogue” developed, cannot simply be conceptualized as filling
the void of the State. Instead, the organization of prisoners and pris-
oners’ agency can transform governance styles and create different forms
of co-governance.
Chapter 7 by Lucia Bracco is “A Decolonial and Depatriarchal
approach to Women’s Imprisonment: Co-governance, legal pluralism and
gender at Santa Mónica prison, Perú”. Research about prisons in the
Global South has started to analyze the power dynamics between prison
staff and prisoners, but it has focused mainly on men’s prisons. Following
decolonial and feminist scholars, this chapter is based on the empir-
ical data produced during an ethnography in Santa Mónica, a women’s
prison in Lima, Perú, with the aim of contributing to the decoloniza-
tion and depatriarchalizing of prison studies. The chapter argues that
Santa Mónica functions through a co-governance with prisoner-delegates
who have the role of intermediaries or “interface brokers”. Moreover, it
proposes that prison is a site of “interlegality”—using the concept of De
Souza Santos—where national law and customary law superimpose and
22 M. Sozzo
interpenetrate in the subjects’ actions and minds. Consequently, social

relationships between authorities, prison staff and prisoners are defined
by a “hybrid legal system”. She concludes on the importance of recog-
nizing different types of political and social organizations, not only as the
result of errors or of failed development processes in the Global South
but also as an alternative configuration that may lead us to question
how we conceptualize prison and imprisonment. In the same line, the
chapter acknowledges women prisoners not only as molded by patriar-
chal structures but also recognize the ambivalences and the possibilities of
organizing and engaging in semi-autonomous actions while imprisoned.
Chapter 8 by Lorena Navarro and Maximo Sozzo is “Evangelical wings
and prison governance in Argentina”. In the last two decades, within
prisons under certain provincial jurisdictions in Argentina, there has
been a rapid growth of “evangelical wings”, spaces where only inmates
who accept to live according to the religious precepts of evangelism are
accepted. This chapter is based on fieldwork in a men’s prison in the
Province of Santa Fe where 6 out of 10 wings are evangelical. The chapter
describes the hierarchy existing among prisoners inside the evangel-
ical wings, in which the “internal pastor”—and indirectly, the “external
pastor”—is recognized as the informal, extra-legal authority. It analyzes
the various strategies for order maintenance within it, both proactive
and reactive, and the roles played by the various positions in the pris-
oner hierarchy of the evangelical wing. Special attention is paid to the
relationships that are built within this framework with the prison author-
ities and guards. The idea that the exercise of power by prisoners in the
upper echelons of evangelical wings can be interpreted as a kind of “out-
sourcing” by state authorities is discussed. On this point, the chapter
argues that this interpretation implies ignoring the series of forces that
“from below” and “from the outside” have contributed to the existence
and diffusion of evangelical wings, in a process of “conquest” of the
contemporary prison that has to be taken seriously. In turn, the chapter
emphasizes the important role of negotiation between state and non-
state actors in structuring the forms of governance of this segment of
the prison population. It argues that the category of “self-governance” is
inappropriate to capture this type of development since it does not take
into account the centrality of state action. But it also suggests that the
conceptual alternative of “co-governance” may run the risk of empha-

sizing only the collaboration between the prison authorities and guards
and the prisoners who occupy privileged positions in the evangelical
wings, losing sight of the quota of competition and conflict that also
exists between them, in a fluid and complex dynamic. Finally, the chapter
advocates in favor of a way of thinking about governmental relations in
this type of prison spaces that includes both the collaborative and the
conflictive sides between state and non-state actors.
Part III. Alternatives? brings together a couple of chapters that
explore schemes of inmate governance in prisons that in Latin America
are presented as “alternatives” to ordinary contexts of confinement and
that for some years have fueled the political debate about what is possible
to do in the region to avoid the extraordinary levels of degradation and
suffering this type of legal punishment generates. Chapter 9 by Fernando
Avila and Maximo Sozzo is “The ‘prisoner-entrepeneur’. Responsibiliza-
tion and co-governance at Punta de Rieles prison in Uruguay”. This
chapter focuses on the “prisoner-entrepreneur” as an agent in the gover-
nance relations in a men’s prison in Montevideo, Uruguay. This is
a non-traditional prison in which prisoners’ responsibilization plays a
fundamental role as a strategy of governance deployed by state authori-
ties and agents to make prisoners responsible for developing, with broad
levels of autonomy, an open range of activities that authorities consider
“positive”. The production of goods and services stands out among these
officially promoted activities. Most of them are generated from prisoners’
initiatives. To obtain the prison authorities’ authorization and support
to carry it out, prisoners are encouraged to design the productive activity
project and draft a formal request. This “prisoner-entrepreneur” occupies
a unique position in Punta de Rieles’ prison population. He is subject to
responsibilization, requested to engage in a “positive use” of time and to
develop forms of self-governance. However, simultaneously, as “employ-
ers” of other prisoners, they become and act as governance agents and
they structure the field of action of the “prisoner-employee”, within a
framework that has similarities and differences with the labor world on
the “outside”. In turn, this governmental role implies a whole series of
collaborative but also conflictive relationships with state agents, especially
with prison officers. This chapter addresses the peculiar position of the
24 M. Sozzo
“prisoner-entrepreneur” in terms of his governmental role and his links

with state agents, as a unique form of governance in this non-traditional
Latin American prison.
Chapter 10 by Sacha Darke is “Radical Alternatives to Punitive
Detention”. Brazil is criticized for breaching international norms on
the treatment of prisoners. Its common prison system is overcrowded
and understaffed. Yet, Brazilian prisons are not so disorderly nor staff-
inmate relations are as conflictual as established theories on prison
order and legitimate prison governance would suggest. Staffing short-
ages are mitigated by recruiting prisoners. Of most relevance to the
current chapter, prison managers informally engage gang leaders to main-
tain inmate discipline. The customary practices gang leaders enforce are
likewise negotiated with prison managers. This chapter examines the
similar roles played by inmates in establishing and enforcing disciplinary
rules at dozens of radically different community prisons inaugurated
by ex-prisoner-led NGOs in the twenty-first Century. In these prisons,
everyday order does not depend on the informal authority of gang
leaders. Instead, prisoners self-regulate through the medium of officially
constituted, peer-selected councils. Disciplinary powers are formally
delegated by prison managers as part of a wider focus on human dignity
and empowerment. Delegating disciplinary powers to inmates contra-
venes the international human rights consensus that prisoners might be
entrusted to manage prison routines but never to exercise power over
each other. This position is questionable from a Southern Criminolog-
ical perspective. The chapter asks, under what circumstances, by what
means and to what extent are disciplinary powers appropriately devolved
to community prison inmates in Brazil.
Finally, the book concludes with Part IV Epilogue that includes a
concluding chapter “Inmate Governance in contemporary prisons in
Latin America. Comparative and theoretical notes” by the book editor.
This chapter attempts to take stock of the several explorations included
in this book as well as the wider work social researchers have done in
the last years. In its first part, it presents some reflections on how to
insert the question of inmate governance within the framework of a more
wide-ranging consideration about the differences between the prisons of
Latin America -and more generally, of the Global South- and those of
the Global North, critically discussing an approach that seeks to build

an understanding of these differences through a distinction of types of
regimes of confinement, characteristic of these various parts of the world.
In the second section introduces the broader discussion of to what extent
the theoretical tools of prison studies in the Global North can be used—
and how—to make sense of the mechanisms and dynamics of inmate
governance in this region, advocating a position that defends the possi-
bility of “use” but discourages the attitude of “application”. There it
also shows how a strong South-South dialogue has been produced on
inmate governance in the last years—of which this book is also a piece of
evidence—, particularly around some key concepts like “self-governance”
and “co-governance”, which have the potentiality of influencing the ways
of thinking about prison order in the Global North. Finally, it raises
the need to advance in the construction of a comparative perspective on
inmate governance in Latin American prisons as a fundamental exercise
in the elaboration of our theoretical tools in this regard, based on the
recognition of the strong degree of variation that this book evidences. In
this sense, it presents a tentative comparative outline, isolating various
crucial dimensions and exemplifying the diverse alternatives with the
analysis produced throughout this book on the various schemes for the
participation of prisoners in the governance of incarcerated life in the
region. This exercise is considered a contribution on a longer path to
more fully theorize the dynamics and effects of inmate governance, both
inside and outside Latin America.
∗ ∗ ∗
Over four years the various authors of this collection met in person
and virtually in different places and several times to discuss the chapters
that compose it, in their successive versions. I greatly appreciate their
enthusiasm and energy throughout this long process.18 It has been an
extraordinarily enriching exercise, of mutual learning and help, which I
18 Throughout this process, other colleagues took active part in these different meetings and
thus also contributed to the development of this book. I thank all of them and especially Chris
Garces, David Skarbek, Jean Daudelin, Jose Luiz Ratton, Rafael Godoi, Gabriel Bombini,
Waldemar Claus and Ramiro Gual.
26 M. Sozzo
believe has substantially improved this final outcome. It has also paved
the way to new collective initiatives that help us understand the dynamics
of Latin American prisons, based on the common understanding of
the essential need to hinder the naturalization and reproduction of the
extraordinary degrees of inequality and exclusion, pain and suffering they
generate on a daily basis.
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Emergence and Transformations
Governance and Legitimacy in Brazilian
Prison: From Solidarity Committees
to the Primeiro Comando Da Capital (PCC)
in São Paulo
Camila Nunes Dias, Fernando Salla,
and Marcos César Alvarez
Introduction
Prisons became an object of increasing interest for the Social Sciences
during the twentieth century. In the 1950s, several aspects were the
The current work is part of the “Building Democracy Daily: Human Rights, Violence, and
Institutional Trust” Project of the Center for the Study of Violence at the University of
São Paulo, financed by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP)
C. N. Dias (B)
Federal University ABC, Santo André, Brazil
e-mail: camila.dias@ufabc.edu.br
F. Salla · M. C. Alvarez
University of Sao Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
e-mail: fersalla@gmail.com
M. C. Alvarez
e-mail: mcalvarez@usp.br

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98602-5_2
36 C. N. Dias et al.
subject of academic reflection, especially in the North American liter-

ature, such as, for example, the configuration of the prison as a social
organization with relative autonomy, the disconnect between the objec-
tives of these institutions and the outcomes they produced, the effects
of incarceration on family relationships, forms of prison governance,
power relations between prisoners and their custodians, social dynamics
between prisoners, disruptions in the internal order of prisons, etc.
Changes in criminal policies since the mid-1970s caused an intensifi-
cation of incarceration in many countries (cf. Christie, 1999; Garland,
2001; Wacquant, 2001, among many others) and have considerably
expanded the objects of study and the volume of academic reflections
on prisons. Some of the new topics discussed included the redefinition
of prison’s objectives and purposes in the contemporary world, the effects
on prisoners of long stays under stricter confinement, prison revolts and
rebellions, and the privatization of prisons.
A central issue that many of the axes of reflection on prisons have
in common is how imprisoned individuals have adapted to disciplinary
mechanisms—as well as resisted these mechanisms—through complex
strategies that make use of individual or group actions to enhance, their
non-acceptance of institutionally imposed rules. In other words, how the
relationship between prison administrators and prisoners affects prison
dynamics in the current context of increased incarceration and prison
overcrowding.
In this text we propose an analysis of so-called prison governance,1
based on the Brazilian experience and on the study of two political and
institutional contexts in different periods, each of which is character-
ized by the existence of groups of prisoners claiming to represent the
prison population through different discursive, normative, and ideolog-
ical frameworks. On the one hand, we have the context of prisoners
being recognized by the authorities as legitimate interlocutors in the
handling of prison matters. On the other hand, we have groups of pris-
oners whose authority is founded on the codes and logic of the criminal
world, without the support of and explicit recognition by institutional
authorities. To a large extent, the latter groups are founded on a discourse
1 Understood here in its broader meaning of exercising power in this specific social space.
Governance and Legitimacy in Brazilian Prison … 37
of opposition to the State. In both cases, what is at play is prison gover-

nance in its verticality—that is, the relationship between custodians and
prisoners—as well as in its horizontality, in the relationships established
between the prisoners themselves.
The two “cases” we will analyze refer to the prison system of the state
of São Paulo.2 The first case was observed in the 1980s, when the forma-
tion of Solidarity Committees among prisoners was encouraged and
supported by state authorities within the context of a “prison human-
ization policy,” and which, despite its brief formal existence, was very
significant in that it provided an unprecedented experience in Brazilian
prisons by creating formal and legitimate form of representation for the
prison population that could communicate directly with the Department
of Justice—the upper echelon of São Paulo’s prison administration.
The second case refers to the emergence of the group of prisoners who
called themselves the First Command of the Capital (Primeiro Comando
da Capital, or PCC), and which expanded during the 1990s and consol-
idated itself in São Paulo prisons during the 2000s. Unlike the Solidarity
Committees, the PCC explicitly defined itself as the “party of crime”
and promoted the struggle for prisoner rights based on a discourse of
confronting the State and within a symbolic logic that was pertinent to
the “world of crime.”
This text will begin with a brief review of some of the Social
Sciences literature, exploring the ways in which prisoners and prison
governance are organized, both in international and domestic contexts.
Then, we discuss the two political–institutional and prison governance
contexts that were established through the interaction between the prison
administration and the prison population in the two cases mentioned,
analyzing the performance of each of the prisoner groups claiming to
represent the prison population. We will then conclude the text with
some reflections on the different forms of prison governance present in
these two contexts.
In light of the cases we will analyze, it is possible to put forward
the hypothesis that obstructions to mechanisms of communication and
2 In Brazil, prison administration is the responsibility of the states. The state of São Paulo
has the largest prison population in the country, accounting for about one-third of Brazilian
prisoners.
representation of the prison population that were effectively “legit-

imized” by the authorities—an experiment that was tried during Brazil’s
transition to democracy in the 1980s—favored the subsequent forma-
tion of prison groups that imposed themselves in part through the use of
violence, in part through the use of the codes of the criminal world, and
in part through denunciations of the deficiencies in the prison system.
In this sense, it is essential that we understand the governance mech-
anisms established in São Paulo prisons starting in the mid-2000s,
based on the multiple elements present in the form of organization,
performance, and demands made by the PCC on behalf of the prison
population to the State, with the ambiguities and paradoxes that perma-
nently strain the fragile maintenance of prison order that has been built
and maintained since that time.
Thus, our analysis of the two experiences—the Solidarity Committee
and the PCC—seeks to contribute to reflections on prison governance,
insofar as these experiences represent two distinct processes in the emer-
gence of organized prisoner groups within the prison context. In the
first case we see a top-down organization, the result of political action
by government officials and administrators seeking to reform the prison
system by encouraging and supporting Solidarity Committees as a model
for managing daily life in prison. In the second case, the PCC arises
from a process that originates within the prison population, which goes
into revolt as a result of the violence perpetrated by the State itself and
due to the precarious conditions in prison and which organizes itself
into a group with rules and symbols of identification that allow them
to confront authorities at the same time that it seeks to strengthen its
power over other prisoners.
A second point is that these experiences of organizing groups of
prisoners led to two different forms of coexistence between guards
and prisoners in everyday life inside São Paulo prisons. The Solidarity
Committee was not only created, encouraged, and supported by author-
ities, but it was also supervised by these authorities, who monitored its
activities and channeled those demands that arose in day-to-day prison
life. This initiative was not exempted from conflicts arising between the
Committee (and its supporters among authorities) and prison guards,
who did not recognize the power that was being given to prisoners and
ignored their demands, especially those designed to restrain arbitrary

punishments and violence against prisoners carried out by the guards. In
the case of the PCC, its creation and subsequent confrontations with the
authorities is structured around practices and references coming from the
criminal world and is supported by the PCC’s capacity to exert influence
over the prison population. The authorities would come to see nego-
tiations with the PCC and accommodation of its power as inevitable
in order to maintain order in prisons, but these same authorities never
publicly acknowledge that these agreements were made.
Both of these experiences, but above all the emergence of the PCC
starting in the 1990s, suggests that these new forms of prison system
governance would be possible in a new punitive context that moved
from the scope of discipline to that of governmentality, as analyzed by
Michel Foucault (), with prison dispositive in different countries taking
on new characteristics not only due to the expansion of incarceration but
also due to the increasing complexity of its relationship to other social
phenomena.
The Problem of Prison Governance

in the International Literature
Studies on prison dynamics have almost always been associated with the
public debate on the role of the prison as a punitive institution, with
its accompanying crises and attempts at reform. Thus, internal instabili-
ties that shook North American prisons throughout the 1950s stimulated
several studies in the field of Social Sciences, seeking, above all, to under-
stand prisoners’ forms of organization, their relationship to custodians,
and their governance mechanisms (Berk, 1966; Goffman [1961] 1974;
Sykes, [1958]3 1974; Tittle, 1969). Authors such as Clarence Schrag
(1954) had already focused their reflections on the mechanisms for
creating leaders among the prison population that could allow prison
3 The date in brackets refers to the original publication date. This date is used in the first
reference, but in subsequent citations only the date of the publication used by the authors is
used.
administrators to exercise control over this process, encouraging certain

leaders to the detriment of others, or promoting the isolation of leaders
considered undesirable.
Of particular interest for the present reflection is the discussion on the
question of legitimacy within the scope of power relations within prison
environments. In that regard, impacted by the wave of riots in British
prisons, Richard J. Sparks and Anthony E. Bottoms (1995) argued for
the need to discuss the maintenance of order in these institutions using
the theory of legitimacy. For these authors, even if order in prisons
is maintained through a regime of force, it can be positively or nega-
tively affected depending on the way the rules are applied, the fairness of
these rules in terms of the subjects’ shared beliefs, and the humane and
dignified treatment of the prisoner. A legitimate prison regime requires
a dialogue in which the voice of the prisoners is heard and, furthermore,
it must be guided by standards that can be defended externally based on
political and moral arguments.
This issue gained political relevance, especially from the North Amer-
ican experience, with the incarceration of the black movement militants
in the course of the struggle for civil rights in the 1960s and 1970s
(Davis, 2003; Wacquant, 2001) and then under new impetus with the
so-called war on drugs, which led to the arrest of gang members who
acted on the streets in the drug trafficking retail market.
This presence of gangs would have important effects on prison gover-
nance and relations with the wider society. In general, this involved the
transference to within the prison space of groups that were originally
external to prisons and that were linked to large North American cities
and associated with specific territories, possessing their own insignia,
symbols, colors, and vocabularies that defined a specific identity, usually
associated to ethnic-racial elements (Jacobs, 1974, 1977).
Jacobs (1977) points out that although gangs have in fact contributed
to politicizing the discussion about problems in prisons, they were unable
to form a stable and univocal alliance with the racial political move-
ments that effectively led the fight for civil rights. In this sense, the
gangs produced a political discourse that was somewhat limited by
disputes related to the illegal markets they controlled inside and outside
of prisons, and by the violent conflicts they engaged in during disputes
and clashes with rival groups. In any case, Jacobs’s analysis demonstrates
the growing presence of gangs in daily prison life as an essential element
for new forms of relations between the prison population and the prison
administration—that is, of governance mechanisms whose transforma-
tions were captured in his analysis and which were characterized by the
prison administration’s fraying authority.
DiIulio (1990) addressed the problem of governance in prisons from
the perspective of institutional and formal management mechanisms. For
him, the manner in which the prison staff operates is fundamental to the
“quality” of life in these institutions. Prison is a formal government and
it is up to the State to train its managers to control the prison popu-
lation and, furthermore, compel them to control themselves (1990, 7).
The author criticizes the view that the prison is itself characterized by
a fragile balance always about to be broken—a conception encapsulated
by Sykes (1974) —since in this perspective there is no way to compare
and contrast different institutions.
Likewise, DiIulio rejects those conceptions that point to the need
to share control with prisoners, refuting the idea of “democratic”
prison management related to prisoners’ self-government. For him, these
conceptions do not find support in the concrete reality of the experiences
of governance in the prisons, which indicate an increase in violence and
disturbances in the same measure that the possibility of prison control
by the prisoners expands and management by the State is reduced.
Skarbek (2012, 2014, 2016) produced a theory of prison governance
by gangs that is very influential today. Based on a critical analysis of
two of the main theoretical approaches to prison order—the depriva-
tion theory and the importation theory—the author states that the basic
element in the emergence of prison gangs is that of depriving the prison
population of governance institutions—and, therefore, the demand for
protection and instances that produce order in prisons. At the same
time, Skarbek proposes that demands for protection, and therefore for
the provision of order and governance, emerges with the increase in
the prison population and the overcrowding of prison facilities resulting
from this increase. As is clear from the literature since the 1970s, prison
gangs emerge as crucial elements in discussions about the production of
order and the legal and extralegal mechanisms of prison governance.
In France, reflections on prison also accompanied the emergencies

and crises caused by prison dynamics themselves. The critical perspective
elaborated by Michel Foucault was formed, above all, out of the crisis of
legitimacy of prison institutions, starting in May 1968 and accompanied
by the subsequent hardening of the French government’s security policies
in the early 1970s, which led to the arrest of leftist militants and a wave
of riots that hit French establishments at the time.
Foucault is best known for his book Discipline and Punish (1987),
which analyzed the central role of prisons in the modern penal
system. The writing of this book, however, was partly the result of
Foucault’s participation in activist activities that gave rise to the Groupe
d’Information sur les Prisons (GIP), created in 1971 and which consti-
tuted itself as a new type of mobilization that sought to publicize the
state of French prisons, by gathering numerous testimonials and writ-
ings produced mainly by the prisoners themselves (cf. Alvarez, 2006;
Artières et al., 2003; Artières, 2004; Eribon, 1990). The creation of the
GIP led, at that time, to an intense public debate about the conditions
of silence that prisoners were subjected to and about the obstacles that
stood between prison, prisoners, and society, not only by denouncing the
sometimes inadequate conditions of incarceration but above all by giving
prisoners a voice, making visible their faces, and their existence behind
bars. Several other works have appeared in France since the early 1970s
that sought to produce more analytical studies of the prison system,
such as those by Philippe Combessie (2001), Gilles Chantraine (2006a),
Philippe Artières (2004), Antoinette Chauvenet et al. (1994), and Corine
Rostaing (1997).
Adopting the analytical contributions provided by Foucault,
Chantraine (2006b) notes that, in addition to the recent trend of
extremely rigid confinement adopted in many prisons, with severe limi-
tations on movement, activities, and contacts with the outside world,
new patterns of internal institutional organization arose, which the
author called a post-disciplinary or governmentalized prison. Looking
at a Canadian prison experiment, Chantraine shows that prisoners
were encouraged by the establishment’s administration to appoint
representatives and name leaders to negotiate with the State over pris-
oners’ demands by establishing a complex mechanism of privileges,
concessions, and restrictions. According to him, the collaboration of

prisoners was encouraged in the hope of instilling feelings of cooper-
ation, responsibility, and autonomy. However, the rights of prisoners
are subject to constant negotiation by the administration, conditioned
on the risks or disruptions caused by prisoners in their commitment
to autonomous management. Technicians and managers sought to
maintain internal order through participatory mechanisms that led
prisoners to self-government, thereby minimizing the use of coercive
mechanisms. According to Chantraine, however, the organization and
self-management of prisoners are always subordinate and are easily
deactivated when they threaten the maintenance of internal and external
order and security.
In short, the literature briefly commented above, points to new fields
of study that have opened up to examine social dynamics both inside the
prison and their effects on the wider and more complex society, high-
lighting the need for a public discussion about greater transparency in
punitive practices and legitimate channels of expression for the prison
population. In Brazil, sociological reflections also addressed these issues,
mirroring somewhat the international literature while at the same time
linking it to the specific social and political context created by the state
of Brazilian prisons.
Reflections on Prison Governance in Brazil

In Brazil, the Social Sciences literature on prisons was greatly influenced
by American studies, but it only really stood out on its own starting
in the late 1970s. Two pioneering works, one based on research in São
Paulo (Ramalho, 1979) and another in Rio de Janeiro (Coelho, 1987),
dealt with the governance of prisons and the dilemmas involved, since
it presupposed a division of power between prison administrators and
prisoners. In the case of Ramalho, he analyzed the norms, rules, and
dynamics established between prisoners (the proceder, or “procedure”)
and how these collectively established rules are relevant to an under-
standing of prison life. In Coelho’s work, the central anchoring point
of the analysis is the idea of the fragile balance of the prison institution
present in Sykes’s work (1974).
In this regard, Coelho discussed the contradictions inherent in the
prison institution with regard to its objectives—to rehabilitate and
punish—and to its functioning: the imposition of power and the need
for prisoners’ cooperation. He also emphasized the important role prison
leaders have in maintaining order at a time when prison gangs were
emerging within the prison population with the creation of the group
that later became known as Comando Vermelho (CV), as well as the
erosion of the prison administration’s power, which implied the need to
foster these leaders and negotiate with them.
One of the most significant contributions to the debate on the emer-
gence of organized criminal groups in Brazilian prisons was provided
by Antônio Luiz Paixão in the book Recuperar e Punir chapter Falanges
Vermelhas, Serpentes Negras and Prison Order (1987). Paixão’s main argu-
ment was that the criminal organizations formed by prisoners at that
time were not the result of lenient humanization policies in prisons,
as their opponents claimed, but rather to a dynamic that he called the
modernization of urban crime. Bank robberies and drug trafficking were
criminal modalities that required greater levels of organization and effi-
ciency for them to be successful. These “phalanges,” “commands,” and
“serpents,” according to him, were nothing more than “organizational
formats and demands that accompany the modernization of criminal
behavior in Brazilian metropolitan areas and that alter the structure of
prison populations” (Paixão, 1987, 77). These organizations ushered in
“a new model for negotiating order” in prisons that directly conflicted
with prevailing standards for managing the prison environment.
Following these reflections, carried out in the 1980s, the question of
the organization of prisoners was taken up in Brazil through the anal-
ysis of rebellions in prison facilities. The approach to rebellions was
generally associated with analyses of social and political contexts and/or
criminal policies that could have an influence (or not) on such events
(Góes, 2009; Adorno & Salla, n.d.). Salla (2006) grouped rebellions
into three periods, which in a way reflected different forms of prisoner
organization and activity: the first, prior to the early 1980s, was char-
acterized mainly by protests against precarious prison conditions; the
second period, which covers the 1980s, is characterized by rupture in the

prisons, linked to collusion, omission, or even incentives from political
and administrative sectors hostile to attempts to humanize the prisons,
especially during the Montoro administration in the state of São Paulo
(1983–1986); and finally, the third period, corresponding to the 1990s,
was marked by the activities of criminal groups that organized and took
charge during rebellions.
Since then, the field of prison studies in Brazil and (more specifically)
in São Paulo has been digging deeper into the phenomenon of prison
gangs, whose role in the dynamics of creating order in prisons—and
also outside them—has been widely discussed in terms of the processes
of their constitution, causes, and social, political, and economic effects
(Adorno & Salla, 2014; Biondi, 2010; Dias, 2013; Dias & Salla, 2013,
2017; Dias & Darke, 2015).
The discussion proposed here is also part of this debate, helping
construct the lines of historical and political continuities and disconti-
nuities in the emergence of gangs in the Brazilian prison system. In this
sense, it is based on the historical reexamination of the creation of Soli-
darity Committees in São Paulo’s prisons—an unprecedented political
experiment in terms of building legitimate representation for the prison
population—to then examine the factors that sought to delegitimize and
interrupt this experiment and, in the end, allowed the emergence of the
First Command of the Capital (PCC), whose claim to represent pris-
oners would be based on legitimation discourses situated in a logic that
was rather distinct from the one that sustained the Committees. In this
sense, considering the two forms of prisoner organization, it is clear that
the different logics of prison governance give rise to different ways of
building and maintaining prison order.
From Solidarity Committees to PCC: The

Construction of Prison Order at Two Points
in Time
In Brazil, the transition in the 1980s from an authoritarian regime to
democracy opened up a broad public debate about prisons and also
encouraged reflections from social scientists. In addition to issues related
to precarious prison conditions and the institutional violence rooted in
prisons, there was a wide-ranging debate about the ways in which pris-
oners are represented and their rights guaranteed, especially with the
signing of the Penal Execution Law (Law 7,210) in 1984. The push for
a “democratization” of prison spaces, which would motivate the proposal
of representation for the prisoners themselves to defend their rights, was
confronted by the authoritarian legacy4 still present in public security
institutions and the political resistance of broad sectors of society, as well
as the emergence of a more organized criminality.
In 1983, as soon as he took over the government of the state of São
Paulo, Governor Franco Montoro appointed José Carlos Dias as Secre-
tary of Justice, whose main task would be to implement a new policy
for the prison system. This became known as the Prison Humanization
Policy and tried to reverse the arbitrariness and violence practiced in
prisons, especially during the military regime. One of the most inter-
esting initiatives of this policy was the establishment in some prisons
of groups representing the prisoners, which became known as Solidarity
Committees.5
Immersed in the context of policies to extend democratic principles to
prison institutions, the Solidarity Committees provided direct channels
of communication between the prisoners and the Department of Justice
and judges (cf. Góes, 2009, 19). Through these committees, inmates
could pass along demands related to prison conditions and the guarantee
of prisoner rights.
4 This authoritarian legacy is due in large part to the military regime that ruled over Brazil
from 1964 to 1983.
5 The committees were very active at two prison facilities: Penitenciária do Estado and
Penitenciária de Araraquara.
The proposal of creating Solidarity Committees situated these groups

within the normative-legal struggle for rights. In this sense, this proposal
rejected both forms of representation where “representatives” were
appointed by the local administration as well as traditional forms of
cooperation between prison administrators and the “natural” leaders
of prisoners—derived solely from their ascendancy within the crim-
inal world. In contrast, the charter of the State Penitentiary Solidarity
Committee stipulated the direct elections of members by secret ballot,
guaranteeing the right to vote to the entire prison population, and barred
the election of prisoners who were accused of committing acts of violence
against their companions or against prison staff (cf. Góes, 2009, 23).
Significantly, the Solidarity Committees were the main target of
campaigns to oppose the policy of humanizing the prisons, which
began already in 1984. With the support of the vast majority of prison
staff, sectors of the judiciary, political parties (including sectors of the
governor’s own party), and part of the São Paulo press (cf. Góes,
2009, 23), the movement to oppose José Carlos Dias’s policies did not
take long to produce effects, especially on the initiative to form the
committees, delegitimizing them. The main attack against the commit-
tees arose from allegations that a group of murderous prisoners, called
the Serpentes Negras (“Black Serpents”), was seeking to dominate the
prison population through the Solidarity Committees.6
Although the existence of the Serpentes Negras has never been proven,
much less their impact on the committees, the accusations were enough
to undermine the first Brazilian experiment in providing a mechanism
of representation to prisoners, by delegitimizing their role as a conduit
for communication between the prison population and those responsible
for the management of prison policies (Higa, 2017). Paradoxically, the
central element in the discourse that sought to delegitimize the commit-
tees was precisely the argument that they were being criminalized, that
is, that they were controlled by criminal groups that sought to use this
participatory forum to plan and carry out illegal activities.
6 Regarding the accusations against Serpentes Negras and their role in destabilizing the
experiment of Solidarity Committees, see Higa (2017) and Higa and Alvarez (2019).
According to the analysis by Góes (2009), the ways in which dissat-

isfaction with the management of prison establishments was expressed
through the Solidarity Committees found some echoes in the new
human rights policies that had been orienting the Department of Justice.
In this sense, forms of negotiation and formal agreements between
prisoners and prison administration were prioritized, whereby violence,
which normally accompanied these demands, could be significantly
reduced. However, in the face of the blockade or, one could say, the
boycott of these new communications channels, the prisoners resumed
the traditional violent methods that mark rebellions and riots. Thus, the
absence of outlets capable of channeling the discontent of the prison
population presented a central element in prison disturbances, and riots
constitute its most expressive outcome.
The pressure of the judiciary on the executive power, with the investi-
gation of the Serpentes Negras (Higa and Alvarez, 2019), the opposition
presented by the guards, within the penitentiary system, to the move-
ment of democratization and participation of prisoners through the
Solidarity Committees, the political opposition in parliament and in the
political debate to the Prison Humanization Policy imposed the end of
the experience of this type of prison governance in 1984. Thus, the diffi-
culties in implementing the Prison Humanization Policy were already
evident during the Montoro administration. In the administrations that
succeeded him, there was a marked conservative turn in the manage-
ment of public security in São Paulo, with the reversal of practically all
efforts at opening up the prison system. In practical terms, this polit-
ical (re)orientation had disastrous effects, with an escalation of violence,
culminating in the Carandiru Massacre of 1992 (cf. Salla, 2006, 2007).
The year following the massacre saw the emergence of a group of pris-
oners called the First Command of the Capital (PCC), which still poses
one of the main challenges to public security in São Paulo. Created in
the Annex of the Casa de Custódia de Taubaté—a prison representing
what was most arbitrary in the São Paulo prison system—the PCC was
anchored in the discourse of unity among prisoners as a way of fighting
oppression perpetrated by the State. According to one of its founders:
We emerged inside the prison because, in all honesty, we didn’t expect the
PCC to grow like it did, because our struggle was internal. We wanted to
combat the injustices we suffered, because at the time, the injustice was
too great, and there was no point in complaining to the authorities, there
was no point in complaining to anyone.7
In addition to allegations of mistreatment, violence, and arbitrariness

of the State vis-à-vis the prison population serving as central elements
in shaping the PCC’s legitimizing discourse, we must mention the
absence of communication channels between prisoners and the author-
ities responsible for prison administration. We can see, therefore, that
it was in this vacuum caused by the absence of a representative body
of the prison population and the complete obstruction of communica-
tion channels between prisoners and prison administration that the PCC
found a space to establish itself and legitimize itself as an alternative to
this population isolation in the face of their demands and their struggle
for rights and recognition.
Regardless of the conditions that led to prisoners’ representation by
the PCC (and whether they indeed do represent them), the fact is that
the discourse of a fight against state oppression and to guarantee pris-
oner’s rights was appropriated with great success by this group, and it
constituted the group’s base of social and political support. With the
consolidation of its power over the prison population through a complex
process that involved violent disputes, agreements, and accommodations
(cf. Dias, 2013), the PCC became an important social and political force.
Organized around illegal activities and with strong support from the
bases on which its power rests, it presents itself as an actor with which
the State, willingly or not, has to deal with and whose claims must be
included (in a direct or indirect way) on the agendas and debates around
prison policies (Biondi, 2010; Dias & Salla, 2013, 2017; Alvarez, 2013).
In this sense, the PCC started to occupy social spaces where the
rules, values, resources, and objectives of public policies for the prison
7 José Márcio Felício dos Santos, in a statement to the Parliamentary Inquiry Commission to
investigate arms smuggling, on 5/17/2005, p. 56. Geleião, as he is known, was one of the
founders of the PCC, and was the group’s main leader until 2002, along with César Augusto
Roriz, known as Cesinha.
system are disputed, appropriated, or rejected (cf. Neves, 1993). The

PCC became a political actor that articulates forms of governance and
the construction of an order within prisons, centered on its increasing
capacity as an informal instance of regulation and conflict mediation
(Dias & Salla, 2017).
Since 2001, in response to the emergence of the PCC, the São Paulo
government has adopted formal and informal mechanisms to try to
deal with the group and reduce its capacity to influence the prison
population. At the formal level, the main measure was the Penitentiary
Administration Department’s creation of the Differentiated Disciplinary
Regime (RDD), through Resolution 26/01, which in 2003 was trans-
formed into a Federal Law (Law 10,792/03) and incorporated into the
Penal Execution Code.8 This is a much stricter disciplinary regime, with
just one hour of outdoor exercise, no conjugal visits, strict control over
communication with lawyers and visitors, solitary confinement without
access to television and radio, and restricted access to books, magazines,
and newspapers. Among the behaviors subject to RDD penalties is suspi-
cion of participation in a “criminal organization.” The maximum time
one can spend in RDD is 360 (although the sanction can be reapplied in
case of new serious violations, up to a limit of one-sixth of the sentence).9
At the informal level, the penitentiary administration has seem-
ingly attempted to provoke the fragmentation of the PCC’s power by
promoting the creation of other prison groups that could constitute
themselves as rivals. These groups, together with the PCC, were protago-
nists in a series of extremely violent clashes inside the prisons. However,
they were practically decimated, and at the end of this period the PCC
established its hegemonic position (Dias, 2013; Dias & Salla, 2013; Dias
& Darke, 2015).
Another strategy that sought to deal with the PCC was repression
by elite groups of the military police, through arbitrary actions such as
wiretaps, torture, kidnappings, and the recruitment and infiltration of
8For a discussion about the impact of RDD on prison dynamics, see Dias (2009).
9In terms of measures to deal with the PCC, in addition to creating these punishments in the
penal system, we highlight the moves by the State Prosecutor’s Office and the Civil Police to
dismantle call centers and block hundreds of checking accounts that were used by the gang to
move money.
prisoners and police in criminal activities linked to the PCC (cf. Jozino,
2005, pp. 156–157).
In the 1980s, the government’s strategies toward the Solidarity
Commission had been to strengthen it as an instance of representa-
tion for the prison population. The Sao Paulo Department of Justice,
at the time, sought to transform the Solidarity Committees into legit-
imate interlocutors for the conduct of internal prison affairs. To this
end, it tried to make its operations as transparent as possible, even
providing regulations that stipulated the conditions for the participation
of prisoners, while seeking to avoid claims that the committees served
purposes other than to represent prisoners and collaborate with prison
management.
The mechanism for building a formal and legal governance structure
involving the prison administration and the prison population through
the Solidarity Committees, however, was subjected to several boycotts by
segments within the administration itself, the judiciary system, and the
press, culminating, as has already been discussed, in the early exhaustion
of a management model in prisons that seemed promising—by linking
the representation of prisoners with the formal and legal recognition by
prison administrators (Alvarez, 2013).
In its place, there was the emergence of a group of prisoners who
imposed themselves as representatives of the prison population based on
their own terms and on their own way of building legitimacy, which
involved a narrative of opposition to and confrontation with the State
and the affirmation of values proper to the “world of crime,” at the same
time that it buttressed itself on denunciations that their rights were being
violated in order to strengthen its position (Dias & Salla, 2017).
In this sense, the governance of São Paulo prisons and the forms of
legitimacy that sustained them underwent a massive displacement, repo-
sitioning the role of state agents and groups that claimed to represent
prisoners in terms of disputes and confrontations that are contiguous to
the relations of informal and unspecified negotiations. Thus, the discus-
sion of the legitimacy of order-building in prisons was reconfigured.
Legitimacy and Recognition: Of Whom,

for Whom, and by Whom?
Prisons are pertinent spaces for discussing the legitimacy of forms of
power in a twofold sense. First, by being part of the punitive apparatus
created by modern society and serving as the locus for the application
of custodial sentences, they express a punitive culture, a set percep-
tions, feelings, and values that translate into one of the ways that society
responds to crime and punishes criminals (Garland, 1990).
Long-lasting historical processes that influence those perceptions are
associated with the construction of authoritarian or democratic regimes,
more hierarchical or more egalitarian societies, and more formal or more
substantial experiences of citizenship. In any case, in this regard the
discussion about the legitimacy of punishments and the prison itself is
situated a little differently in regard to the direct contact the incarcerated
population has with their custodians.
In this broader sense, the Brazilian social and political experience
allows us to observe some obstacles to the functioning of Brazilian
democracy, to the extent that broad layers of Brazilian society do
not recognize the legitimacy of legal punishments—and therefore of
prison—when they tolerate the arbitrary and illegal use of violence by
the police, the systematic use of torture and ill-treatment of detainees, the
extermination of individuals considered to be criminals, and the refusal
to recognize the rights of prisoners. These attitudes directly interfere in
the social arrangements structured in prison environments, sometimes
making the attempt to build a legitimate legal order unfeasible by not
recognizing the rights of prisoners or by allowing laws to be misapplied
in regard to the people being punished.
Second, it is interesting to analyze the legitimacy of prisons on a more
limited level, since they constitute, even in democratic societies, auto-
cratic spaces that impose themselves on confined subjects (Sparks, 1994,
15). This dimension configures a complex construction of power rela-
tions, submission, and obedience involving custodians and prisoners in
order to build and maintain a prison order that provides relative stability
and predictability—that is, through governance mechanisms (Castro &
Silva, 2008).
The issue of the legitimacy of prisons has been discussed in the inter-
national literature (Sparks, 1994; Sparks & Bottoms, 1995; Tyler, 2010;
Carrabine, 2005; Liebling, 2013; Brunton-Smith & McCarthy, 2016)
mainly through this dimension, in which the construction of the internal
order comprises laws and formal rules, their form of application by
custodians, and the fair treatment of prisoners.
The rupture of internal order, riots, and rebellions have been consid-
ered indicators of a lack of legitimacy in the power relations between the
enforcers of laws and rules and the prisoners who should be submitted
to them (Sykes, 1974). Also on this plane, as we have shown earlier, the
Brazilian experience can contribute to a critical reflection on legitimacy
and on building order in prisons and the ways in which ruptures are
made explicit.
Although this failed experiment of sharing management with prisoners
(the Solidarity Committees) in legal and formal terms may have equiv-
alents in other social and political contexts, its developments have led
to important transformations in the development of incarceration in the
country, given the size and the centrality of the São Paulo’s prison system
for Brazil as a whole. One of them was the decisive public support for
the reproduction of prison conditions that violated the rights of pris-
oners, and therefore in the construction of a fragile internal prison order
that created space for groups of prisoners to form or be fortified inside
the prisons, forge forms of identity, and make claims to represent the
prison mass (Alvarez, 2013). More than being just a gang—as occurs
in North American prisons—the recent Brazilian experience with such
groups saw them establish a regulation of social relations between pris-
oners that affected authorities’ ability to enforce the formal laws and rules
at their disposal, a regulation that expanded even beyond the peniten-
tiary walls (Godoi, 2017). In addition, although they may use coercion,
threats, and physical force, these groups claim and, in a way, seem to have
succeeded in creating a basis for the justification of their acts, emerging
as an effective instance of control and regulation of prison dynamics.
Both in relation to the first aspect and in relation to the second, the
Brazilian experience suggests some problematizations regarding the ques-
tion of the legitimacy of order in prisons and some new challenges for
current interpretations.
Paradoxically, the accelerating growth of the incarcerated population

in Brazil occurs during the country’s re-democratization process since the
mid-1980s, on the heels of twenty years of military rule (1964–1984).
There has been a marked increase in the incarcerated population over
the past 30 years. In 1988, when Brazil’s new constitution was promul-
gated, the country had 88,041 prisoners (Salla, 2003); in June 2017,
Brazil had a total of 726,354 people deprived of their liberty, of which
226,464 were imprisoned in São Paulo (INFOPEN, 2019). In the same
period, the number of prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants jumped from
65.2 (Salla, 2003) to 349.78, reaching a rate of 507.88 if we consider
just the state of São Paulo (INFOPEN, 2019). During these decades, the
gradual restoration of democratic institutions—promoting free elections,
the functioning of political parties, the participation of social move-
ments, freedom of the press, economic freedoms, etc. —does not seem
to have produced the same effects in the institutions dedicated to the
control of crime (police, prisons, and courts).
In addition to the direct impact on prison environments and their
population, large-scale incarceration leads to other issues. One of them
is related to the possibility of legitimizing prisons as a legal puni-
tive resource in contemporary societies (Sparks, 1994, 1995). For Tyler
(2010), the indiscriminate use of prisons to punish an ever-increasing
set of behaviors, promoting mass incarceration, tends to delegitimize the
prison.
Another aspect is related to the effects that mass incarceration has
had on countries like Brazil, by degrading the living conditions in
prisons, increasing tensions, rebellions, and deaths; providing the condi-
tions for the formation of organized groups, which start to exert strong
control over the prison population and over prison life; and, furthermore,
the social consequences and impact on the subjective plane regarding
prisoners and their families, and even on society as a whole.
In line with the tremendous increase in the prison population, there
is an intensification of violations of the rights of prisoners as a result
of overcrowding and the material precariousness of prisons. At the same
time, the increase in the size of the prison population was not accom-
panied by a concomitant and proportional growth in the institutional
infrastructure, especially in terms of the prison staff. In this sense, what
we see is a huge gap in the capacity of state actors to govern prisons,

a chasm that widens as the prison population expands (Dias & Brito,
2017).
Darke (2013) approached the problem of order in prison through field
research carried out at several Brazilian prisons and observed that the
structural precariousness of prisons, with a small prison staff, produces
a context in which prison routines rely heavily on the participation of
prisoners themselves to carry out a series of activities. At the same time,
prisoners’ interest in collaboration is strongly linked to the possibility
of circulating within the prison establishment and the reduced use of
punitive procedures such as solitary confinement. In other words, pris-
oner participation in the management of prison life is strongly associated
with the situation of material deprivation in Brazilian prisons and is
effectuated as a result of mutual interest—of the guards and prisoners—
in establishing arrangements that produce more accommodation than
conflicts.
In this way, at the same time that there is an increase in the prison
population, we can also note a change in the capacity to establish mech-
anisms to govern and regulate social relations in prison, shifting from
the guards to the prisoners. As we have seen, in the 1980s there was
an attempt to create formal and legal procedures (recognized by state
authorities) to carry out the shared governance of prisons, including both
the prison administration and groups of prisoners, where the recogni-
tion of the prison population’s representatives followed certain rules and
regulations established by the prison administration itself. This was a
brief experiment, soon made impossible by sectors within the State itself,
including the prison administration. Subsequently, groups of prisoners
such as the PCC emerged who claimed to represent the prison popula-
tion by also presenting themselves as the Party of Crime, by establishing
new parameters in the governance relations within prisons.
We are dealing with two forms of governance where the sharing of
power, management, and the establishment of order in prisons by prison
administrators and the prison population itself is based on distinct rela-
tionships between these actors and in the way they agree upon forms of
governance. In this sense, discourses around the legitimation and justi-
fication of prisoners’ representation in the context of these two forms
of governance are organized around different narratives: in the first case,

a narrative of demand for rights, based on the legal order itself; in the
second case, a narrative that denounces the oppression and ill-treatment
present in the prison environment, in opposition to a State that repre-
sents an enemy that can be fought against by joining the so-called Party
of Crime, as the PCC is sometimes referred to.
In the first case, there is a commitment to collective action in the
struggle for human rights and the enforcement of laws, taking place
within the framework of the democratic rule of law and of the acceptable
and legitimate practices in this context. In the second case, there is also
an emphasis on collective action, but outside of the normative and legal
context of citizens demanding the recognition of their rights, supported
instead by a rhetoric of “war” against the State, based on the expansion
of illegal activities and, therefore, of engaging in criminal activity as a
way to fight oppression.
Therefore, there are two forms of governance that emerge from this
historical experience, characterized by distinct relationships between the
actors involved: political groups, the prison population, and prison
administrators. In the model of governance proposed by the Solidarity
Committees, due to its formal character and the State’s recognition
of prisoners as legitimate interlocutors, they sought to guarantee the
opening and maintenance of communication and dialogue in the search
for solutions to institutional problems. In the form of governance arising
from the actions of the PCC, that is, governance by the so-called Party
of Crime, the field of dialogue with authorities is barred, due to the
assumptions inherent to the narrative that places the PCC and the State
in opposing camps.
Paradoxically, as we have seen, it was precisely this second model of
governance that consolidated itself. Despite the rhetoric of confronta-
tion and war, it is this arrangement that has permitted the São Paulo
prison system to have a relatively stable semblance of order during the
past 20 years, significantly reducing rebellions and riots, even amid a
scenario of worsening prison conditions as a result of the continued prac-
tice of mass incarceration. In this way, the PCC has consolidated itself
as an essential player in understanding the local forms of governance of
prisons. Mass incarceration, the new forms of governance in prisons, and
the strengthening of the PCC are inextricably linked in the São Paulo
prison system.
However, the State continues to be formally responsible for the
custody of prisoners and for the administration of prisons, and it is neces-
sary that we understand the complex governance that is established under
these terms. The construction of order in prisons through the work of
the PCC—and of other gangs, in other Brazilian states—is constituted
through a mechanism for sharing management spaces (Dias & Brito,
2017), where the government “outsources” to the gangs the responsi-
bility over internal spaces—cells, cellblocks, and yards—while retaining
control over the intermediate spaces and the surrounding establish-
ments—administrative areas, prison walls, access gates, etc. This estab-
lished order is maintained through a precarious balance and is sustained
through agreements and accommodations involving the various state and
non-state actors, almost always informal and obscure, and oftentimes
illegal. In this model of prison governance, prison order is guaranteed
even in a scenario of oppression and constant violations of prisoners’
rights, at the same time that the PCC is strengthened and consolidated
in the prison space as a locus par excellence for its self-reproduction and,
therefore, the self-reproduction of the governance model that engenders
in the relationship it establishes with the State.
Final Considerations
The difficulty for the prison population to establish itself as a legiti-
mate interlocutor in the sphere of punishment was evidenced by the
frustration of the experiment—unprecedented in Brazil—of Solidarity
Committees, conceived of as a channel for prisoners to defend their
rights and interests in disputes over prison policies. This text presented
the hypothesis that blocking this attempt to democratize prisons led to
the repression of legitimate demands that were not able to be legalized,
legitimized, or institutionalized before society as a whole.
These same demands, however, were later appropriated by the PCC
and formed the basis of ideological support that allowed the group to
constitute itself as an (alleged) representative of the prison population,
which is how it presents itself today. A representative body that was a

byproduct of prison policies and, at the same time, an extremely rele-
vant political actor—although not explicitly so—in the deliberations
and decisions around São Paulo’s prison system during the past three
decades. In other words, the historical trajectory presented here portrays
a phenomenon where prison groups ended up manifesting those very
complaints that were used as slogans to end an experiment of formal
and legitimate representation (the Solidarity Committees). Prison gangs
have become a paradigm for building prison order and governance
mechanisms in prisons.
In recent years, an expressive number of studies have been produced
with an emphasis on the activities of the PCC and its developments
outside of the prisons (cf. Adorno & Dias, 2019; Dias, 2013; Godói,
2017; Teixeira, 2009). However, we see that there is still something
missing in reflections on the effects and meanings and the role of the
gangs’ performance as representatives of the prison population and, as
such, in its specific forms of governance.
The social, political, and institutional transformations that shaped
new forms of building prison order and new frameworks for the rela-
tionships between prisoners and administrators can help deepen our
understanding of the governance of prison institutions that took place
in Brazil, including the significant differences that exist among different
Brazilian states—which present different scenarios in terms of the degree
of fragmentation of prison groups (which prevails in many states in the
Northeast, South, and North regions of the country) or monopolization
of power (as is the case in the state of São Paulo). This variable of “frag-
mentation” or “monopoly,” for example, seems to be a promising way to
understand the dimensions of informal governance mechanisms and the
more or less violent, conflicting, and stable forms they take (Butler et al.,
2018).
The accusations that the Solidarity Committees were dominated by
the Serpentes Negras criminal group turned out to be a self-fulfilling
prophecy thanks to the emergence and consolidation of the PCC, which
profoundly reconfigured the power relations in the São Paulo prison
system—and, later, in Brazil as well (Dias & Manso, 2017)—through
a form of prison governance that lacks any trace of the legitimacy and
formal recognition that Brazil at one point in time attempted to build.
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Tales from La Catedral: The Narco
and the Reconfiguration of Prison Social
Order in Colombia
Libardo Ariza and Manuel Iturralde
At my father’s insistence, my mother agreed to finish the new cell. You

first entered into a living room with an Italian wicker sofa and a matching
pair of comfortable armchairs. Then came a dining room fit for six people
and a full kitchen with a stove and refrigerator. There was also a wooden
counter, where my father said a little yellow bird came every day to be
fed. (Escobar, 2016, 221)
L. Ariza (B) · M. Iturralde

University of Los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia
e-mail: lj.ariza20@uniandes.edu.co
M. Iturralde
e-mail: miturral@uniandes.edu.co

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98602-5_3
64 L. Ariza and M. Iturralde
Latin American Prisons, the War on Drugs

and the Emergence of the Narco
Most of the literature that discusses the topic of drug trafficking and
prisons in Latin America has focused on the impact of the war on
drugs on the significant increase of the prison population across the
region, particularly since the 1990s (Bergman, 2018; Darke & Garces,
2017; Iturralde, 2019; Macaulay, 2019, 2017; Madrazo Lajous & Pérez
Correa, 2019; PNUD, 2013; WOLA, 2010). Incarceration rates in Latin
America doubled (107%) during the last two decades. In 2015, the
average incarceration rate for Latin American countries was 237 inmates
per 100,000 inhabitants, while at the beginning of the 1990s it was 126
per 100,000 inhabitants (Iturralde, 2019, 478).
What Pfaff calls the standard theory of mass imprisonment (2017), that
is, the assertion that the war on drugs is a key factor in explaining
mass imprisonment in the United States, has been regarded by the liter-
ature on the subject as one of the key aspects to explain the punitive
turn in Latin America and the impressive increase of imprisonment rates
across the region since the 1990s. The war on drugs, sponsored by the
United States, has pushed for legal and institutional reforms aimed at
hardening the criminal justice system to defeat the Narco, regarded as a
dangerous and brutal enemy that must be incapacitated. The enhance-
ment of the criminal justice system to fight drug cartels has resulted in
longer prison sentences for drug-related offences as well as the restriction
of the rights of the accused (for instance, through mandatory pretrial
detention and exclusion of early release mechanisms). Also, the war on
drugs has prompted the transfer, and adaptation, of US institutions,
methods and ideas to Latin American crime control fields. Examples
of this are the implementation of the accusatory model in many Latin
American criminal jurisdictions and the building of US-style supermax
Tales from La Catedral: The Narco and the Reconfiguration … 65
prisons to isolate the most dangerous criminals, among them the Narcos 1
(de Dardel & Söderström, 2018; Iturralde, 2019).
Many of the studies on drug trafficking and prisons in Latin America
have focused on quantitative data to measure the impact of anti-drugs
policies on incarceration and overcrowding rates, and have denounced
the sharp decline of prison conditions, which constitute a massive and
systematic violation of the human rights of prisoners (PNUD, 2013;
WOLA, 2010). But more recently, anthropological, sociological and
socio-legal studies on Latin American prisons have opened a promising
line of research, which focuses on the effect of the punitive turn and
the war on drugs on social order and governance in prisons.2 This line
of inquiry is based mainly on qualitative studies (based, for instance,
on ethnographies, fieldwork observations and interviews) that assess the
configuration and transformation of prisons’ markets, social order and
power relations.
Most of these studies acknowledge the considerable impact that the
war on drugs has had on this social order and these power relations. The
impressive increase of incarceration rates of people accused or sentenced
for drug-related offences has had several effects in Latin American
prisons: overcrowding and deterioration of, already poor, living condi-
tions and provision of goods and services; the rising numbers of detained
young urban males, many of them with links to drug gangs and different
forms of organized crime; the loss of State control and legitimacy, over
prisons’ internal order and legal and illegal markets (Ariza & Iturralde,
2020; Darke & Garces, 2017; Gundur, 2020; Macaulay, 2019, 2017,
2013; Peirce & Fondevila, 2020).
1 As we will discuss, the Narco represents the archetypical figure of the Latin American drug
baron (particularly from Colombia and Mexico), who is portrayed by popular culture as a
powerful and ruthless leader, a self-made man, full of masculine attributes and who answers
to no one. Not even the State rules apply to him. In this way, a complete mythology and
aesthetic (known as Narco aesthetics) is built around the Narco, who is celebrated in songs,
movies, paintings, t-shirts and all kind of merchandise. Colombia’s Pablo Escobar, and Mexico’s
Joaquín el Chapo Guzmán are the best representatives of the Narco; several books, movies and
TV series have been made about them, reaching a worldwide audience. The popular Netflix
series that, in different seasons, tells the story of Escobar and the Medellín cartel, the Cali
cartel, and of el Chapo Guzmán and the Mexican cartels, is called, unsurprisingly, Narcos.
2 See, for instance, the thematic issues on Latin American prisons in Service Journal (2017),
229 and International Criminal Justice Review (2020), 30(1).
The organized groups of prisoners that, through violent and non-

violent means, impose, to different degrees, order and provide legal and
illegal goods and services, are also linked to criminal organizations and
gangs outside the prison, and may even control illegal markets in the
free world. This is the case of street gangs such as the Mara Salvatrucha
(MS13) and Barrio 18 in El Salvador and Honduras, and of prison
gangs, like the Primeiro Comando do Capital (PCC), Comando Vermelho
and Terceiro Comando in Brazil (Biondi, 2017; Carter, 2014; Dias &
Darke, 2016; Dias & Salla, 2013, 2017; Lessing, 2017; Lessing & Willis,
2019; Macaulay, 2017).
Organized groups of prisoners have taken over many of the functions
that should be performed by the State and that are key to guaranteeing
their government and daily operations, in many instances cooperating
with State officials, especially with guards. In other instances, even if
there is no open cooperation between authorities (especially at a manage-
rial level) and inmates, the authorities tolerate prisoners’ organization and
activities (both legal and illegal) and limit their functions to secure the
prison perimeter and to avoid, when possible, outbursts of violence.
Inmates’ self-government has proved to achieve stability, and thus to
decrease violence and protests in Latin American prisons. But this is a
fragile and tense order which may be broken by prisoner groups’ struggles
to control markets, exact taxes on other prisoners and exercise control
within prison pavilions. Violence, which is high and common in Latin
American prisons (Ariza & Tamayo, 2020), may also break out to oppose
the attempts of State officials to interfere with the prison social order
through repressive measures, like seizure of illegal goods and disciplinary
actions against gangs and their leaders. As noted by Weegels (2020),
studying the Nicaraguan case, riots in Latin American prisons are not
as common as they could be, considering the appalling conditions of
prisons and weak State presence. Violence is strategically used by orga-
nized prisoners as a tool of political negotiation and pressure to protect
their rights and interests against what they perceive as worsening condi-
tions and abuses from State officials, who may also exert extreme violence
against inmates (Ariza & Tamayo, 2020).
Despite the relevance of the above-mentioned approaches for under-
standing the intense transformation of Latin American prisons during
the last decades, under the spell of the war on drugs, little has been
said of the instrumental and symbolic role of the Narco in the social
order of Latin American prisons, as the archetypical figure that embodies
the immense power of drug barons and the cartels they lead. As will
be discussed in the following pages through the case study of Pablo
Escobar (maybe the most famous, and most violent, drug baron of all
times3 ) and La Catedral (the prison where he was held for a brief period),
in many instances, the Narco plays similar roles to those performed
by prison groups and gangs in terms of social order in prisons, also
replacing the State in their government and in the provision of goods
and services. Nevertheless, due to his immense power and number of
resources, the Narco takes some of the features of Latin American prisons
and social order, as well as the latter’s relationship to State authority to
a different level. The Narco has also fostered new dynamics, which have
reconfigured prisons’ spaces, markets, social order and power relations.
In this chapter, we seek to present an interpretation of the transfor-
mation of Latin American—and particularly Colombian—prison spaces
and social order during the last decades (under the influence of the
war on drugs, the punitive turn, and the massive expansion of the
prison system) based on the description of what may be regarded as
the symbolic, foundational episode of a new prison era: the construc-
tion of La Catedral Prison in Envigado (close to Medellín) to hold
Pablo Escobar, the leader of the Medellín drug cartel, behind bars.
Pablo Escobar was imprisoned in La Catedral for 396 days (from June
20, 1991, to July 21, 1992). If the Central Panopticon’s opening in
Bogotá at the end of the nineteenth century (where Colombia’s National
Museum operates today), marked the historical attempt to transplant
penitentiarism into the local context as a symbol of modernization and
formation of the nation state (Salvatore & Aguirre, 1996), the opening
of La Catedral , almost a century later, marks the emergence of a peculiar
prison culture characteristic of the Narco era.
As any other symbol, La Catedral , surrounded by mythology, with all
its excesses, represents and transmits meanings, making sense of everyday
3 As is written on the cover of journalist Mark Bowden’s bestseller, Killing Pablo: “The hunt
for the richest, most powerful criminal in history.”
life experiences. Under the power of the Narco of Narcos, La Catedral

expressively shows that the modern project that considered prison a tech-
nology for disciplining and controlling the body and soul of criminals
has found no ground in Latin America. Thus, despite its short duration,
the symbolic and material effect of La Catedral expresses the structural
features of the historical formation of the prison under the Narco era and
helps to better understand the local prison experience.
To describe the 396 days of Pablo Escobar’s imprisonment and their
resonance in the local prison world, we will focus on the testimonies of
some of the subjects who witnessed those events, as well as on chron-
icles and journalistic investigations. We will sketch the flow of public
discourse on La Catedral , and the ways in which it reshapes the local
prison experience and imagination.
In order to develop our argument, in the next sections we will discuss:
(1) In which ways the Narco has reconfigured the space, dynamics
and social relations of Latin American—and especially Colombian—
prisons, and how these differ from other forms of social order and
power relations, like those imposed by prison gangs in countries like
Brazil, El Salvador and Honduras. (2) The case study of La Catedral , the
prison where Pablo Escobar was held for 396 days and which symbol-
izes the emergence of a renewed ethos of Narco-led prison dynamics in
Colombia. In sync with current times, under the ethics and aesthetics
of the Narco, a political economy has developed in Colombian prisons,
whereby a fragmented, delegitimized State rolls back most of its key
functions (i.e., the provision of security and welfare to its citizens),
leaving them to the brutal competition of unregulated markets and
power relations. Like different public spheres of contemporary societies,
Colombian and Latin American prisons have also been privatized. (3)
How La Catedral reflects and enhances two traits of Colombian and
Latin American prisons, porosity and hybridity, which also reveals that
they are substantially different—rather than a defective copy—of the
modern prison project born in Europe and the United States. (4) The
material and symbolic effects of La Catedral in the Colombian prison
system, whose hybridity and porosity has increased, as market forces and
privileged groups outside prisons have taken control of them, while the
State retreats.
The Narco and the Reconfiguration of Social

Order in Colombian Prisons
The prototypical figure of the Narco (embodied in characters like Pablo
Escobar in Colombia and “el Chapo” Guzmán in Mexico) differs from
that of prison groups or gangs in the Narco’s extremely personalized and
uncontested power: he answers to no one and discusses his decisions
with no one. Of course, prison groups and gangs have their charismatic
leaders, but, as the literature on the subject has shown, most of these
groups were created or strengthened their power within prisons through
a collaborative effort, key to maintaining order by consensus—even if, in
many instances, this is supported by the real threat of violence.
The Narco brings with him a significant amount of economic,
symbolic and social capital, which gives him an important advantage
when it comes to taking control of the prison. He does this by means of
the respect and fear he produces among inmates, or through his actual
capacity to deploy extreme forms of violence to exert control. The Narco
represents a particular form of the exercise of power and establishment of
a special kind of social order within prisons. This reveals, in an extreme
fashion, many of the features of social order in Latin American prisons
and the role that the State plays there, affecting its legitimacy. It also
reveals the ethos of Latin American prisons and the practices that reveal
and reinforce it (Macaulay, 2019, 281).
In this sense, Latin American prisons are not a defective copy of the
modern, rehabilitative and disciplinary ideal originating in Europe and
the United States. As Darke and Garces (2017, 3) remark, the region’s
prison systems have focused on managing “offending bodies,” socially
regarded as threatening, rather than on correcting them. The ethos
of incapacitation has been a long-standing feature of Latin American
prisons. But incapacitation takes different forms; the Narco prisoners are
a good example of a common way of incapacitating those regarded as
criminal in Latin America.
Depending on their resources, networks and contacts, prisoners have
very different experiences of incapacitation, though they also share
common features. Since the prison system does not have the capacity
to fully provide goods and services to inmates, as well as guaranteeing
their welfare and rehabilitation, inmates must, to a great extent, fend for
themselves. Those who have resources may secure access to the goods
and services they require and can even control the markets to provide
those things to other prisoners. This is a great source of economic income
and power. Those who do not have the resources to acquire basic goods
and services, make themselves useful by joining gangs and groups, or
performing tasks for them. Thus, a form of cooperative and hierarchical
organization between inmates is likely to develop in these circumstances,
as illustrated by the cases of Brazil, Honduras and El Salvador. A key
part of holding onto power is to monopolize force; therefore, even if
these groups apply rules that are, to a great extent, cooperative, violence
is always at hand to enforce those rules if needed.
On the other hand, the Narco imposes order unilaterally, and the
threat of violence is a main component of his control techniques. The
power of the Narco (based on his immense economic resources, the
armed organization he commands, and the contacts he has) is not only
material but also symbolic. It transmits important cultural and political
meanings and transforms the space where it is exercised. The Narco has
the will and power to reconfigure the carceral space where he is forced
to live, providing it with a particular symbolic meaning. Prison becomes
his territory, his domain: he is sovereign there and he wants everyone to
know it, inmates and State authorities alike.
Thus, the Narco displays his power in very expressive and symbolic
ways. He transforms the prison, his prison, in different ways. First,
he adapts its architecture and security to his needs. Then, he imposes
his style, through all kinds of privileges and excessive luxuries; finally,
he transforms its dynamics by imposing his power and controlling
the provision of certain goods and services. He might have been put
in prison by the State, but the Narco’s business and his power will
continue from prison, his new territory, his new kingdom. And he has
everything to show for it, both to other prisoners and to the State
and society. In this way, the Narco aesthetics, characterized by their
expressiveness and excess (regarded as kitsch, bad taste and vulgar by a
bourgeois aesthetic sense), colonize and transform the carceral space, also
building up the mythology surrounding the kingpin and the Narco-world
(Larrosa-Fuentes, 2020, 3).
The Narco shapes and rebuilds the prison and by unfolding his
immense power, he copes with imprisonment through its material and
symbolic reconfiguration. In his war against the State, the arrested Narco
is momentarily defeated but strikes back by conquering the prison field.
Pablo Escobar and La Catedral are a case in point.
Tales from La Catedral
There aren’t any visiting hours there, darling. Your father has it all set
up,” she explained. “They bring us up there in a truck, and we can stay
as long as we want. It’s just like a farm. (Escobar, 2016, 212)
They listened to music while the kids watched some of the inmates
releasing colored balloons made of paper that disappeared into the night’s
darkness. And they ate stuffed turkey, caviar, salmon, smoked trout and
Russian salad.4 (Salazar, 2001, 293)
In the chapter “Stories from La Catedral ,” from the book Pablo Escobar,
My Father, Juan Pablo Escobar, son of the drug lord, describes in detail
his experience during the days that the kingpin was held in La Catedral .
He recalls that he was with his family and a group of Escobar lieutenants
in New York, where he got his father the “twenty-five or thirty warm
coats” (2016, 209) he needed to stand the cold of La Catedral . He had
already bought two hundred-meter-range microphones, a dozen pens
with built-in microphones and a briefcase with a 1,500-m-range audio
receiver, among other security and surveillance equipment that his father
wanted to have in La Catedral . His son also got Escobar “the famous
black, Russian-style fur hat that later appeared in a photo of my father
inside the prison” (Escobar, 2016, 211) and that would become an iconic
image of the “King of cocaine” behind bars.5
4 Our translation of the original.

5 As with all myths, there are several versions of the same events. According to a journalistic
account, the famous Russian hat was a gift from Escobar’s mother, who bought it on a visit
to Moscow. Following this version, Escobar wanted to make this hat a symbol of his identity,
like Che Guevara’s beret (Salazar, 2001, 292–293).
One of the Escobar’s henchmen took the suitcases from New York
to the top of the ridge known as La Catedral , in the outskirts of Envi-
gado, from which Escobar’s prison took its name.6 Though Escobar’s
story is surrounded by rumors and myths, a wide version, shared by
many journalists, is that the prison’s grounds were Escobar’s property. He
specifically chose that place for its strategic location—inaccessible, with
a broad view over Medellín, and frequently surrounded by fog (Salazar,
2001, 280). It was also located in Envigado, the area where Escobar was
born, lived and made his fortunes. He chose La Catedral as his place
of imprisonment and his new fortress, from where he would run his
business and defend himself and his closest allies.7
Escobar chose his new residence after he decided to surrender to the
Colombian government. More than a surrender, it was an agreement.
After a long and bloody confrontation with the Colombian State, the
war was taking its toll on Escobar’s finances and organization; many of
his men were killed by State forces and his enemies of the Cali Cartel, or
they were imprisoned; the US government was pressuring its Colom-
bian counterpart to capture and extradite Escobar to American soil.
Escobar needed a respite to rebuild his organization, improve his finances
and avoid extradition. Confronting two enemies at the same time was
counterproductive, so Escobar decided to reach an agreement with the
Colombian government and to continue his war with the Cali cartel.
Nonetheless, Escobar had two main conditions: a legal guarantee of
not being extradited and a prison of his choice. He got both. The prison
was La Catedral and the legal guarantee of extradition was nothing less
than a constitutional ban on the extradition of Colombians. By the time
Escobar was negotiating his surrender with the Colombian government,
the National Constituent Assembly was adding the finishing touches to
a new Constitution that would replace the 1886 Constitution. In the
final days of deliberation, the majority of the Assembly members voted
in favor of the ban. It was only then that Escobar gave himself up.
6 The press and popular culture, half-jokingly, would soon give the name of the prison a
different meaning, comparing it to an actual cathedral, for its richness and splendor.
7 Escobar feared two things: that the Colombian government, breaking the agreement it made
with Escobar so he would surrender, would take him from La Catedral to extradite him to the
United States. But his greatest fear was an attack from his deadly rival, the Cali cartel.
Widespread rumors said that Escobar paid off several of the Assembly
members, or even threatened them, to secure a majority (Iturralde, 2010,
128).
After returning to Medellín, Juan Pablo Escobar went to visit his father
in prison. Even he, used to the excesses derived from the immense family
fortune, was surprised as what he saw was nothing like what he imag-
ined a prison would be. He thought he would have to wait in line, be
searched, follow a schedule; he never dreamt that he would be able to
stay overnight. In his words, “I felt like I was in a huge theater produc-
tion” (2016, 214), in which his father’s bodyguards would disguise as
prison guards to take care of him.
Such a play would be staged all the time, in the whole prison. After
Escobar’s escape from La Catedral , the rumors that the government
knew but looked away were confirmed. He literally ran the prison. Even
though on the outside it looked like an austere prison, it was nothing
of the sort. Escobar chose and paid the guards that watched over him;
had the military commander in charge of the security ring outside the
prison on his payroll; he had a concealed arsenal, a route of escape in
case of emergency; he also had access to the control panel of the prison’s
electric fence, as well as the lights and alarm systems (Salazar, 2001, 285,
291). Finally, Escobar chose the inmates that could live with him—all
of them trusted members of his organization. The word “prison” did not
represent that place, shaped by the will of a powerful inmate. As with all
mythologies, rumors about Escobar’s power spread and became facts. For
instance, respected journalists published, as a proven fact, that Escobar
never missed a match in which his football team, Nacional , were playing,
and that he sneaked out of prison to watch them play in Medellín, while
“police would block traffic to allow Pablo’s motorcade easy access to and
from the stadium he had built years before.” (Bowden, 2002, 145). It
was also said that, to celebrate his first year in prison with his family
and friends, he went to a nightclub in Envigado, and even that he was
spotted doing Christmas shopping in a fashionable mall in Bogotá –420
kms from Envigado (Ibid.).
Juan Pablo Escobar’s narration of his father’s imprisonment in La
Catedral , as well as the imagined or real journalistic tales, illustrates
the Narco’s total dominance over the prison space, rules, dynamics and
symbols. Escobar set the schedule and activities, the visits regime, all
under the approval of the compliant prison director. Thus, Escobar
routinely fixed football matches where he played with some of the top
Colombian star players, and paid beauty queens to party and spend the
night with him and his men (Salazar, 2001, 288, 292). The uncon-
tested power of the Narco replaces the rules that, theoretically, should
have guided the prison operations. The State’s influence fades together
with its legitimacy and only reaches the external walls of the prison—its
function being primarily to protect the Narco and his henchmen from
external threats, rather than preventing escape attempts.
Perhaps one of the most significant aspects of the reconfiguration
of the prison under the Narco’s rule was his ability to transform its
very materiality. Several authors (Cañas, 2013, 2014; Larrosa Fuentes,
2020; Rojas Sotelo, 2014) have pointed out that one of the most
outstanding features of the Narco culture in Colombia and Mexico is
the aesthetic experience that it implies. As Rojas Sotelo (2014) points
out, the Narco needs to display his power through clear symbols, an
iconography that represents his enormous economic capital through an
astonishing purchasing power. Such capitalist display of wealth and accu-
mulation gives rise to what he calls Narco aesthetics: a “violent aesthetics
of excess and a taste for tacky neoclassicism—baroque and rococo styles
consumed in a paroxysm of the eclectic” (2014, 2018).
The Narco’s ambition is not simply to display abundance, but to boast
the rarest and most precious things, even if it means transforming ecosys-
tems by importing—as Escobar did—hippos, giraffes and zebras to have
his own zoo in Hacienda Nápoles (his mythical stronghold, now turned
into a hotel-museum), and therefore recreate entire landscapes that fulfill
the grandiose image the Narco has of himself and his power (Cabañas,
2014). Thus, Narco aesthetics is based on exaggeration; it is extravagant,
noisy, strident; an aesthetic of objects and architecture (Rincón, 2009,
151). The arrival of Narco aesthetics to prison entails the aesthetic trans-
formation of the experience of detention, which in turn, is a political
exercise of resistance to the pains of imprisonment. Like the kitsch aspect
of Narco aesthetics, which is humoristic and self-aware, Escobar brags
about his power and being a tough, wise guy who mocks the State that
imprisons him only in appearance. On the walls of his room, Escobar
hanged a series of framed vintage portraits of himself and his henchmen,

representing stereotypical images of nineteenth-century Mexican rebels
and bandits, along with Chicago gangsters. He was a Colombian Pancho
Villa, an Al Capone, and he was proud of it.
In the prison world, we imagine inmates cannot demolish walls,
expand their cells or reconfigure the prison space to their image and
personality. Pablo Escobar proved that this was possible; in fact, it
could be said that his way of defying rules and the pains of impris-
onment was actually to eliminate them by making the prison one of
the many places he owned and dominated. When Escobar arrived at
La Catedral , the press was able to see that it was a standard, austere
prison (though significantly better than the common Colombian prison),
without any significant luxuries. But once outside the public’s gaze,
Escobar completely refurbished the interior and surroundings of the
prison. According to Bowden:
A bar was installed, with a lounge and a disco. For the gymnasium
there was a sauna. Inmates’ ‘cells’ where actually more like hotel suites,
with living rooms, small kitchens, bedrooms and bath. Workmen began
constructing small, camouflaged cabanas uphill from the main prison.
This is where Pablo and the other inmates intended to hide out if La Cate-
dral was ever bombed or invaded. In the meantime, the cabanas made
excellent retreats, where the men entertained women privately. Brightly
colored, surrealistic murals were painted on the walls and ceilings of the
cabanas, as in classic sixties-era dopers’ lairs, complete with black lamps
and Surround Sound. Food was prepared for them by chefs Pablo hired
away from fine restaurants, and once the bar and disco were up and
running, he hosted many parties and even wedding receptions. (2002,
144–145)
Escobar also order the installation of a games room with a poker and
three billiard tables; a family cinema where he and his son enjoyed
watching James Bond and Charlie Chaplin movies and the football field
where he played with the Colombian star players, whose drainage system
cost him a fortune.
Through such ostentation of power, the Narco escapes the cruel,
inhuman and degrading punishment that results from the conditions of
a system crushed by the weight of overcrowding and lack of resources.

The brutal reality of Latin American prisons does not apply to the Narco
as a prison subject. He does not suffer overcrowding nor solitary confine-
ment; even if his pavilion is in an overcrowded prison, he will not directly
experience the rigors of an overpopulated prison; he will gaze at them
from the comfort of his tower. Pablo Escobar is an extreme example of
the privileges of the Narco in the prison system; he did not just isolate
himself from the horrors ordinary prisoners suffer; he made a prison for
himself and to his taste. The description of his “cell-suite” is eloquent
enough:
My father’s cell had a 250-square-foot living room and then, through

a door, a bedroom with a large bathroom, also 250 square feet in size
(...). My father’s bedroom was accessed through a wooden door. In one
corner was the bed, which had the Virgin of Mercy, protector of inmates,
on the headboard and was raised on an eight-inch cement platform so
you could see the city from the pillow. On the single nightstand stood a
gorgeous, colorful Tiffany lamp. A wooden bookshelf held a twenty-nine-
inch Sony television and the collection of James Bond movies that we’d
started watching together. Beside the window was his office area, with
a desk, sofa, a zebra skin decorating the carpeted floor, and a fireplace
to alleviate the cold. Then came the bathroom with a bathtub and steam
room, a clothing closet, and a hiding place—of course—where he stashed
money and weapons. (Escobar, 2016, 216, 222)
This reconstruction of the prison disrupts the orthodox sense of the peni-
tentiary experience in Latin America and the words we use to name it.
The very notion of a cell seems to be put to the test because the space
that the Narco inhabits far exceeds the legal standards of living space per
prisoner—which most of the prison population cannot enjoy.8
8 In the Colombian case, the Constitutional Court has ruled that the minimum standard of
living space per prisoner is 5.4 square meters in an individual cell, which nevertheless varies
according to the number of hours an inmate stays in his cell—the more hours inside the cell,
the larger it should be.
Permeable Institutions. Latin American

Prisons and the Modern Penitentiary Project
In the chapter “Complete and Austere Institutions,” of Discipline and
Punish (]), Foucault describes the historical consolidation of the prison
as the “the most immediate and civilized form of all penalties” (1995,
233). Austerity, as an ethical and sensory experience that seeks the subjec-
tive transformation of the prisoner, and completeness, as an expression
of the exercise of disciplinary power, which encompasses each and every
sphere of daily life, define modern penitentiarism. These two features,
which Foucault analyses in the historical context of Western Europe and
the emergence of modern capitalism, are the outcome of the historical
turn of punishment, marked by the transformation of the relationship
between punitive power and the body of the condemned. The rational-
ization processes that marked the loss of magic in the world, together
with the ascetic ethics that characterized the emergence of capitalism in
Protestant European countries (Weber, 2001, 1930]), made possible the
specific rationalization and bureaucratization of punitive power, now in
the hands of technical experts. This meant the replacement of “unbear-
able punishments” unleashed upon the body of the condemned with a
disciplinary technology of suspended rights, which seeks to transform
the soul of the offender by changing his attitudes and dispositions,
making him docile and useful (Foucault, 1995, 231). The modern prison
produced a technical mutation and a new punitive aesthetic.
Under the modern paradigm, austerity implies, as a punitive and reha-
bilitative project, the imposition of a specific mode of existence based on
material deprivation, abstinence, probity and mastery over the instincts
and appetites. The modern prison imposes a monastic life. This modern
discourse, which legitimizes the austerity and privations of prison life,
has been discussed by several authors; it was first explained by Rusche
and Kirchheimer (2017 [1939]) through the principle of less eligibility;
Melossi and Pavarini (2019 [1977]) critically discussed the penitentiary
project of turning the prisoner into a subject of pure necessity; Sykes
(2007 [1958]) coined the term “the pains of imprisonment,” to describe
the social and legal expectations about what life ought to be in prison.
Wacquant’s recent narrative of the penitentiary ethos under neoliberalism
(2009) alludes to the pauperization of the prisoner and his relatives as

one of the most devastating effects of prison experience.
Modern prison is not expected to be comfortable or to allocate goods
and services beyond the essential. It is the minimum, and not the excess,
of goods and services that the law tends to regulate; a minimum serving
of water; a minimum serving of food; a minimum space to live in; a
minimum number of open-air hours. A sentenced person is expected to
go to prison to have a hard time. The inevitable retributive dimension of
penitentiary punishment means affliction, pain and deprivation. These
are marks of the prison experience; a fundamental aspect of the material
and symbolic conditions of modern punishment.
Affliction, pain and deprivation are also trademarks of Latin Amer-
ican prisons, not so much as the ethos that guides their dynamics and
therapeutic aims, but as the outcome of States’ abandonment and lack
of care, which result in a derelict system, overstretched and under-
funded. These features, particularly during the last three decades, have
been coupled with expressive and vengeful social attitudes against crim-
inals, and echoed by politicians who have translated them into punitive
policies. Thus, the phrase “let them rot in jail,” so widespread in Latin
American societies, is an expression of States’ ad social attitudes toward
criminals and the penitentiary treatment they deserve.
Nevertheless, as has been discussed, another key feature of Latin
American prisons’ dynamics, which also reflect some of the salient char-
acteristics of Latin American societies, is the extreme inequality vis-à-vis
access to goods and services through the legal and illegal markets existing
in prisons. Depending on a person’s or group’s different forms of capital,
access to and control of such markets are deeply differentiated, as is
the experience of imprisonment. State presence and legitimacy within
prisons is weak, as is its capacity, and sometimes its willingness, to inter-
vene in such markets and the social order and power relations they shape.
La Catedral is an extreme illustration of this process. With its mate-
rial and symbolic excesses, La Catedral is a place where the appetites
of the Narco are satisfied; more than a place of confinement, it is a
refuge, maybe uncomfortable in some respects, but by no means a form
of deprivation; the grandeur of confinement replaces prison austerity.
In this sense, it is an expressive form of resistance against the punitive
will to turn the prisoner into a subject of pure necessity. Pablo Escobar
tames imprisonment, and with it, the State. The Narco’s imprisonment
is maximalist.
But this bravado of excess is only possible because Colombian and
Latin American prisons are incomplete, rather than total , institutions.
In order to achieve stability, they become porous by tearing down their
walls, materially and symbolically, and allowing the outside world to
enter prison grounds. The “incompleteness” of Latin American prisons
is balanced by their permeability to the outside world and by the absence
of the State. In this sense, La Catedral is not an aberration regarding the
dynamics and ethos of Latin American prisons, but rather a magnifying
glass, portraying some of their features in hyperbolic terms.
Goffman refers to permeability as the degree to which total institutions
have the capacity to produce a world of their own, ritualized, hierarchical
and governed by a single bureaucratic apparatus that seeks to admin-
istrate all aspects of life. According to Goffman: “Another dimension
of variation among total institutions is found in what might be called
their permeability; that is, the degree to which the social standards main-
tained within the institution and the social standards maintained in the
environment society influence each other sufficiently to minimize differ-
ences.“ (Goffman, 2009 [1961], 119). Even total institutions are porous
entities; to different degrees, they are permeable to exchanges between
the inner and outer worlds. In the case of Latin American prisons, they
are extremely permeable to the structures and dynamics of free markets
and capitalism, which are adapted to the prison social order. The Narco
brings with him the resources and drive of a capitalist entrepreneur,
which provide him a dominant position in the illegal drugs market and
the power that comes with it.
Understanding Prison Social Order

and Government Under the Narco. The
Hybridity of Colombian and Latin American
Prisons
In the case of the Narco era of penitentiarism, one should not under-
stand the incompleteness of Colombian and Latin American prisons
in normative terms, that is, as a sign of the “failure” of the modern
prison project. In their attempt to characterize prisons in the global
south, and particularly in Latin America, authors, such as Birkbeck
(2011), develop their analyses in terms of dichotomies that refer to a
binary structure of compliance/non-compliance with what are consid-
ered essential features of the modern prison. For instance, imprisonment
in global north prisons is defined as “the presence of projects for doing
something with or to inmates while in confinement” (Birkbeck, 2011,
321), which implies more social organization. Meanwhile, the analytical
category fit to describe Latin American prisons is not confinement but
internment, defined as the absence of such projects, which implies less
social organization.
This kind of comparative analyses lose sight of the fact that the prison
project, like Modernity, is a sort of globalized localism that is adapted,
and transformed, in specific spaces. From the Rasphius in Amsterdam,
the workhouses, Millbank and Pentonville prisons in Britain, Auburn
and Philadelphia prisons in the United States, or Mettray in France,
the modern prison traveled and changed as it was adapted to different
contexts, reaching, centuries later, the top of a mountain with a view of
Medellín, Pablo Escobar’s city and dominion. Through this long cultural
journey, the penitentiary project loses some of its original elements,
while acquiring others that are embedded in particular, localized milieus,
experiencing a mutation that exceeds static categories.
Foucault’s “complete and austere institutions,” which concentrate all
spheres of life in a single institutional space, administered by the State
bureaucratic apparatus, reproduce and bring together, in an austere
manner, all the dimensions that define the experience of everyday life
in the free world. In the Latin American context, prisons are basically
incomplete institutions: in order to function, they incorporate into their

internal order structures and dynamics of the free society, like markets
of goods and services, which in turn, shape-specific types of individual
agency based on the forms of capital mobilized by inmates. A brutal
and unregulated penitentiary market will allow the excesses of magnif-
icence and misery, from the Narco’s pavilion, or prison, with its bar,
disco, Jacuzzi, where drug barons party with beauty queens and their
underlings, to the overcrowded prison yard, without toilets or drinking
water.
La Catedral is the prime example of the permeability of the mate-
rial and symbolic structure of Latin American prisons, of the powerful
resistance that privileged sectors of the criminal world can exert against
imprisonment. In this prison order, extremely unequal, just like the
society in which it is embedded, the poor and the dispossessed will be
thrown to the periphery of the prison, into the crammed yards, without
water, without toilets, to suffer the misery of confinement in all its
dimensions. Meanwhile, the power, and fear, that the Narco instills from
his privileged position, transforms the carceral space that he colonizes.
Latin American prisons embody the hybrid prison, characterized by a
juxtaposition of the spheres of the free world with the internal social
order of prisons. By replicating structures of the free, capitalist society,
such as the market, it produces a specific habitus that defines the agency
of prisoners, whose significant actions are shaped by institutional perme-
ability. The equality of prisoners, which in the model of the total
disciplinary institution is achieved by the dispossession and mortifica-
tion of the ego, achieved through the deprivation of free access to goods
and services, vanishes in the hybrid prison of which La Catedral is the
example par excellence.
The absence or weakness of the State, which does not reach the cells,
courtyards and pavilions where the Narco, the Pluma, the Cacique, the
gang rule, is a key and common feature of Latin American prisons, which
reinforces their hybridity. In this sense, Latin American States are “frag-
mented security states” (Pearce, 2018), whose presence and monopoly
of violence is not uniform across the geographical and social spaces,
making them highly permeable to the rules of capitalist markets and
private interests, of traditional elites or the upcoming social classes, like
the Narcos. The fragmented State, with its fading legitimacy, cedes the
internal government of the prison to these groups, through explicit or
tacit agreements regarding the division of labor. Again, La Catedral is an
extreme example of the privatization of State power within the prison
social and economic orders. As Bowden (2002, 151) asserts:
Everyone knew La Catedral was no prison. Effectively, it was a state

within the state. The surrender agreement had been a capitulation to
violence, pure and simple, a deal with the devil. Still, most of official
Colombia were happy to live with it. Pablo was like a dangerous snake
that had been driven into a hole. The prevailing attitude was: Before, Pablo
Escobar ruled Colombia; now he rules Envigado, so leave him alone.
Prisons are a facade of Latin American States’ rule and legitimacy: from
the outside, they look to society as highly securitized spaces, built to inca-
pacitate dangerous individuals, where the State has sovereign power over
the bodies and life of prisoners. From the inside, different rules apply—
for the most part, the State is only a peripheral actor in the construction
of social order, despite keeping the appearance of a bureaucratic institu-
tion that enforces disciplinary rules. Another anecdote from La Catedral
elucidates this point:
The Attorney General embarrassed the President in early 1992 by

producing photographs of Pablo’s scandalous luxuries in La Catedral –
the waterbeds, Jacuzzis, expensive sound systems, giant-screen TVs, and
other goodies.
When Mendoza9 investigated, however, he discovered that all of
Pablo’s furnishing were legal. They had been stamped and approved in
efficient triplicate by his very own Bureau of Prisons. The bureaucrats
had protected themselves well. The regulations allowed each prisoner a
bed but gave no description of what kind. Likewise with bathtubs. Who
could argue that a Jacuzzi was not a bathtub? Under the rules, a prisoner
could be allowed a TV set for good behavior, and where did it say that
the TV set couldn’t have a well-sized screen with a satellite hookup, VCR,
9 Mendoza was the Deputy Minister of Justice of César Gaviria’s government, and was in charge
of building a criminal case against Escobar and keeping him in check while he was imprisoned
(Bowden, 2002, 147–149).
and stereo speakers? The prison system had created a parallel world for
Pablo. He lived in the equivalent of a resort, while on paper he was in a
maximum-security prison. (Bowden, 2002, 153)
Tolemaida Resort and Other Luxuries: La

Catedral Effect and the Reshaping
of the Prison Experience in Colombia
Pablo Escobar escaped from La Catedral on the night of July 21, 1992.
Rumors that he had tortured and executed two of his associates in La
Catedral for betraying him reached the press. President Gaviria was
forced to act; he ordered Escobar’s transfer to the maximum-security
prison of Itagüí, where other members of the Medellín cartel were held.
Aware of the movement of troops outside La Catedral , Escobar feared
that he would be assassinated or extradited to the United States, so
he executed his escape plan. He and many of his men escaped a State
maximum-security prison through a hole they had previously made in
one of the walls, without firing a shot, walking through the mountain,
in the middle of the night (Salazar, 2001, 300).
This event, which put the Colombian establishment to shame, was
influential in the development of penitentiary policy in Colombia and
the construction of US style maximum-security facilities, with their
rules, government style and culture (de Dardel & Söderström, 2018).
Nonetheless, La Cathedral ’s ethos had metastasized throughout the
national prison system. Its privileges, excesses and violence were repli-
cated, on different scales and with different actors, in several kinds of
prisons. From high and maximum-security facilities in Itagüí, Cali and
Bogotá, that would later hold the surviving members of the Medellín
Cartel and the kingpins of the Cali Cartel, to the new Special Detention
Facilities (EREs), designed and financed by the US government, which
detain politicians, paramilitary and guerrilla fighters, extraditables,10 to
the resort-like military prisons, La Catedral effect shaped the material
and symbolic structure of the local prison world.
10 Those who were being extradited to the United States.

A telling example is that of military prisons. On February 4, 2011,

national media reported that at the Tolemaida Military Detention
Centre, which is in the heart of the country’s largest and most impor-
tant military training garrison (Ejército Nacional de Colombia, 2020),
many of the 269 officers, non-commissioned officers and soldiers who
were confined there for homicides, massacres, tortures and kidnapping,
were entering and leaving the military base at their will, they had busi-
ness inside and outside the base, and they lived not in cells but in
cabins (Semana, 2011a). The press reports explained that the detained
servicemen, many of them sentenced for war crimes and crimes against
humanity, with the permission of the director of the military deten-
tion center, had built their own cabins, some owned restaurants, while
others had transportation businesses to move inmates and their fami-
lies from the detention center to the other areas of the military garrison
and the nearby town. As reported in Semana, several of the convicted
militaries had their businesses there, such as retired Lieutenant Colonel
Orlando Pulido, sentenced to 30 years in prison for La Cabuya massacre
in Tame, Arauca, where five peasants were killed on November 20,
1998, including a seven months pregnant woman. The retired officer’s
restaurant was called Héroes and offered fast food and à la carte dishes.
This report was the result of a journalistic investigation that a few
months earlier had denounced that retired Major Juan Carlos Rodríguez,
a.k.a. Zeus, held exorbitant parties inside the military prison and enjoyed
unprecedented privileges for a military official convicted for drug traf-
ficking, conspiracy to commit crimes and extrajudicial executions. After
his retirement, Rodríguez had been the head of security for drug lord
Diego León Montoya, a.k.a. Don Diego (Semana, 2008). Through the
excesses of Zeus, the trail of the Narco ethos colonized yet another prison,
shaping it to the image and preferences of drug lords who, not only do
not follow State rules inside prison but create and enforce their own,
with the authorities’ acquiescence.
Something similar has happened with Colombian political bosses
imprisoned for corruption, drug trafficking and having links to drug
cartels or paramilitary groups. Though it may be considered a conquest
of the rule of law to put these powerful characters behind bars, some-
thing that a few decades ago was not common, just like the Narco, they
use their resources and influence to adapt prison life to their needs, with
the approval or complicity of State authorities.
Such approval is even legally sanctioned. Law 65 of 1993, the Colom-
bian Prisons Statue, establishes in article 29 (entitled “Imprisonment
in special cases”) that different kinds of public servants, including
congressmen and members of government, may be imprisoned in “spe-
cial facilities” outside of prison complexes. In practice, high-ranking
public servants and elected officials are held in police or military bases,
similar to Tolemaida. Though formally under the supervision of the
Colombian Prisons Bureau, they enjoy all kinds of privileges, such as
access to the Internet and phones in their rooms (not cells), a gym, chefs
to prepare their meals, a more generous visits regime, not being hand-
cuffed when leaving jail for medical appointments (which happens quite
often) or judicial procedures. They also refurbish their spaces of seclu-
sion (transforming them into lofts) and hold parties with special guests,
alcohol and musicians.
A telling illustration of how the Narco ethos is part of prison culture in
Colombia and has made its way into popular culture, is that the media
refer to the scandalous excesses and prison lifestyle of high-profile and
powerful characters, as “La Catedral style” (“a lo Catedral”). The weekly
Semana (2011b) magazine revealed the latest of these scandals in an
article that was, tellingly, entitled “La nueva Catedral” (the New Cate-
dral ). Juan Carlos Martínez was a congressman imprisoned for his links
with paramilitary groups, as part of the macro-criminal process known in
Colombia as la parapolítica (parapolitics), in which hundreds of members
of Congress and elected officials have been sentenced for their ties with
these groups. Martínez was detained with several fellow parapolíticos, in a
special annex of La Picota, Colombia’s main prison complex, which holds
8,332 inmates and has an overcrowding percentage of 38.8% (INPEC,
2020). But parapolíticos lived in quite different conditions in their special
annex, known as R Sur (Iturralde, 2013). The press was tipped off about
Martínez and his room, which he had refurbished into a comfortable loft,
and how he threw wild parties, like when he celebrated his 41st birthday.
He had 34 guests from the outside, food from the best restaurants in
Bogotá (which included shrimp cocktail, seafood rice and pork ribs) and
live music. He was not the only one; several of his fellow inmates threw
parties like this. Indeed, one of the guards of the special annex at R
Sur reported that no rules applied there. What mattered was money and
power. And most of those who were held there had both, so they could
do whatever they wanted. (Semana, 2011b).
In the 1990s, during the golden era for Narcos, in Colombian prisons,
just like in the free markets, everything was bought and sold; all kinds of
goods and services were provided according to supply and demand, to a
level unprecedented in the prison environment, allowing privileged pris-
oners to import their capital to customize their prison experience. It was
an extreme form of privatization of the prison space and dynamics, where
capital and markets overrode the State. Wars to control such markets, and
therefore the prison social order, were waged in different prisons between
the same groups that were fighting each other in the Colombian armed
conflict. This is the case of the confrontation between paramilitary and
guerilla groups in Bogotá’s La Modelo prison, at the beginning of the
1990s, which allegedly resulted in hundreds of deaths, disappeared and
tortured inmates, and which now, together with La Catedral , is part of
the infamous mythology of excesses and violence in Colombian prisons
(Ariza & Iturralde, 2020).
During the 1990s, like never before, even common inmates, could
find the kind of supply of goods and services that the State could not
provide. According to a guard, during those years, a weekend at La
Modelo resembled a popular festival. The inmates’ families visited them,
bringing with them all kinds of goods, with almost no restrains. Restau-
rants and shops were open inside the prison to satisfy the customers’
needs; even cattle were brought into the prison to sacrifice them there
and then, for barbecues. The flow of all kinds of goods and services that
traversed the prison walls was so permanent and intense, that it cannot
be described as smuggling. Such a market was a key component in terms
of the stability and legitimacy of the prison social order, commanded by
inmates, not the State, in what constitutes a self-governing, functioning
community (Kalinich et al., 1988).
The juxtaposition of the prison with the market society may also
be illustrated by a photograph of La Modelo Prison Newspaper, Libres
(Free), run and financed by inmates, since 2000:
Source: Personal file.
The advertisements on the right-hand side and along the bottom of

the page are for some of the services offered in the courtyards to the
prison population: bakeries, fast food joints, cafes, restaurants, fresh
vegetables, meat, chicken and fish markets; photocopy services and a
“poetry factory” that also offers laundry services. To add to this list, long
before the Constitutional Court admitted the prison population’s right to
use the internet,11 in Patio 4 (4th Courtyard) of La Modelo, inmates were
offered access to the outside world through 130 channels of DirectTV
( cable TV), with a one-month-free-trial included.
The newspaper’s ads that publicize the goods and services that the
market has to offer, reveal the hybridity and porosity of Colombian
prisons in their capacity to incorporate some of the basic aspects that
define a free market society. They also demonstrate a high level of conser-
vation of individual agency, a key component of capitalist societies,
which allows inmates to carry out significant social actions that place
them in an intermediate, liminal spot, between the prison world and the
free society.
11 See, Colombian Constitutional Court, Ruling T-276–2017.

And, just like in any contemporary capitalist society, there are key
players, capable of influencing, or even controlling, the markets. As
has been discussed throughout this paper, the most powerful are the
Narcos, the high-State officers, and elected politicians, who accumulate
different kinds of resources. However, also in the courtyards in which
common criminals (los delincuentes sociales, according to prison jargon)
are crammed, a Cacique (chieftain) invariably emerges, replicating the
Narco’s power on his turf and on a smaller scale. In the area of the
prison that the Cacique dominates, all the cells, corridors and communal
areas have a price. The Cacique owns these spaces, and he sets the rules,
like those of the housing market –the Cacique allocates scarce spaces in
exchange of a weekly rent for their use. The Cacique also exacts taxes
from inmates and gets a percentage of all commercial transactions in
his territory. Like the Narco, but on a different level, the Cacique is the
boss of his courtyard, and he exchanges the scarce prison resources he
controls for inmates’ obedience and money. His commands are backed
by the threat of physical violence, which he displays through exemplary
punishments.
The Dawn of the Narco Era and the Political

Economy of Colombian and Latin American
Prisons
Under the spell of the war on drugs and the punitive turn in Latin
American countries, the region’s prison system has undergone a deep
transformation that has reinforced the historical features of the Latin
American penitentiary project, but it has also led it in new directions. As
we discussed, the archetypical figure of the Narco has been a key compo-
nent of such transformation, particularly in Colombia and Mexico,
where the most powerful drug cartels have emerged. His immense power
and resources, together with a specific type of ethics and aesthetics, have
made an impact on the materiality and ethos of imprisonment.
At the same time, the dawn of the Narco era in Colombian prisons
is the expression of wider and structural changes, not only in the
government and order of prisons but of Latin American societies, where

the forces of capital and unregulated markets replace the State in the
provision of goods and services (starting with security).
Wherever a powerful Narco, or someone with similar power and forms
of capital (like high-ranking militaries or politicians) is held captive, there
is a replica of La Catedral . Even though the documentation on the social
order of Colombian prisons before the Narco era is scarce, and it is diffi-
cult to assess its defining characteristics, it is reasonable to claim that the
Narco fostered a new way of dealing with the pains of imprisonment.
The Narco has reinforced the hybrid and porous features of Colom-
bian and Latin American prisons, also reconfiguring their economic and
social orders, as well as the role played by the State. Very much in line
with the neoliberal political economy of the times, a fragmented State,
with a deficit of legitimacy, shows a punitive and authoritarian face to
fight crime and social disorder under conditions of extreme violence and
inequality. But it recoils before the force of capitalist markets that also
colonize prison spaces.
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Provós, Representantes, Agentes: The
Evolution of Prison Governance
Arrangements in the Dominican
Republic’s Prison Reform Process
Jennifer Peirce
At the entrance of almost every Center for Correction and Rehabil-

itation—the name of the Dominican Republic’s new, rehabilitation-
oriented prison—the key principles of the UN Mandela Rules (for
the treatment of prisoners) are posted prominently. Slogans such
as “Working toward Freedom” and “Creating Second Opportunities”
bedeck posters. The premise of the Dominican Republic’s “New Prison
Management Model” (Nuevo Modelo de Gestión Penitenciaria)—a major
prison reform process implemented over the past fifteen years—is that a
corrections system based on human rights and rehabilitation principles
is both morally right and effective for public safety goals (Coyle, 2003;
Craig, 2004). The New Model is widely cited as a reference point and
best practice in Latin America (Carranza, 2012; Justice Trends, 2017).
J. Peirce (B)
John Jay College & CUNY Graduate Center, New York, USA
e-mail: jpeirce@jjay.cuny.edu

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98602-5_4
94 J. Peirce
A key component of the New Model is a shift in social order and

governance of prisons: trained corrections officers and other professionals
manage all aspects of daily operations. While this is meant to improve
quality, access, and transparency, it does not start with a blank slate; it
interacts with and attempts to replace a social order based on prisoner-led
governance arrangements in the old prisons. Further, the arrangements in
old model prisons have also evolved, in part as a result of increased public
scrutiny sparked by the reform process. Therefore, many prisoners and
prison officials have experience with the daily operations and the benefits
and challenges of different governance arrangements.
This chapter recounts the historical trajectories, key mechanisms, and
perceptions of how prisoners and staff negotiate daily operations and
social order in old and new prisons in the Dominican Republic. It argues
that this unique case of coexisting governance strategies demonstrates the
need for integrating several current analytical frameworks and typologies
of prison governance, in particular those that hinge on economic and
political concerns. The old model prisons in the Dominican Republic
illustrate a form of co-governance (shared authority), with both material
goods and spaces for some participatory decision-making. Meanwhile,
the new model CCRs demonstrate the effects (deliberate and unin-
tended) of shifting away from prisoner-led governance and toward
full-fledged formal authority management—but with gestures toward
participatory spaces. I contend that neither fully achieves the elusive
balance of meeting prisoners’ needs for material well-being, a sense of
autonomy and voice, and the collective operational order of the prison
as a whole.1
1 This chapter draws on and contains excerpts from my doctoral dissertation, From Rulay to
Rules: Perceptions of Prison Life and Reforms in the Dominican Republic’s Old and New Prisons
(Peirce, 2021).
Provós, Representantes, Agentes: The Evolution … 95
Context: A Brief History of the Nuevo Modelo

De Gestión Penitenciaria
The prison reform experiment in the Dominican Republic began
through a convergence of initiatives and visionary individuals in the late
1990s and early 2000s. First, two broader reforms converged: an inter-
national aid project to modernize public institutions in the country and
the shift from an inquisitorial to an adversarial criminal justice system.
Second, a few key players decided to take a chance on using some of
the modernization resources to “convert” one single prison. A group
of influential people—the British Embassy, a Spanish consultant, the
Attorney-General, a few former prison directors, and the former presi-
dent of the main university (who had himself been a political prisoner
in his youth)—merged their political capital and technical resources to
build a framework—called the Nuevo Modelo de Gestión Penitenciaria
(New Prison Management Model)—and to pilot it quickly in some
smaller prison facilities. This model was based on a blend of Spanish
and British approaches to corrections and was designed explicitly in
contrast to US prison models that emphasize security and technology.
After relying on European funding for the first five or six years, the
Dominican government institutionalized the New Model into its regular
structures and budgets.
The reform team then established a brand-new academy for a new
staff figure, agentes de vigilancia y tratamiento penitenciario (corrections
officers, known as VTPs). A key qualification for this job is to be a
civilian—former police and military officers are not eligible due to the
repressive role these institutions have historically played in the country.
VTP salaries are much higher than police wages (to reduce corruption)
and there is a clear professional career path. The training emphasizes
human rights, respect, security, programming, and a discourse of rehabil-
itation. Still, the training and structure of the VTP corps is hierarchical
and quasi-militaristic, with officers organized by rank denoted by stripes
on their uniforms. Over the years, the new model project gradually
converted the old prisons into new prisons, with remodeled or new
facilities. The government also built a coordination institution—located
under the Director of Prisons (which manages all prisons, including the
96 J. Peirce
old ones) but with substantial operational autonomy—and was granted

a regular budget from the Procuraduria (Attorney-General’s Office). This
has caused some tensions between the two sides of the system in terms
of public profile and resources, but they coordinate on daily operations
fairly consistently.
The prison reform process coincided with the shift in the judicial
system in the Dominican Republic, from the inquisitorial system to the
adversarial system (Hartling & Modesto, 2020). However, these two
processes were not closely coordinated in terms of operational rollout.
This is evident in the criteria for judicial decisions on pretrial detention
and on assigning people to old or new prisons. The new Criminal Code
prescribes that pretrial detention should be used only as a last resort
and sets out various alternatives—but judges and prosecutors continue
to impose pretrial detention because they perceive it to be the least risky
option (Peirce, 2020).
Judges also have discretion over the prison to which they assign a
person with a conviction or in pretrial detention, as well as over decisions
regarding transfers (to another facility or the other model), day release
permission, or early release. In practice, the decision on where to send a
person for detention is constrained by the availability of CCR beds (due
to the policy of not allowing overcrowding). In other words, any “over-
flow” people assigned to prison if the CCRs are full will by definition
go to the traditional prisons. On top of this, various extra-legal factors
influence the decision, too: influence of the attorneys, bribes, or simply
the judge’s view about whether a person would benefit from the CCR
programs.
Since 2003, the Dominican government has built or renovated 24
facilities, spacious and well-equipped, called Centros de Corrección y Reha-
bilitación, known colloquially as azulitos for their pastel painted walls.
The azulitos by policy cannot exceed bed capacity, and so they hold
only a third of the country’s incarcerated population, with the overflow
going to the 19 remaining old facilities, which are increasingly over-
crowded. Since 2004, the total prison population has ballooned from
14,000 to about 27,000 people—due mainly to rising pretrial detention
and harsher sentences. In 2018, the Dominican government inaugurated
its “Humanization Plan,” which has invested heavily in new infrastruc-

ture and training more VTP officers, with the goal of expanding the New
Model and CCRs far enough to replace all the old model prisons.
Since the governing party switched in the 2020 elections, polit-
ical dynamics have shifted away from the Humanization Plan. Most
dramatically, the Attorney-General who initiated that plan, Jean-Alain
Rodriguez, was indicted in 2021 on corruption charges, in part related
to the construction of new CCRs (CDN, 2021; Listin Diario, 2021).
Nonetheless, the new leadership appears to be continuing to invest in
and expand the New Model, with the goal of replacing the old prisons.
This Study—Methods
This paper draws on data from a larger mixed-methods project that
explores prisoners’ perceptions and conditions, in both old and new
Dominican prisons (Peirce, 2021). I developed this project in collabo-
ration with Dominican prison authorities from 2016 to 2019, who gave
me access to facilities after several months of discussions. The quantita-
tive portion used a survey of prisoners, adapted from the British survey
Measuring the Quality of Prison Life (Liebling, 2004), with some addi-
tional content on basic services and the role of prisoner-led governance
groups. The qualitative portion used interviews and participant observa-
tion. Over the course of about six months in 2017–2018, I visited 17
facilities, some of them several times, for one to three days each; this
study is not an extended ethnography of any facility. I excluded women’s
prisons and “special population” facilities (for military officers, elderly
people, and pre-release semi-open centers). On most visits, I brought two
or three students (men and women) from the main university, whom I
trained as research assistants. We spent most of our time administering
surveys and doing interviews, but we also observed the daily routines,
educational, religious, and recreational activities, and shared meals and
unstructured time with prisoners and staff. In most visits, our research
team enjoyed a significant degree of autonomy and unsupervised conver-
sations in the collective areas of the facility where we spent most of our
98 J. Peirce
time (patio, chapel, classroom), but our visits to cell areas were closely
escorted.
The sample for the survey is 1240 prisoners, from 17 facilities of
varying sizes (from both models, with about 56% in the old model).
I chose participants as randomly as possible from those who were avail-
able on the day of data collection in the general population areas of the
prison (the patio in the old facilities and various program and recreation
spaces in the new model) and willing to participate. Some declined but
most were eager to participate. I did not survey people in maximum
security, solitary confinement, or women’s facilities, although I did inter-
view people in these settings. We administered the survey on paper, with
some people filling it out themselves and others responding verbally,
depending on literacy level. The survey also includes open-ended ques-
tions—specifically, about positive, negative, and surprising aspects of
prison life, preferences for either model, and general comments—
and responses generated in conversation between the prisoner and the
research team.
I also conducted over 150 semi-structured interviews, in Spanish and
occasionally in English or French. My interviews with 46 currently incar-
cerated people lasted between ten minutes to about an hour, since the
chaotic social dynamics and schedules often interrupted interviews; some
spoke to me in pairs or small groups. Due to some people’s hesitancy
to be seen speaking with me alone, I also held focus groups (between
six to twelve people each, one with women) with prisoners inside and
two with former prisoners. Additionally, I interviewed former prisoners,
whom I found through a small NGO in a marginalized community,
through the Catholic Church’s official program for people on parole,
and through personal referrals. My study also includes interviews with
prison facility staff and other key actors, such as government and elected
officials, attorneys and judges, academics, journalists, and human rights
advocates.
Prison Governance in Latin America

Latin American prisons may appear chaotic to an outside observer,
but as significant empirical research has documented, both officials and
prisoners use elaborate and evolving strategies for survival and order
amid very tough physical conditions. Although basic conditions, such
as amount of space, food, and programs, are extremely important, the
modes of governance of a given prison vary dramatically even where
material resources are similar (Lessing, 2016; Peirce & Fondevila, 2020;
Sanhueza et al., 2015; Skarbek, 2020). Governance of prisons in Latin
America involves complex relationships between formal authorities, pris-
oners, and other actors. Thus, simple typologies such as the classic
US studies that set out degrees of top-down control (DiIulio, 1987)
are insufficient. Understanding prison governance and order in Latin
America requires an analysis of how the material conditions, prisoners’
organizations, and staff tactics influence and interact with one another.
Birkbeck defines prison management models in part through social
arrangements—which encompass formal staff structures, staff-prisoner
interactions and communication mechanisms, and informal inmate-led
methods of distributing power and resources within the facility (Birk-
beck, 2011). In settings where staff have training and autonomy to estab-
lish more multi-faceted interactions with inmates and to use professional
discretion, prisons are less punitive overall (Cheliotis, 2006; Lerman,
2013; Liebling & Arnold, 2012). Although formal authority is more
comprehensive in US prisons than in other regions of the world, it is not
total. Prisoners organize to respond to needs that formal authorities do
not meet (including protection, illicit products, and dispute resolution),
using different modes of centralization and communication, depending
on the tactics of formal authorities (Gundur, 2018; Pyrooz et al., 2011;
Skarbek, 2014). This perspective differs from conventional analyses of
prison violence, which tend to reduce facility management strategies to
one factor—degree of strictness in staff authority—along with individual
traits of inmates, such as age and criminal history (Blevins et al., 2010;
McCorkle et al., 1995; Useem & Piehl, 2006).
However, in Latin America, prison governance modes are more diverse
and, arguably, more influential than in the Global North. In the
100 J. Peirce
Dominican Republic, there are only very limited facility divisions by

risk status of the prisoner: a few CCRs have “maximum security” areas
that are separate. Mostly, in both old and new model facilities, pris-
oners of all types live together: similar proportion of pretrial detainees
versus sentenced people (about half and half ), as well as similar propor-
tions by criminal charge, age range, and education level. Though the size
of a prison varies, the material conditions of the buildings and living
conditions are relatively similar (apart from the old model / new model
difference in the DR case).
Given these circumstances, the overall “culture” of a given prison and
the ways that both authorities and prisoners manage day-to-day life are
more influential than the particular combination of individual character-
istics or program interventions. Scholars who have analyzed the relatively
disappointing “impact” of training programs meant to improve the skills
of formal corrections authorities and to reduce violence inside prisons
in the Global South (e.g. in Africa) have underlined the tendency for
external observers to discount the role of informal prison governance and
culture (Jefferson, 2007; Martin, 2017). In Latin America, researchers
have demonstrated the various ways that internally-organized inmate
groups run most daily prison affairs (Antillano, 2015; Darke, 2018;
Weegels, 2018); these dynamics also exist in other regions (Butler et al.,
2018; Lindegaard & Gear, 2014; Narag & Jones, 2017; Piacentini &
Slade, 2015; Symkovych, 2017). This is often called “co-governance”or
“hybrid” governance (Darke, 2018; Macaulay, 2013).
There are several frameworks for understanding these arrangements.
Some comparative scholars look at organized groups that coalesce around
street-level gangs or organized crime and/or around political identity, and
then emphasize how their role inside prisons varies by geographical and
political setting (Butler et al., 2018). Skarbek takes a broad compara-
tive approach at the global level, going beyond just “gangs,” and instead
bases his typology on if and how much the formal authorities meet pris-
oners’ basic needs. In cases where they do not, extra-official governance
emerges, led by prisoners themselves, with varying degrees of central-
ization (Skarbek, 2020), depending on availability of information and
enforcement capacity. The more centralized forms of extra-official gover-

nance may include coordinated management by gangs or other struc-
tured organizations of prisoners that evolve over time and across facilities
(as portrayed in US prisons, see (Gundur, 2018; Skarbek, 2014; Tram-
mell, 2009), and in some Brazilian prisons, see (Biondi, 2017; Lessing,
2015; Nunes Dias & Darke, 2016). Similarly,Sozzo (Sozzo, 2019), refer-
ring to Latin America, argues that both the degree of informal authority
(of prisoner groups) and the degree of official authority (by state actors)
are important, and that different combinations of these two dimensions
exist in the region. In other words, highly organized informal authorities
can co-exist with highly present formal authorities, through a form of
negotiation.
Writing about Peru, Pérez Guadalupe & Nuñovero set out a two-
axis framework that is more rooted in Latin American contexts (Pérez
Guadalupe & Nuñovero Cisneros, 2019). They argue that prisons can
be categorized based on the degree of institutional presence (from
“authoritarian,” which means total control as in max-security models, to
“abdicated,” where prisoners are warehoused with nearly zero attention
from authorities) and degree of dialogue (from “institutional”—extensive
and leading to actions—to “apparent,” where officials offer superficial,
tokenistic spaces for prisoner input or well-being). This framework is
helpful because it emphasizes that it is the substance of the engagement
of formal authorities that matters, even if they do not necessarily provide
all the basic amenities that one would expect in a North American prison.
Therefore, a medium amount of institutional presence combined with
sincere institutional dialogue may generate stability and low violence—
even if there are vast gaps in basic needs that prisoners fill through other
channels, such as families or prisoner-led committees.
This is more nuanced than Skarbek’s framework, which assumes
a direct relationship between basic needs (material and safety) and
the response of prisoner organizations. However, Pérez Guadalupe &
Nuñovero do not account in as much detail for the variation in the
details of daily living conditions, as they focus mostly on the role of
authorities. As the Dominican case demonstrates, prisoners may respond
differently if engaged authorities are offering improved water and toilets
102 J. Peirce
versus if they are offering “rehabilitation” programs and classes—even if

both are sincere initiatives.
The following section outlines the evolution of governance in the
Dominican Republic prison system, demonstrating how a major policy
reform—the introduction of the “new model prisons”—affected gover-
nance arrangements over time.
The Evolution of Prison Governance Models

in Dominican Prisons
The reforms in the Dominican prison system affected governance
arrangements in both old and new facilities. As the New Model built new
facilities and imposed the authority of formal corrections officials (VTP
officers) in these Centers for Rehabilitation and Corrections (CCRs), the
prisoners and staff in old model facilities took notice—and they often
objected. Both prisoners and staff in the old model saw their routine
but unofficial transactions cut off, sometimes abruptly. As noted above,
the CCRs expanded gradually over more than a decade, one facility at a
time, and as of 2019, held only a third of prisoners. The traditional (old)
prison facilities remain predominant, but they now exist with the CCRs
as a comparison or reference point, for both authorities and for prisoners.
Prisoners now hear about CCRs that offer a different set of material
amenities, with more formal officer presence. Meanwhile, government
officials responsible for traditional prisons must respond to questions
from the public, the media, and prisoner advocates about the mate-
rial conditions and safety/violence levels inside the old prisons—with
implicit or explicit comparison to the CCRs. Leaders remained colle-
gial in the public discourse, but old model officials had to do more
work to demonstrate action and change in reducing corruption and poor
conditions in the remaining old prisons.
From Provó to Representante: Governance

in Traditional Prisons
During this time period, the social order arrangements in the old model
facilities have evolved from fully inmate-run to partially inmate-run.
Within the governance frameworks described above, this represents a
shift from “abdicated” governance—near-total absence of formal author-
ities—to “co-governance” arrangements, with significant variation by
facility. In the Dominican old model prisons, guards (police and mili-
tary officers) typically remain only on the periphery of the facility. Their
role is to prevent escapes and riots, but not to be actively involved in the
social order of day-to-day life inside.
More than ten years ago, old model prisons (known colloquially as
rulay, a term loosely akin to “street life,” with the implication that “any-
thing goes”) were entirely the domain of inmate provós (leaders), who
ruled primarily by force and fear. This leader gained power through
controlling illicit economies (particularly drugs, but also licit goods
like food and clothing) and overtaking rival leaders through actual and
threatened brute force, often leveraging outside street-gang connections.
Such men were colloquially called tigres—a reference to using brute force
to gain power. The provó had no incentive to promote positive activi-
ties among other inmates, except to keep people occupied and calm. As
one current staff member of an old model prison said, “Yes, in truth the
prison was a myth, as they say, it was a war zone. Like, in La Victoria
prison you couldn’t walk like you walk around now. I’ve been visiting
that prison since I was 13 years old and back then it was not what you
see now. You walking around like this? No. You couldn’t. The police only
guarded outside.”
The formal authorities did not care much how a provó ran the facility,
as long as there was minimal media attention and a sufficient flow of
bribe payments to officials. For some, this meant extensive privileges.
One formerly incarcerated person told me about this time: “Yes, I myself
would leave every so often. People left as they wished. It was a time of
terror, terror, one had to be armed, had to belong to a group, to a gang,
to a well-known neighborhood, to be calm, and even then, the guys from
your own circle who had more power would abuse the weakest one.” A
104 J. Peirce
police officer described the era in terms of the corruption: “So, before,
it was harder, right, because the Prisons Directorate had less resources.
So, the police, for whatever thing, sometimes prisoners would escape
in coordination with judicial and prison authorities. Many colonels and
generals made their retirement off of that stuff ”. Despite the incentive
to keep bloodshed low to fend off outside scrutiny, riots and homicides
among inmates were relatively frequent, as this was the primary way that
other prisoners attempted to overthrow a provó and take over the role for
themselves. In the words of one former resident of the country’s largest
prison said: “That was an epoch of terror. You had to be armed, to belong
to a gang, to a neighborhood group. Now, the police control things, and
the control is to keep things clean for business.”
As the media coverage of these incidents of violence started to increase,
prison authorities were under pressure to “get control.” As the new model
prisons were expanding—and enjoying positive and extensive media
coverage—the old model prison authorities sought to counter the narra-
tive that the rulay prisons were “hellish” or “disasters”. Although the
expansion of the new model facilities was never framed as a compe-
tition between the old and the new facilities—everyone acknowledged
that the new model facilities benefit from vastly more resources—there
was more scrutiny of how authorities were running the traditional facil-
ities. In my interviews, most officials from both models underlined that
there was a widespread perception that staff in the old model, at head-
quarters and at the facility level, participated in corruption and neglect.
According to new model staff, this is a valid reason for barring such
staff from being hired into the CCR management roles. In contrast, old
model staff saw this as an unfair generalization, even if they acknowl-
edged that some individuals may have been corrupt or neglectful. Many
old model staff expressed frustration with this broad-brush characteri-
zation and explained that they sought to demonstrate their competence
and creativity by improving conditions in the rulay prisons, even under
difficult circumstances.
In this context, according to officials who participated, officials
responsible for the traditional model sought to increase their presence
and influence inside facilities governed by the provó system, with the goal
of reducing violence and offering more programs and better conditions.
Gradually, the prison authorities identified the “power brokers” among

inmates, civilian prison staff, and police/military guards and mapped
out interests and incentives. Using this information, they established
“prisoner committees” and nominated Representantes. These individuals
became a kind of intermediary between facility-level prison directors
and a given sector or cell area; one high-level staff said it’s “collabo-
ration between authorities and prisoners.” Another official commented
that they began by asking the Committee to coordinate visit day and
cleaning issues, and then gradually expanded the list of tasks.
According to both prisoners and officials, the selection of a Represen-
tante required nomination by formal authorities and also agreement or
endorsement by the prisoners in his sector or facility. For example, one
prisoner told me that prisoners would gather for a meeting and express
their agreement (or dissent) for the selection of a given nominee, voting
with their voices or raised hands. Representante is the government’s term;
prisoners usually call this person the jefe de la cárcel (chief of prison). If
there is a prisoner who has de facto power in a sector of the prison—
whether as official Representante or not—and is not cooperating well
with the authorities’ goals for the Committee, the headquarters will move
him. “This allows us to manage the system at the national level … We
took one [prisoner] out of La Victoria some months back where there
was this type of management, a [prison] leader that was someone with
some power, and there was fear … When I proposed [transferring him],
they said, “you’re crazy,” and I said, no, he’s crazy. And he leaves.” This
process of establishing representantes involved transferring some people
to other facilities, which, according to officials, was a strategy to ensure
that the selected individual had a “positive” influence with the prisoner
population.
Prisoners explained to me that the representante typically had several
traits: a longer sentence (often over 20 years, usually for a homicide or
organized crime charge), significant “weight” with prisoners (implying
respect in the street), literacy, and the ability to communicate and nego-
tiate respectfully (some added that this means not having a fiery temper).
It is notable that, by and large, street gangs do not have a major presence
in Dominican prisons. Local gangs are active in marginalized neighbor-
hoods in most cities—they are called naciones—and people spoke to
106 J. Peirce
me openly about their affiliations (e.g., the Trinitarios, the 42 s, Latin

Kings). They all emphasized, though, that there is an expectation that
inside prison, people will respect the existing arrangements per facility—
such as the inmate committee and representante—and not prioritize their
gang affiliations or obligations. Many interviewees said that the naciones
“do not operate” (“no corren”) inside or “lower their flag.”
However, since gangs tend to be geographically local and people are
usually incarcerated in a facility near to their residence, the reality is that
many people in a given prison do have ties to these local gangs. This
lends some coherence and a sense of familiarity, but also local conflicts
can nonetheless spill into intra-prison life. As one prison staff member
said, “We don’t want gangs or groups here … You guys are friends from
the block, OK? It’s justified to defend yourself, since if I can’t provide you
food maybe your friend can, OK, so that’s a survival instinct, but with
regard to the rest of it [gang dynamics], no, I don’t think so.” The fact
that most old model prisoners have cell phone access and visitors usually
circulate freely through the facility means that the walls of prison do not
actually block out the dynamics of home communities.
The representante system is based on an informal agreement; nothing
is official or written. But the exchange and expectations, based on my
interviews and observations, are quite clear and similar across facilities.
According to both prisoners on Committees and prison staff, the author-
ities quite openly provided a set of resources to each Representante. At
the individual level, these include privileges of access to administrative
areas of the prison, fewer restrictions on visits, a single cell, a formal
“good conduct” letter for a parole application, and perhaps a cellphone or
payments (accounts on the latter two were less consistent in my research).
At the collective level, the representante (and his delegates or committee)
generally have partial or full control over disciplinary decisions and
other inmates’ access to certain activities, funds for improving the facility
conditions, and sometimes a measure of influence over decisions about
other prisoners’ transfers.
In exchange, the Representante sets up and manages a “Discipline
Committee”—made up of other prisoners, usually—that handles day-
to-day order and hygiene, addresses disputes among inmates, and doles
out consequences for rule-breaking. In one larger facility (over 500 pris-
oners), interviewees told me this was twenty or thirty people, “people
with capacity”; in another of similar size, they told me there were fifty
people on the committee, whereas in a smaller facility, the committee
was ten or twelve people. The Committee has a “delegate” for key tasks,
such as collecting fees, doing headcount, food logistics, visitor access,
and others. In practice, the Committee also serves as a regulator for
the drug trade inside the facility, including negotiating fees and kick-
backs to police officers and civilian staff. One former prisoner, who was
incarcerated during the period of transition from provó to representante,
said: “They need the help of the prisoners to impose discipline. The
authorities know that the police alone can’t do it.”
The Committee sets rules for basic daily operations, such as how
collective lunch is distributed and how the patio space is organized on
visitor days. There is an economic organizational role here, as the old
model prisons have complex economies. First, the Committee collects a
weekly limpieza fee (a euphemism) from each prisoner, like a tax. In
my survey, the average amount of this fee was 25 pesos (about fifty
cents) per week, plus occasional “special fees” for initiatives like repairs or
holiday parties. Within the broader prison economy, the Committee also
enforces interpersonal economic obligations, such as paying for sleeping
areas, sales of goods and services (licit and illicit), etc. There are rules
to control “bad behavior” —for example, to limit fighting, stealing,
snitching, and disputes over women. Many people used the term “media-
tors” or “judges” to describe this function. The Committee runs a kind of
tribunal, to address and mediate conflicts and infractions. It sometimes
issues punishments for infractions—ranging from mandatory chores to a
fine to a few hours or days in the isolation cell to a beating. For example,
in one facility, prisoners mentioned that a common punishment was
removing an individual’s belongings for a fixed period. In another, pris-
oners said that beatings (“dando golpes”) occur either in the basketball
court or holding someone in the isolation cell.
The prisoners generally respect and follow the rules and systems
set by the Representante, as long as they perceive that the benefits
they receive—tranquility, order, protection from theft, contract enforce-
ment—are worth the fees they pay and the restrictions/rules they must
108 J. Peirce
follow. One formerly incarcerated person described the Representante

system positively: “It was a marvel, because before you get to the point
of fighting, the representante shows up and mediates so that there are no
problems.” Another said that the mediation is “absolutely necessary …
since conflicts can even lead to deaths.” In my interviews, one of the
most common comments was along the lines of “if you obey the rules,
you can live quietly.” Some prisoners expressed frustration at some of
the inequitable standards of rule enforcement, suggesting that prisoners
with more power or resources had fewer rules, but they still generally
viewed the Committee system as necessary. Moreover, many prisoners
spoke about fearing the harshness of punishments, which often involve
violence, while simultaneously describing this system as justified. One
older man recounted, regarding the Committee delegates, “In the tradi-
tional prison, one lives with tension … We had 70 armed men to be able
to maintain discipline, in each cell area. Yes, many times some of those
men would do inappropriate things.”
The other way that the Representante and his Committee establish
adherence and order is through offering improvements to collective
conditions of prisoners, using resources drawn from both prisoners and
formal authorities. The old model facilities are extremely overcrowded—
as of 2019, ranging from 150 to 700% over capacity. According to my
survey, 72% of prisoners paid money for their sleeping space, whether a
floor space or a “goleta” (box-like private bed stacked against the wall),
and only 30% sleep on any type of bed. Further, prisoners or their
families pay out of pocket for food and hygiene products, since very
minimal supplies are provided by the administration. Access to bath-
rooms and water is scarce, with a typical cell sector having one crude
toilet for dozens of prisoners and one or two water taps. My survey
found that the average amount of out-of-pocket money a prisoner spent
per month inside prison was $124 US—which is about two thirds of
minimum wage in the country. Prisoners must generate these funds by
selling or stealing goods or services inside prison or by donations from
their families or other people on the outside. Generally, I observed that
Representantes and Committee members lived in nicer goletas or even in
cell spaces that were more like a private room, with a door and more
amenities.
Given this burden, any alleviation of the harsh prison conditions has
a major impact. The official authorities and Representantes, in several old
model prisons, according to my interviews, organized significant infras-
tructure improvements, such as installing electric wires, water taps, or
even expanded cell/bed areas. In one facility, prisoners told me that the
Representante persuaded the authorities to fix the electricity. In another,
a prisoner recounted admiringly how, five years ago, the Representante
collected over 20,000 pesos (about $400) toward the construction of
a school and assigned twenty prisoners to do the labor to build it. In
another facility, the prisoners uniformly lauded the jefe because he had
collected funds (a “special tax”) from inmates and, in collaboration with
the prison administration, bought materials to install new toilets and
running water. In both cases, these improvements build positive percep-
tions of the administration and of the Representante, with an emphasis on
the Representante’s ability to negotiate and organize the process. One pris-
oner said “We have the #1 chief here” due to improvements in food and
reduced violence. In other words, these material improvements counter-
balance some of the harshness, costs, and favoritism of the Committee
system and some of the neglect of the formal administration.
Another important function of the Committee is discipline and
enforcing rules. There is some variation across facilities, but typically the
Committee has a kind of “hearing” for more serious or complicated cases,
allows the involved parties to speak, and determines a type of verdict
and punishment. The lighter consequences may include removal of some
privileges (such as access to sales activities or sports), a fine, cleaning
duties. According to prisoners, the jefe or Committee may impose these
for lighter infractions without a hearing. For more serious breaches, the
most common punishments are either a beating or time in the soli-
tary confinement cell. In my survey, in traditional facilities, about 20%
reported experiencing some type of discipline or punishment. Of these,
37% of prisoners reported having experienced beating, compared to 46%
who had spent time in solitary confinement.
In Dominican prison slang, the isolation cell (solitary confinement)
is usually called la plancha—the grill—because in past eras, the primary
discipline tactic was to tie a prisoner to a board and let him bake in
the hot sun. This then shifted to a punishment “cell,” which can also
110 J. Peirce
be extremely hot or uncomfortable. Further physical punishment some-

times occurs inside the punishment cell; answers most frequently listed in
our surveys were: beatings, stabbings, and deprivation of food and water.
In some cases, it also serves as a temporary protection space or as a place
to isolate people who are deemed as dangerous to the general popula-
tion. For example, in two old model facilities I visited, the person inside
the punishment cell was very visible, with a metal door or bars. In both
cases, the prisoner Comité members told me that the person was “crazy”
or “deranged,” had a history of violence against inmates, and posed an
ongoing threat. The Comité said they had no choice but to keep him
indefinitely in the plancha. Both facilities also had other plancha cells
for shorter punishment periods, used at the discretion of the Comité.
In general, though, conversations about discipline in old model facili-
ties focused far more on the threat or use of violence and the removal of
privileges in the social order.
One prisoner I spoke with summed up his strategy for surviving inside
as “He who lives straight walks straight.” In other words, if you follow
the rules, you avoid trouble. The governance arrangements of the tradi-
tional model prison rely on most prisoners buying into the explicit and
implicit rules of behavior and enforcement mechanisms. On the whole,
a surprising proportion of them expressed some support for the Comité
system, mostly with one of the following reasons: the rules are clear so
one can choose to avoid trouble, prisoners participate in the decision-
making in some ways, and / or that the tension is worth it due to the
relative degree of liberty inside the prison.
Agentes De Vigilancia Y Tratamiento Penitenciario:

Governance in the New Model CCRs
The basic premise of the governance model in the CCRs, at least on

paper, is robust presence of official/formal authorities (VTP officers and
civilians) and robust provision of amenities, programs, and opportuni-
ties—importantly, at no charge and impartially, all in line with modern
management processes. The theory is that by treating prisoners with
decency and a rehabilitative ethos, they will not need to resort to illicit
or confrontational behaviors, and they may even learn behavioral change

that will benefit them after release.
In the early days of the New Model facilities, the leaders of the reform
team developed strategies for the “conversion” of a traditional prison into
a CCR. A key challenge in this process was confronting and dismantling
the negotiated co-governance arrangements between the Representantes
and Committees and the facility officials. According to early leaders,
they decided it was not possible to retain a portion of the co-governance
arrangements or any individual actors, given the extent of corruption
and illicit transactions. One of the pioneers of the New Model told me,
citing the United Nations and British corrections expert Andrew Coyle,
…a prisoner cannot have any kind of decision-making capacity over

fellow prisoners. This is a golden rule. … In the educational space and
the space of other occupational activities and spiritual activities some-
times, there they can suggest … the professor can create groups like on
the outside … in that group doing that project, that seminar, there could
be one who coordinates. But to have levels of coordination inside the
prison, this is terrible. Very specifically, in the living spaces, this is grave,
grave. In the living spaces, I mean in the cells, pavilions, blocks, buildings.
It’s grave to hand over authority to a prisoner over others, very grave.
When the team opened a new CCR, they typically transferred most
of the prisoners—those not in the Committee structure—to the new
building quickly and attempted to gain their favor through the vastly
improved material amenities, offered for free. Then, they had to assess
the Committee members and Representante on an individual basis, to
determine which ones were willing to reside in the new building as
generic prisoners without any special role. In the case where the New
Model leaders decided that an individual prisoner would cause too much
disruption or challenge the new arrangement, they would either transfer
him to a different CCR where he had fewer connections or would decide
to leave him in the traditional model, in another facility. One former offi-
cial described the challenging experience of transferring the first group of
women prisoners who moved from a traditional facility to a CCR.
112 J. Peirce
When we took them out and were coming for the transfer, I remember
we entered the prison with them, and they were there with mouths open,
because if you had a cell like your own house, with your night table, TV,
with three other prisoners under your command, who did your ironing
and cooking, and then you come into [the CCR] with your bag [suitcase]
and they tell you, you’re in bed 107, it’s yours, floor 2, they didn’t believe
it. The first night with all of them supposedly sleeping, we got the call
about the first riot the women did.
Overcoming this initial resistance to the change in the privileges of the

prison conditions required CCR staff to be deliberate about who moved
to which facility and when. In this sense, at the beginning, the selec-
tion of people in CCRs, at least in the initial stages, is not random
or comprehensive, even though most prisoners are transferred without
incident.
The CCR management strategy relies on the formal authorities
providing full supervision and coordination in all areas of daily life. Each
facility has a director and deputy directors for security, treatment, educa-
tion, legal issues, and administration, each with a staff team. The VTPs
specialize into roles, including perimeter security, transfers of high-profile
prisoners, admissions, searches, overseeing certain dormitory or activity
areas, etc. Some have additional training and work in educational or
psychological treatment programs or in administrative roles. Only those
in perimeter security and prisoner-transfer roles carry firearms; those in
other roles carry only small batons. The rules are clear, posted on walls,
and procedures are spelled out in an Operations Manual. Routines are
scheduled into 30-min increments and VTPs shift prisoners from one
program area to another in organized lines.
The CCRs do provide vastly more basic conditions and amenities—
but they are not always 100% available or completely free of charge, in
practice. In general, CCR prisoners had full access to clean water, toilets,
and three meals a day at no charge. There were significant complaints
about the quality and quantity of food, however. In my survey, this was
the most common complaint about the CCR facilities, with over 30%
describing it as “bad” and another 60% describing it as “mediocre.”
Since people have the option to purchase outside food in traditional
prisons, the rule against doing so in CCRs means that prisoners do not
have the opportunity to supplement their food intake out of pocket,
except through a limited and expensive commissary. In terms of sleeping
space, there is no charge for a bed space. According to my survey, 88%
of prisoners slept in a mattress, with the remainder citing shortages of
supplies in certain facilities. In a few CCRs, prisoners reported having
to pay for mattresses or sheets, again due to supply shortage. They
also expressed frustration about having to purchase other essential prod-
ucts only through the administration’s channels—items such as clothing,
hygiene products, medicine—with limited options for their families to
find the best price or version outside the facility.
In the new model facilities, prisoners generally describe the overall
social environment in terms that imply less overall violence and fear:
orderly, safe, tranquil, and regulated. In interviews, they attributed this
difference due primarily to the much more extensive, structured, and
well-resourced work of prison staff in new model facilities. The staff
are involved in all aspects of daily activities, from leading programs to
imposing discipline to sharing leisure time with prisoners. I regularly
observed VTP officers, including senior ones, spending time playing
cards or dominoes or basketball with prisoners and interacting socially
in a friendly manner. This is in stark contrast to US prisons—where offi-
cers are almost always in control/surveillance mode—and to old model
facilities, where staff interact with prisoners mostly only for gate control.
Further, daily life in CCRs is generally quite full and regimented, with
time blocks for morning and afternoon activities, meals, daily counts,
etc.; VTP officers ensure circulation of groups through this daily routine.
In interviews and surveys, prisoners almost all said that the Represen-
tante and Comité system does not operate in the new model facilities,
except for a designated inmate per cell who is responsible for assigning
cleaning tasks each week. One focus group participant explained:
I can answer this because I’ve been in the two [models]. Here is better,
because in the public [traditional], the chief, when you pay him, you’re
paying him to do a job. The chief has people in the street. For example,
if I’m here and the chief. And if he [a fellow prisoner] wants to know
something about his case, I charge him and I call my assistant outside to
114 J. Peirce
go and investigate that, because he’s paying. [Here] we cannot pay because
the state pays, but nor can we tell [someone] what to do. For example,
he’s been in prison for 8 months, but they gave him three months [of
pretrial detention], and he’s almost at 8 months and doesn’t know the
reason for this length of time. The legal officer [of the CCR] is there for
that, to call the prosecutor and tell the Attorney General’s Office, tell the
accused person who is his assigned lawyer and what’s going on with him.
There is a sub-rosa economy among prisoners in CCRs—particularly

with respect to drug sales and cellphone access—and the accompanying
violence that sometimes flares up over disputes and debts. But most pris-
oners in CCRs report that illicit goods and violence among prisoners
is minimal, due largely to the constant surveillance by VTP officers.
Further, prisoners who are “notorious” (famous) or part of organized
crime are typically held in a separate block in maximum security condi-
tions. Nonetheless, I observed that some prisoners in the regular cellblock
areas enjoyed some additional privileges—autonomy, access to more
resources—if they joined religiously-based “good conduct” or “therapeu-
tic” sectors. VTP officers spoke plainly about the fact that members of
these groups enjoyed more trust from officers, due in part to their shared
religiosity.
Discipline in new model CCRs is a central pillar of the work of
the VTP officers. Indeed, more new model prisoners experience serious
punishment more than old model prisoners, according to my survey:
46% of new model prisoners, compared to 21% in old model facili-
ties. Staff in CCRs have a process set out in their manual, including a
type of tribunal called the Comisión or Junta de Evaluación y Sanción,
composed of the prison director, a security officer, a psychologist, and an
educator (but no representative for the inmate). According to CCR staff
I interviewed in a larger facility, the Junta typically meets once or twice a
week, and reviews from five to twelve incidents per meeting. The scale of
consequences ranges from a verbal reprimand to removal of certain priv-
ileges (most commonly, phone access and conjugal visits), with the most
severe punishment being a month in solitary confinement or a transfer
of up to 60 days to another facility. The Junta also imposes the threat of
not achieving a “good conduct status” for future parole applications or

applications to work-release programs, according to one focus group.
Even though international prison standards emphasize drastically
reducing the use of solitary confinement,2 the new model CCRs use a
form of solitary confinement quite extensively: 46% of survey respon-
dents reported having spent time in solitary confinement (more than
twice the proportion in rulay prisons) and the median length of time was
25 days. The new model staff call this isolation cell the “reflection space”
or espacio de reflexión, implying that it facilitates internal thinking and
change by the prisoner. The permissible sentence is one to thirty days,
and if an inmate “reoffends,” additional periods of stay may be added.
One prisoner described the Junta’s process as such:
They have a council, among themselves like a court, you go, they sit you
down, ask you what happened, how was it, and they tell you to leave …
They ask you “what are you here for?” [and you say] “well for drugs, or
because I slashed so-and-so.” They take that into account and tell you
thirty days in reflection, or fifteen, whatever.
The physical cell space is moderately more humane than in the old
model, and prison staff may permit access to programs (but often do
not). Still, prisoners report that people are put in “reflection” for other
behavioral objectives, not just punishment for infractions. For example,
I heard anecdotes about VTP officers putting prisoners in the reflection
cell to detox from a drug addiction, to “encourage” school attendance,
and to separate people who have mental breakdowns or suicide attempts
from the general population. The fact that CCR prisoners refer to this
cell as the plancha (the grill) implies that they see it as equivalent to the
isolation cell in the old model. Most prisoners saw the isolation cell as
justifiable punishment for certain rule infractions, but almost all shared
the view that the VTP agents use the reflexion space arbitrarily, for even
small slights.
Notably, prisoners in the new model facilities talk about a signifi-
cant amount of violence committed by prison staff, specifically those
2 For example, the UN Mandela Rules cap stays at 15 days and prohibit this for certain
vulnerable groups.
116 J. Peirce
who are in a security role (rather than a role such as teacher, psycholo-
gist, or administrator). Officially, staff in the new model facilities are not
permitted to use violence as a disciplinary tactic; the operations manual
specifies sanctions against any staff member who does so. Yet, in the new
model facilities, prisoners widely report that security officers use violence,
mainly for this purpose. For example, one prisoner told me,
They hit you, mistreat you. Supposedly if this is a rehabilitation center,

they have a repressive part, punishment, which is to isolate you for 1
month, 2 months, a year, six months, ten days, fifteen days. One supposes
that’s there so that [an officer] resists the mistreatment of a person. So
I say, if they’re going to mistreat you, beat you, they should drop the
isolation cell, and that’s it. If they have isolation, I believe they should
not be hitting people.
The governance strategy in new model facilities contains contradictions.

On paper, it relies on a modern corrections and rehabilitation logic and
transparent, orderly procedures, with clear delineations of roles for offi-
cers and no role for prisoners in day-to-day management. In practice,
it is clear that officers sometimes break procedure and employ arbitrary
and/or physical force in their efforts to keep order. While material condi-
tions are relatively similar for all prisoners, there are some groups who
enjoy slightly better conditions and/or more autonomy in their activi-
ties. Prisoners generally appreciate the free and equitable access to basic
amenities but complain fiercely about the shortages and the officers who
misuse their authority.
Discussion: Integrating Conceptual

Frameworks of Prison Governance
The Dominican prison system provides a unique window into signifi-
cant changes in governance arrangements in prisons that feature the usual
characteristics of Latin American prisons. Due to the reform process over
the past two decades, as well as changes in prison conditions, authorities
have sought to alter how prisons are managed. This occurred through
robust, direct interventions that aimed to dismantle and replace the

previous arrangements (in the case of the CCRs) and more gradual,
negotiated adjustments to infuse more formal authority into shared
arrangements with prisoners (in the case of the traditional prisons).
The Dominican case study helps to illustrate the importance of inte-
grating two prominent conceptual frameworks of prison governance in
the research: Skarbek’s theory of official / extra-official and centralized
/ decentralized governance, and Pérez Guadalupe & Nuñovero’s theory
of institutional presence and degree of dialogue (Pérez Guadalupe &
Nuñovero Cisneros, 2019; Skarbek, 2020).
In the traditional model Dominican prisons, the provó era is a classic
example of one extreme in both frameworks. In terms of institutional
presence, it is toward the “abdicated” end of the spectrum, as formal
authorities only guarded the gates. Due to this neglect, the official
governance system did not provide sufficient goods and protection,
so extra-official governance flourished. The provó maintained a fairly
centralized grip on power over key areas—assignment of living spaces,
movement of bulk goods, the drug trade, weapons, and discipline. His
power over economic activity and ability to control information and
enforcement mutually reinforced one another, in line with Skarbek’s
theory. But prisoners also participated in highly decentralized forms of
self-governance, organizing delivery of small amounts of food and other
goods through visitors, setting and enforcing daily behavioral rules at
the cellblock level, and generally surviving autonomously at the micro
level where less profit was at stake. Finally, in this era, there was no
effort by authorities to develop dialogue with prisoner organizations,
except for coordination between certain police/military officers and the
provó directly. Thus, while this dialogue was real, it does not represent
genuine institutional engagement with prisoners’ concerns in the way
Pérez Guadalupe and Nuñovero posit.
When the formal authorities decided to develop more presence and
authority inside traditional systems, they did engage in dialogue with
prisoners (not just the provó) about the daily operations and needs of
hundreds of men in any given prison. Although it seems that formal
authorities determined the design of the Representante system and the
allocation of roles and resources unilaterally, they did also make room
118 J. Peirce
for substantive input from prisoners in terms of the selection of Repre-

sentantes. Still, this dialogue is not comprehensive or equitable, as once
the Representante is selected, the authorities negotiate primarily with him
and his Committee, not the prison population at large in some quasi-
democratic way. Furthermore, they increased the presence of formal staff
in the day-to-day activities, in particular through visible infrastructure
improvements and some health and program services.
This represents a shift from abdicated institutional presence toward
something in between—but not authoritarian. In Pérez Guadalupe and
Nuñovero’s typology, then, the Representante model sits somewhere in
the middle of both axes: some institutional presence and some dialogue.
Following Skarbek, this transition did increase the quality of official
governance to some extent—modest improvements in conditions and
a significant improvement in safety and conflict resolution due to the
Comité’s tribunals replacing the heavy hand of the provó. Still, the state
authorities are far from fulfilling prisoners’ basic needs, and so a form of
co-governance emerges, mainly through the Representante and Comité.
This prisoner-led arrangement is centralized because the formal authori-
ties deliberately give information and enforcement capacity to this group;
they do not need to rely solely on violence to acquire this.
The Comité system does substantively improve the quality of gover-
nance: it facilitates some better conditions—even if prisoners must pay
extra taxes and provide free labor for infrastructure projects—and reduces
violence and conflict through its tribunal. Skarbek gives less emphasis
to the importance of prisoners’ sense of participation in co-governance
arrangements, but prisoners in my study spoke often about this issue.
They largely accept the Comité system, despite its serious shortcomings,
because they feel they have some degree of voice in how it works. Also,
they retain some autonomy over the micro-level choices in their daily
lives.
In contrast, the New Model CCR governance arrangements sit in
a different area of both typologies. Through Skarbek’s framework, the
New Model facilities do vastly improve material conditions and security
through free, government-provided amenities, space, and supervision.
This puts the CCRs squarely in the “official governance” side of the
typology—but, as my interviews demonstrate, prisoners are still dissatis-

fied with the quality of the fulfillment of these basic needs. They must
pay for mattresses that should be free; they have three very meager meals
per day; they experience fear of violence committed by VTP officers.
But there is only minimal emergence of any co-governance or
prisoner-led solutions. This is largely because the authorities make signif-
icant effort to prevent such dynamics. They permit only very modest
“privileged” groups and areas under the auspices of church-led enti-
ties and a very ascetic set of behavioral norms. It is notable that the
Dominican CCRs have not experienced more presence of prison gangs
or other criminal groups attempting to exploit this gap, as Skarbek has
documented in the US context (Skarbek, 2014). This may be because
the institutional presence in the CCRs, while strict, still allows some
degree of prisoner autonomy. Further, prisoners perceive this arrange-
ment in contrast to the Comité system in the traditional model, and so
they may be more ready to accept the tradeoff of less participation for
better amenities.
In terms of institutional presence, the CCRs raise the question of a
potential third category in Pérez Guadalupe and Nuñovero spectrum.
The VTP staff model has full, robust presence, but it is not author-
itarian in the way the Peruvian scholars describe. Rather, the CCRs’
emphasis on rehabilitation programs, arts, and culture dilutes some of
the quasi-military dynamics in other highly formalized Latin American
prisons. However, the most significant complaint from CCR prisoners
is about their constrained autonomy: they cannot buy food if they are
hungry, they must follow strict daily routines, and they have few avenues
of recourse if they perceive an abuse of power by an officer. In this
sense, the “dialogue” that the government officials develop in the CCRs
is closer to the “apparent” end of the spectrum in Pérez Guadalupe and
Nuñovero’s framework. The Dominican CCR case is distinct, though,
in that the authorities largely appear to be sincere in their efforts to
build a formally managed, rehabilitation-oriented system. To them, their
engagement with prisoners’ concerns is genuine and constructive, not
just marketing or tokenism. So, the spectrum of the degree of dialogue
should also specify whether perceptions of both parties to the dialogue
align or not.
120 J. Peirce
Conclusion
This chapter has outlined the evolution of governance and social order
arrangements during the prison reform process in the Dominican
Republic, in traditional and new model prisons. In both settings, the
arrangements are complex and contingent, particularly during periods
when official policy and concrete prison conditions are changing. The
CCR governance approach of robust formal authority was developed
externally and imposed top-down, and now grapples with the shortages
of material goods and the challenges of officers who use violence or force.
The cost of retaining full formal control and not allowing some more
meaningful spaces for prisoner participation in decisions or ability to
acquire goods beyond what the state requires is widespread frustration
and cynicism among prisoners. The Representante system emerged more
organically, as authorities responded to external pressure and scrutiny
sparked by the reform process. The negotiation between formal authori-
ties and Representantes has different content and power dynamics in each
facility, as the very severe material shortages dictate certain distributions
of roles and power, in line with Skarbek’s theory.
To prisoners, this is a tradeoff that allows them some more autonomy
and access to “banned” goods, but they live in the unpredictability of
unofficial arrangements that largely rely on individual discretion by pris-
oner leaders and staff. And still, they struggle to meet their basic material
and security needs. Nonetheless, it is striking that in neither setting
is there a governance arrangement that is rooted in hierarchical street
gang rule. This is common in other parts of Latin America and tends to
generate the most difficult challenges for both prisoners and staff. Thus,
the Dominican case offers some lessons for the region.
However, the nuances of governance tactics in different prisons exist
within the larger context of the Dominican judicial system and the
political incentives that shape it. Despite two decades of implementa-
tion of the adversarial system—meant to reduce long pretrial detention
and to bolster due process—Dominican prisons remain full of people
in pretrial detention. The overall prison population has doubled during
the reform period, with about two thirds in pretrial detention. Polit-
ical leaders and judges readily point to the progressive achievements of
the New Model CCRs but simultaneously uphold the widespread use
of pretrial detention instead of available alternatives. This leads to a
contradictory reality: as the CCRs have expanded, the traditional prisons
remain as full as they were in 2003. To put it more bluntly, the existence
of the New Model relies largely on the continued existence of the tradi-
tional model—to absorb “extra” prisoners. The political confrontations
that would be necessary to drastically scale back the prison population—
namely, constraining pretrial detention, shortening sentence lengths,
and expanding parole—might not be feasible. Reducing the scope of
the prison system overall would also require tackling the corruption
incentives that continue to infuse prison operations, especially in the
traditional model.
The recent initiatives to expand CCRs and dismantle traditional
prisons—through the Humanization Plan and its new iterations –are
laudable. But any effort to implement a governance approach that
achieves order, and a sense of fairness will quickly be corroded if the
judicial system and political culture remain punitive and risk averse. An
eventual outcome could be a kind of “hybrid” of the staff presence and
structures of the CCRs with some of the prisoner-led initiatives of the
traditional model. The central political challenge, though, is to shift the
incentives of judicial actors toward alternatives to incarceration. With
smaller, less crowded prisons and with more efficient and transparent
judicial processes, some of the key shortages and pressures that shape the
governance dynamics described in this paper would fade. Smaller prisons
with stable populations are easier to manage and could better allocate
scarce resources.
Policymakers who support improving prisoner rights and well-being
must also try to understand how and why certain changes occur, and
why actors inside prisons welcome or resist these changes (Goodman
et al., 2015). In the Dominican context, this requires an honest assess-
ment of how to apply more state control and transparency on the existing
self-governance system without inadvertently causing a backlash due to
a perception that people are “worse off ” without the jefe at the helm.
The themes emerging from my interviews suggests that prisoners value
access to basic material goods and services (free for the most basic and
at a fair cost for discretionary items), predictability and transparency
122 J. Peirce
regarding enforcement of rules, fair and impartial treatment, opportu-

nities to resolve conflicts, opportunities to contribute to decisions, and
having a recourse channel for cases of abuse of authority. In short, mate-
rial conditions and lack of violence matter, but only as part of this
longer list. This provides support for theories of legitimacy and proce-
dural justice in prisons (Jackson et al., 2010), including in a non-Western
and hybrid-governance setting. As scholars of reform elsewhere have also
noted (Crewe, 2011) even when institutional and physical changes are
implemented, if power relations and incentives for transparency and fair-
ness remain unchanged, prospects for true rehabilitation of incarcerated
people are slim.
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Dynamics and variations
The Carceral Reproduction of Neoliberal
Order: Power, Ideology and Economy
in Venezuelan Prison
Andrés Antillano
Introduction
The “rehabilitation center” is a prison within the prison. Furthermore,
it is perhaps the only thing that evokes, within Peonía, the image of a
prison. Occupying a dilapidated building (an old administrative office
at the time when the state controlled the prison), about 20 inmates
(although the number can fluctuate: after a particularly busy weekend,
when the population rises or close to holidays and special occasions, like
Christmas, the number usually grows to more than 50) wander into an
area no larger than 100 square meters, confined by a wire fence that
separates the compound from the rest of the prison facilities, under the
indifferent watch of a pastor and his deacons, who monitor and manage
the center. Boys with dark skin, with shaved heads (one of the marks of
A. Antillano (B)
Central University of Venezuela, Caracas, Venezuela
e-mail: andresantillano@gmail.com

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98602-5_5
130 A. Antillano
punishment that they must wear with resignation during their stay in
the center), wearing shorts and sleeveless shirts, spend their time doing
nothing, watching television in the common room where they also sleep
(the thin and dirty mats are stacked against one of the walls), waiting
to be called for the hard and unpleasant tasks which they are forced to
complete: unloading the truck that brings food to the prison, hauling
goods to the stores controlled by the bosses, cleaning and garbage collec-
tion tasks, carrying the corpses of other prisoners executed or killed in
clashes with rival gangs, or any other tasks that the bosses order.
The life of the prisoners in the center is monotonous and meaningless,
they are suffering from the restrictions and stigmas that are imposed as
part of their punishment. Unlike the rest of their fellow inmates, they
are prevented from moving freely through the rest of the prison and
they cannot use time at their discretion; instead, they stay within the
closed perimeter of the center, subject to arbitrary orders and treatment
that infantilize them. Not even the bathroom has doors, to avoid sexual
foreplay with fellow inmates or even masturbation. Despite its preten-
tious name, except for the obligation to participate in collective prayers,
which the inmates assume with a mixture of indifference and cynicism,
there is nothing of rehabilitation in the rehabilitation center: it is a place
where the bosses who control the jail send those inmates who violate
the harsh unwritten rules that govern inside the prison. These violations
can range from robberies, using innuendo to refer to women visiting
other inmates, fights and any act of interpersonal violence, including
insults and teasing, ignoring strict regulations on language and dress,
indecent acts, or double-meaning phrases that produce irritation in other
members of the community, and homosexual contact, failure to pay
debts, including the regular payment they must make to live in peace
within the prison, or for any act of defiance of those who govern the
prison.
In a different sense, life in the rest of the prison could hardly be
more of a contrast: hundreds of prisoners indulge in bustling activity,
in which everything, as long as it does not violate the rules and can
be paid for, is allowed. Dozens of small shops provide any merchan-
dise imaginable: varied dishes (while inmates without resources must
prepare their food on makeshift fires or depend on inedible prison food),
The Carceral Reproduction of Neoliberal Order: Power … 131
clothes, tattoos, drugs, pirated movies, artisanal alcohol. Even on special

occasions, women who come from the street offer sex or stripping. Pris-
oners with more money wear fashionable clothes, carry state-of-the-art
cell phones, and wear gold garments, while the poorest are covered with
simple clothes worn out by use. The kingpins and those who can pay live
in spacious cells, some old offices now converted into luxurious rooms,
with jacuzzies, plasma televisions, and other amenities, while the poorest
sleep in overcrowded cells, if they can pay for them, or in makeshift huts
out in the open.
This peculiar device, the “rehabilitation center” (a prison made by the
same prisoners to punish other prisoners), makes sense in the light of
informal agreements and transactions with the State, which forces the
gang that controls the prison to substitute the use of corporal punish-
ment and punitive executions for less visible sanctions. These agreements
and transactions together with a certain process of bureaucratization, in
the Weberian sense of the term, causes the most expressive and violent
forms of exercise of power to be abandoned by the bosses who govern the
prison for other more rationalized and effective, in addition to its useful-
ness as a means for the profit and overexploitation of the captive labor
force and discipline of the prison population. In contrast, the picture of a
prison outside state control and self-governed by the inmates themselves
is already part of the usual landscape of Latin American prisons. But
what we are interested in highlighting in this article is how, unexpect-
edly, the social order sustained by the inmates of Peonía (as in so many
other Venezuelan prisons and throughout Latin America) on the margins
of the state, emulates, like a fairground mirror, societal models and penal
prescriptions of the neoliberal creed: de factoprivatization of the public,
deregulation, commodification, prison technologies proposed by neolib-
eralism. All this in Venezuela, a country governed by a political project
that sought to leave behind the neoliberal legacy of previous govern-
ments, along with its heritage of social exclusion and criminalization of
the poor (Antillano, 2012, 2018).
We propose to account for the similarities between social order
constructed by prisoners themselves, within a self-ruled prison, and prac-
tices and discourses typical of the neoliberal creed, part of its penitentiary
program (privatization of prison management, exhaustive control and
132 A. Antillano
supervision, rigorous and labor-intensive disciplinary regime), or even of

its more general premises (conservative values, commodification, indi-
vidualistic ethic, hierarchization and inequality, overexploitation and
dispossession). These similarities, where a group of socially excluded
prisoners duplicates and reproduce the same devices that lead to their
exclusion, are an even greater paradox if they are considered to occur
within the framework of a political project that seeks to overcome the
neoliberal legacy and dignify the poor, including those locked up in
prison. This allows us to understand neoliberalism not only as a doctrine,
a set of policies or rationality but above all as a social arrangement,
in this case, constituted by the effect of the continuity of the use of
prison as a mechanism of segregation and control of the surplus popula-
tion (key to neoliberal governance, as Wacquant pointed out) and the
emergence, within the prison, of an economy based on dispossession
(Harvey, 2004), as a result of double exclusion (social and institutional)
that prison implies for this surplus segment of the population.
After two decades of post-neoliberalism,1 the balance of progressive
governments in South America is uneven and not very encouraging.
Despite the bright promises and undoubted progress, in most cases, there
are signs of exhaustion and restoration. In countries such as Argentina,
Brazil, Bolivia, and Ecuador, neoliberal governments substitute post-
neoliberal projects -although in some cases for a short period-, while
in Venezuela, after three lustrums of poverty and inequality reduction,
the same government that raised the banners of social justice restores,
1 The wave of post-neoliberal governments in Latin America began with the victory of Hugo
Chávez in 1998 in Venezuela, where, after his death, his party (United Socialist Party of
Venezuela) still governs. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won the elections in Brazil with the Workers’
Party, then was succeeded by his fellow Dilma Rousseff, who was overthrown in 2016. Also
in 2003, in Argentina, Néstor Kirchner took the government, which was succeeded by his
wife Cristina Fernández, to be replaced by a right-wing government in 2015, but to return
to power, this time led by Alberto Fernandez, in 2019. In 2006, Evo Morales came to power
with the Movement toward Socialism, who was evicted by a coup in 2019 but returned in
2020. In Ecuador, Rafael Correa governed between 2007 and 2017. Other countries that
experienced progressive governments during the period were Honduras (2006–2009) Nicaragua
(2007-present), Uruguay (2005–2020), Paraguay (2008–2012) El Salvador (2009–2019), Peru
(2011–2016), Saint Vicent and the Grenadines (2001–present). Despite significant social and
economic advances and important democratic innovations, most of these governments have over
time been ousted by coups, through adverse electoral results, or have had marked authoritarian
drifts.
without confessing it, neoliberal policies that were repudiated in the

past. In all cases, there are evident signs of exhaustion of post-neoliberal
proposals, of the perseverance of dynamics of dispossession, exploitation,
exclusion, and domination typical of the order that was intended to be
left behind. When the restorative impulses loom as an imminent threat,
it should be asked if they do not find in the persistence of practices
typical of neoliberalism, but underground and peripheral, the conditions
that, from below, fertilize and reproduce their resurgence.
This paper discusses this reproduction of neoliberalism from below
(Gago, 2015) regarding a space distant from the scene of the great polit-
ical projects and economic models: the prison. For this, we will consider
neoliberalism not as a doctrine or a rationality but as a set of prac-
tices (which also involve subjectivities, discourses, norms, and values)
that operate under certain conditions and are governed by a rationality
based on calculation, competition, and the search for maximization of
economic gains. In this way, areas regulated by different practices and
rationalities (democracy and politics, public interest and common goods,
rights and solidarity, honor and reputation, rehabilitation and justice,
in the case of prisons) would be colonized by practices oriented toward
the pursuit of profit through competition, exploitation, and disposses-
sion, subordinating themselves to rationality proper to the free market.
A sort of commodification of the different spheres of social life (Foucault,
2007) or rather, as Brown (2016) clarifies, an extrapolation of the market
model and competition to areas and practices previously alien to it. This
definition allows us to recognize the neoliberal nature both in institu-
tional practices emanating from centers of power (state or not), such as
economic policies that involve the dismantling of rights and the expan-
sion of the market logic to areas previously considered of public interest,
and social practices “from below” produced by collective subjects (we
could even suppose that both practices from above and practices from
below interact and constitute each other). The ascription or doctrinal
acknowledgment of the neoliberal creed is irrelevant, as it emphasizes
practices and their rationality rather than the explicit sense that agents
attribute to such practices. Our interest is to describe the prison social
order, as it is manifested in Peonía, based on its identities with practices
and logics typical of the neoliberal order (whether in what is prescribed
134 A. Antillano
concerning the prison or about more general values and practices) and to
inquire the material conditions that make it possible for such practices to
flourish in a context as unlikely as a prison self-governed by the prisoners
themselves.
Our fieldwork, carried out intensively between 2012 and 2015—
entailing two or three visits per week—and then until 2017 through
more sporadic visits, focused on Peonía, a prison facility just over 100 km
from Caracas, controlled by a prison gang. Chelina Sepúlveda, Iván Pojo-
movsky, Alberto Alvarado and Amarilys Hidalgo actively participated in
this research.
An extensive literature associates neoliberal hegemony with recent
changes in the prison. On the one hand, scholars point out how the
increase in the incarcerated population is consistent with changes in
rationality and sensitivity typical of neoliberal regimes (Cavadino &
Dignan, 2006; Garland, 2005; Melossi, 2009; O’Malley, 2009); this
is also explained as a control mechanism complementary to the flex-
ibility of work and the exclusion inherent to the economic changes
that derive from the new order (De Giorgi, 2004, 2007; Wacquant,
2003, 2010). On the other hand, the neoliberal project permeates the
prison space, reconfiguring its nature, functioning, and effects (Irwin &
Owen, 2004; Pemberton, 2009; Wacquant, 2001a). We propose that
both dynamics associated with the neoliberal program, the expansion of
the use of the prison as a form of control and legitimation and the muta-
tions in its internal order, are related to each other, which is why the
insistence of post-neoliberal governments on mass imprisonment would
produce as a paradoxical effect changes within the prison that emulate
the penitentiary program advocated by neoliberalism.
The Long Neoliberal Night

Neoliberal hegemony in the region coincides with dramatic changes
in the place and functioning of prisons in Latin American societies.
Since the late 1980s, when the so-called “Washington Consensus” was
imposed, the prison population in Latin America has increased fivefold
(Iturralde, 2019; Nuñovero, 2019), in contrast to the relative stability of
the incarceration rate during previous decades, when a good part of the
countries of the region faced repressive dictatorships. Democratic tran-
sitions converged the arrival of neoliberal policies (although incubated
during authoritarian regimes) and the widespread use of incarceration.
The growth in the incarcerated population was accompanied by an
increase in intramural conflict, riots, massacres, and the emergence of
prison gangs throughout the region, which put the governability of the
prisons in check and even managed to wrest control from authorities.
In addition to explaining the excessive growth of the incarcerated
population, neoliberalism has an impact on the functioning of prisons
through policies that generate disorganization of their informal order
and deterioration of the material conditions of the prisoners. Thus,
the “rehabilitative ideal” and treatment programs are discarded, replaced
with harsh discipline and exhaustive and rigorous control (Irwin, 2004;
Simon, 2000). Educational or treatment activities diminish or disap-
pear altogether.2 An attempt is made, generally with dubious results,
to bring Latin American prison systems up to date with neoliberal
reforms imported from central countries, such as privatization processes
or attempts to implement supermax prisons.
In Venezuela, during the 1980s and 1990s, the incarcerated popula-
tion skyrocketed dramatically, coinciding with the application of neolib-
eral policies and the consequent impoverishment of the population and
increased inequality. The prison population increased from 12,000 in
1980 to more than 29,000 in 1989. Since 1989, with the second wave
of neoliberal reforms (deregulation of the labor market, privatization of
services, fall in state social spending), the incarcerated population grew
again, surpassing the barrier of 30 thousand inmates. At the end of
the 1990s, at the hands of a center-left government that maintains the
neoliberal adjustment program, incarceration slowed its growth and even
2 This statement, however, requires nuances, at least in the case of Latin American coun-
tries, because although in most countries a punitive and incapacitating approach of the prison
prevails, and the prisoners are left to inactivity without many options of treatment, education
or recreation programs, at the same time in recent years projects that recover the ideal of reha-
bilitation and treatment have been tried in different countries. See, i.e.: Hathazy (2016); Peirce
(in this volume).
136 A. Antillano
decreased, to stabilize around 25 thousand inmates (see Antillano et al.,

2016).3
The use of incarceration was growing hand in hand with legal reforms,
but above all with aggressive police policies that increased arrests and
sent more people to prison. Already precarious treatment programs were
abandoned and investment in education and prison labor was reduced.
Even the progressive system, the basis of the idea of rehabilitation, was
replaced by a mechanical calculation that considers hours of study and
labor to reduce the length of the sentence. Faced with the decline of the
rehabilitative ideology, although it only had served to give a veneer of
legitimacy to the prison management, institutional violence and coercion
became the only and naked resources. The increase in the incarcerated
population fractures the existing order and the capacity for state regu-
lation, producing riots and episodes of increasing violence between the
prisoners and from the authorities toward the prisoners. During those
years, the first prison gangs emerged and firearms appeared inside the
facilities.
The marriage between neoliberalism and punitivism has been widely
discussed in the Anglo-Saxon context and, although to a lesser extent, in
European and Latin American contexts (see, for Latin America, Hathazy,
2013; Iturralde, 2019; Sozzo, 2016; Wacquant, 2003; Wilenmann,
2020). The relationship between the use of the prison and the reinforce-
ment and legitimation of the neoliberal State (Davies, 2014; Hancourt,
2010; Wacquant, 2010), the substitution of the waning welfare poli-
cies (Beckett & Western, 2001), its use as a means of controlling the
surplus population (De Giorgi, 2004, 2007; Wacquant, 2010), its asso-
ciation with the fears and anxieties of the middle class (Cheliotis, 2013),
the affinities with neoliberal moral discourses on crime and poverty,
and with managerial rationality focused on risk in neoliberal governance
(O’Malley, 2009), would explain this relation. For its part, the redesign
of penitentiary regimes is explained by the abandonment of rehabil-
itative perspectives and their replacement by tough and managerialist
approaches, the search for cost reduction and the colonization of market
3 For a discussion on neoliberal policies in Venezuela, see Maya and Lander (2001).
criteria in the prison environment, as well as the attractive opportunities

offered by the private exploitation of oversaturated prison systems.
The Prison Pink Tide

Although the relationship of these changes in contexts of neoliberal
governments might be evident, in countries that have tried post-
neoliberal change these trends have not necessarily been reversed. Despite
denunciations of the punitive legacy of the previous regime and an initial
impulse to introduce important legal changes, and although together
they maintained lower incarceration rates than their neighbors (with
the dramatic exception of Brazil, Uruguay, and El Salvador), progressive
governments quickly restored punitive legislation and mass incarcera-
tion policies, even presenting spectacular increases in their incarceration
rate: El Salvador (411%), Ecuador (398%), Venezuela (302%), Brazil
(221%), Nicaragua (219%), Bolivia (with an overpopulation of more
than 200%) (Iturralde, 2019; Nuñovero, 2019).
Also operating in these contexts is the remodeling of the internal
regime in a direction similar to that of their peers who continued along
the neoliberal path: privatizations as in the case of the APAC model
in Brazil (although it is certainly a project of a religious nature and
not a business for profit; see Darke, in this volume), regimes of draco-
nian control (the case of El Salvador and Brazil, where an attempt was
even made to transplant the supermax model), militarization, increasing
violence against prisoners, hard control, etc. The vain promises of
redemption of post-neoliberal projects are exposed when considering
the persistence (or even worsening) of the patterns of violence, oppres-
sion, hopelessness and chaos within prisons, embodied in the Scylla and
Charybdis of institutional violence and the prison gangs that govern
the lives of inmates (Cerbini, 2012; Dias et al., in this volume; Dieter
Stegemann, in this volume; Nunes, 2011; Nuñez, 2007).
This continuity in the penal field of formulas more typical of neolib-
eralism does not fail to pose problems and challenges to progressive
projects. First, it brings back to the discussion the proverbial lack of
“criminological imagination” of the Left, which is often torn between
138 A. Antillano
immobility and replications of conservative and anti-popular positions in

the face of the challenges of crime and the use of punishment. Second, it
also shows the limits of these transformative projects in a broader sense,
since the prison, which continues to recruit its clients from the most
disadvantaged groups, reveals the insufficiency of social inclusion efforts
and transformation of the structural conditions that generate exclusion
and inequality. Finally, the resurgence or persistence of practices typical
of neoliberalism, whether through policies carried out by the State or
through spontaneous, underground, and peripheral social practices, blurs
the distinction between neoliberalism and post-neoliberalism, generally
posed in terms of discourses sustained or proposed programs.
In Venezuela, the government that was inaugurated in 1999, with
the presidency of Hugo Chávez, proposed from the beginning a break
with the neoliberal policies that characterized previous governments,
including distancing itself from the mano dura policies that served to
criminalize broad disadvantaged groups. During the first years, as a result
of inclusive social policies, poverty and inequality were reduced, while
some timid measures allowed a significant reduction of the incarcerated
population, which went from 25 thousand prisoners at the beginning of
the new government (120/100,000) to 14 thousand (57/100,000) in the
first year. However, the number of prisoners began to rise just a couple
of years later, the effect of legislative changes and aggressive policing. In
2002 there were 20 thousand prisoners, and in 2009, paradoxically coin-
ciding with the highest levels of well-being in the general population, the
prison population reached the historical figure of 50 thousand, for a rate
of 170/100.000, not counting the growing number of detainees in police
headquarters, which is not reflected in official statistics.4
This twist can be explained by changes in the Chavismo narrative on
crime (from “structural” rhetoric during the first years, which understood
crime as a consequence of social disadvantage and called for policies of
inclusion to a moral discourse on crime as a consequence of “capitalist
4 Although detainees in police headquarters have been a constant since the entry into force of
new procedural legislation in 1999, their number has increased substantially in the last decade,
until today it is equal to or even greater than the number of registered prisoners. The opacity
of this figure is important since it depends on local authorities or police who do not report
prison statistics, collected by the Ministry of the Penitentiary Service.
values”), or due to disputes within Chavismo, a particularly heteroge-

neous political project, between actors with more progressive positions
in criminal matters and others (especially the military sector, of capital
importance that was growing over time) who held more conservative
positions. But above all, it would be the very limitations of the social
inclusion policies unfolding during those years, based fundamentally
on the redistribution of huge but fickle oil income, which, although it
improved the living conditions and the consumption capacity of disad-
vantaged groups, was not able to circumvent the structural conditioning
factors that generate poverty and inequality and have a universal impact.
This failure produced new social gaps between those who were better able
to access the opportunities for inclusion that were opened during this
period and those who were left behind (generally excluded young people,
with little capitals to compete for access to income distributed through
governmental policies and their effects on the economy), which led to an
increase in intraclass conflict, including high rates of crime and expres-
sive violence, and the rise of punitive claims from the newly included
in the face of threats from laggards. As in neoliberal contexts such as
the one described by Wacquant, mass incarceration and tough policies
become a mechanism for containing the surplus population (in this case,
from the labor market and redistributive policies) while contributing to
the legitimation of the State (Wacquant, 2010).
Neoliberalism in the Shadow

On the other side of the coin, these punitive policies and the growth
of the incarcerated population produce changes in the intramural social
order, breaking the previous forms of regulation and promoting the
emergence of prison gangs. Prison gangs in Venezuelan prisons date
back to the 1990s when the incarcerated population skyrocketed and
the state’s ability to control and support an increasingly growing and
conflictual population diminished. In Peonía, a prison whose popula-
tion ranges between 2,000 and 3,000 inmates (along with the other
facilities that make up the complex, the total number of inmates may
exceed 5,000), the presence of the state is reduced to guarding the
140 A. Antillano
outer perimeter of the prison, to a dilapidated educational center and

precarious area of culture (which do not fulfill any correctional objec-
tive: participation in educational and cultural activities only matters
to the extent that they are computed to reduce the duration of the
sentence), a medical service and a kitchen that prepares inedible mess,
from which only the inmates without any other recourse feed, while the
other inmates prepare their food or eat in the private restaurants inside
the prison, most of which are owned by the gang members. The rest of
the spheres of life are under direct monitor by the Carro, the gang that
replaces the authorities and governs the prison. As soon as they cross the
threshold that separates the entrance, under the control of armed officers
of the National Guard and the guards of the prison administration, and
enter the decrepit facilities where the prisoners live, armed men dressed
in shorts appear who control the steps of those who enter and give alerts
to others. Order, security and surveillance, the defense from rival gangs
or sporadic incursions of the National Guard, justice and discipline, the
cleaning and repair of common areas, parties, and protection of visitors,
fall under the watchful eye of the members of the Carro.
The bosses of the Carro have developed permanent supervision of the
prison population, through a complex web of surveillance and informa-
tion: Gariteros or watchmen stationed in key areas, who report any news,
luceros that tour the prison or are in charge of controlling the different
areas, prisoners who denounce to bosses to whom violate the code of
conduct that governs life in prison. The kingpins dole out justice, resolve
conflicts, impose norms and punish the wayward, most of the time by
sending them to the Rehabilitation Center, but also, depending on the
severity of the offense, by applying cruel corporal punishment.
Marked social differences distinguish the different groups within the
prison. On the one hand, the gang leaders, who hold the highest levels
of life, show off their privileges and power. When we toured the prison
with one of them, some inmates bowed or greeted them with gestures
of respect and submission. The bosses control most of the businesses
inside (and outside) the prison, they have the largest cells, equipped with
jacuzzis, latest generation televisions and other luxuries, they carry the
most ostentatious weapons and are followed by an entourage of body-
guards (their perros). The Carro also has different ranks: the luceros de
la alta (in charge of armed clashes) and the luceros de la baja (who do
police work and maintain direct contact with the population, generally
prevented from communicating directly with the bosses). Other pris-
oners, due to their position before incarceration that provide them with
money or their relationships outside the prison, also enjoy privileges
above others. Then there is the rest of the population, who dedicate
themselves to different activities to survive: they produce artisanal goods
or sell different merchandise, they spend the day lazing around, playing
basketball or talking, unless they have to garitear: the obligatory turn
of surveillance in some of the strategic points assigned to them by the
Carro.
The following social position is occupied by cristianos, members of one
of the two evangelical churches that operate in prison, who as a general
rule become believers to escape the harsh and severe rules of mundana
life, which govern the rest of the prisoners. The cristianos live in a sepa-
rate area, the iglesia, they must walk all the time with a tie and bible in
hand, and are dedicated, in addition to religious activities such as prayer
and preaching, to mediate in case of conflict, to offer refuge to those who
transgress the rules (hence they have been in charge of the management
of the “Rehabilitation Center”) and unpleasant tasks, such as picking up
garbage, caring for the wounded or carrying the dead out after confronta-
tions or executions (see on evangelical churches inside prisons in Latin
America, Navarro and Sozzo, in this volume).
Finally, the outcasts: those punished in the rehabilitation center, who
cannot move freely, are subjected to acts of debasement such as having
their heads shaved and being used as forced labor for the bosses. There
are also the abnegados, expelled from the social order, who wander on
the periphery of the prison with their mouths sewn up (a parody of
the hunger strike, which seeks to pressure the authorities to transfer
them and, at the same time, prevents being executed by the members
of the Carro, following the unwritten traditions that make the strikers
“untouchable”), waiting to be transferred to other prisons, and the
chicharrones, who do not have a visitor or means to live and must occupy
the margins of the prison.
Social stratification presupposes different living conditions within the
prison, while most of the services and goods (from food, a place to
142 A. Antillano
sleep, a room for intimate relationships, to drugs, liquor or women

for sex service) are commodities that are accessed if you pay for them.
Not only is the prison privatized de facto, but the life inside it is
markedly commercialized. Goods and services previously provided by the
state, become tradable merchandise from which everyone with sufficient
roguery or power extracts benefits. The common areas of Peonía function
as a large market in which it is possible to buy practically anything, legal
or illegal. In addition to this, all prisoners must pay the causa, a weekly
tax that allows living in prison, just as all businesses pay revoluciones, a
mandatory tribute that all commercial activity must pay to the bosses.
Although the most lucrative businesses, such as drugs, are the monopo-
lies of the members of the Carro, anyone with sufficient disposition and
resources will find the best conditions to establish an enterprise that at
least allows them to survive in prison -this entrepeneurial dimension is
also present in other different prison contexts of Latin America, see Avila
and Sozzo (in this volume).
This diverse and complex world is regulated by strict informal
rules, the rutina. These norms, which rule relations between inmates
(including relations with bosses and with lower categories), relations
with visitors and relations with prison staff, behavior in public and
private (including sexual behavior), are deeply conservative in nature:
stealing, violence, deviant sexual behavior or discourtesy toward visitors
and women receive the severest punishments, and being considered a
chocón (a rule breaker) is a serious moral devaluation both inside and
outside the prison. In the background, this set of rules, which from a
distance may seem motley and bizarre, seek to preserve internal order,
avoid fights and conflicts, provide each individual with security against
interference and aggression from others, and guarantee the incontestable
dominance of the Carro.
The rutina not only preserves the order of domination and the power
of the bosses, but also postulates and reinforces a moral order. The
informal rules that govern life inside the prison enshrine autonomy and
self-determination, even under the tyrannical rule of the Carro, prisoners
can dispose of their time and life as they please. It stimulates initiative
and self-reliance. It promotes competition, selfishness, and dominance
over others. It sacralizes hierarchies and inequality. All in a framework
in which neither the social order nor the free functioning of the prison
economies is endangered. For this reason, violent fights (and everything
that can precipitate them, such as double meanings, disrespect for visitors
from other prisoners, deviant sexual acts), challenges to bosses, robberies,
no matter how insignificant, and unpaid debts, are severely punished
(Antillano, 2015; Sepulveda & Pojomovsky, 2021). On the one hand, it
is not only that it does not prevent intolerance, abuse, and even violence
against those devalued groups (the “manchados”), but it also prescribes
them—against homosexuals and transsexuals, rapists, people who due to
their previous jobs and activities are considered undesirable, those that
for a reason they have violated the baroque informal rules (“bataneros”
or thieves, snoopers, mannered, etc.), all are subjected to rude treatment,
including conditions of slavery and debasement, and segregated from
collective life.
On the other hand, the rutina promotes self-regulation. Saberse
conducir ( knowing how to conduct yourself ), saberse comportar
(knowing how to behave) are central values in prison that are also
rewarded when returning to the world of crime (contrary to the domi-
nant idea in contemporary positivist criminology of the offender unable
to contain himself and a slave to his impulses).
Far from the anti-authoritarian creed of the first liberalism, contem-
porary neoliberal rationality emanates a gaseous moral constellation that
gathers a motley mixture of backward values (racism, machismo, conser-
vatism, Christian fundamentalism—the role of evangelism in Venezuelan
prisons, as in the rest of America Latina: See Navarro and Sozzo in this
volume), authoritarianism (discrimination, intolerance, violence) along
with values associated with unbridled capitalism and the free market
(competition, unscrupulousness, entrepreneurship, individualism, self-
responsibility), as a result of resentment that fertilizes in exclusion, the
weakening of the social and shared values and deregulation of both the
market and social life (Brown, 2019). Similarly, the informal prison
order combines entrepreneurship with conservatism, autonomy with
authoritarianism, self-responsibility with intolerance.
Surprisingly, Peonía replicates what different authors warn about
the relationship between neoliberalism, discipline and punishment
(Hancourt, 2010; Wacquant, 2010). Free and unbridled consumerism
144 A. Antillano
(the number of those punished tends to increase at times of festivi-

ties, when consumption and ostentation are exacerbated, or when the
prison population grows beyond available resources), profit motives and
ostentation, the inequalities and exclusions that proliferate everywhere
within the prison, the demand of harsh control and uncompromising
punishment, which contain those defenestrated from the paradise of
lumpen consumption and discourage any rebellion of the relegated.
The rigor of the codes, the severity of corporal punishment, the exis-
tence, in a grotesque twist, of a prison within a prison, and how these
devices target precisely those who belong the least, account for the link
between the neoliberal order (even this unnamed order that unexpectedly
grows behind the prison walls), authoritarianism and punishment. The
two images that open this chapter, that of a libertine and unrestricted
prison and, within it, another that harshly punishes the wayward and
conflictual, evoke free market societies and their excessive use of punish-
ment like a mirror or an echo for those who are outside their privileges
and at the same time sustain it.
The Kitchen of Neoliberalism

It is astonishing how this self-rule order, which condenses and reveals
abominable and dark practices, at the same time reproduces the neolib-
eral prison project. The de factoprivatization of the prison, the imposi-
tion of a draconian and authoritarian regime, where discipline renounces
any rehabilitation purpose and only concentrates on the punishment
and control of the conduct of the prisoners, the commodification of
life, where everything is paid for, the overexploitation of captive labor,
unexpectedly emulates the neoliberal recipes for criminal punishment
(Autores, 2001; Crants, 1991; Goldberg & Evans, 2009; Lotke, 1996;
Mason, 2013; Pemberton, 2009; Varios Arriagada, 2012), but this time
applied by prisoners themselves. This prison social order reproduces
the general values of the neoliberal creed: inequality, greed and compe-
tition, exploitation and taking advantage, conservative values, and an
individualistic ethic. It is a synecdoche of neoliberal society (Whitfield,
2016).
Neoliberalism is an elusive and changing concept. It is understood as

rationality (Foucault, 2007; Ferguson, 2009), a doctrine (Hayek, 2011),
a set of policies or culture (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2001). Some author
emphasis is placed on the market (Lapavitsa, 2005; Shaikh, 2005), or
on the contrary, it is argued that without a certain state configuration
(a neoliberal state) neoliberalism could not be possible Davies, 2014;
Harvey, 2007; (Wacquant, 2010). For others, neoliberalism is reduced
to the purely economic sphere, especially financialization, or it extends
to the most varied social spheres, previously outside the market. Instead,
in Latin America, a “social” reading of neoliberalism prevails, which asso-
ciates it with informality and “business opportunities” (Devés Valdés,
2003; De Soto, 1986; Gago, 2015). The persistence of neoliberal logics
and practices in contexts apparently far removed from their creed, such
as China or the post-neoliberal processes of Venezuela and Argentina
(Fernandes, 2010; Gago, 2015; Ong, 2006) has also been discussed,
explaining their paradoxical existence as an effect of areas of exception in
which different technologies, governing and citizenship regimes interact
and are articulated (Ong, 2006), or as a hybrid composition of the
state, where different and even opposing logics and rationalities coexist
(Fernandes, 2010), or of neoliberal rationality incubated from below by
peripheral sectors (Gago, 2015).
Two defining features of neoliberalism are key to understanding what
happens in prison: deregulation and the expansion of market logic in
areas so far removed from the market. The erosion of the state regulatory
capacity of intramural life from the 1990s, as a result of the acceler-
ated increase in the incarcerated population, the defunding due to the
fiscal crisis, turned the prison into a deregulated space. Neither the legal
norms nor the official authorities rule in Peonía. The informal codes, the
rutina, which is intended to be exhaustive to the detail in other orders,
do not restrict economic activity or prohibit exploitation or profit. On
the contrary, it encourages this: an entrepreneurial spirit spreads among
the prisoners and revolucionar is highly valued, to establish an enter-
prise, no matter how small, that reports profits. Only physical labor
is looked down on in some prisons del malandreo, perhaps because it
evokes the exploited condition of their class origin. The bosses of the
prison are characterized by their participation in different businesses,
146 A. Antillano
both inside and outside, in which they show the same charisma, leader-
ship, and the same managerial capacity with which they lead the lives of
their vassals. The prison code in general encourages autonomy and self-
sufficiency. The rutinario (who complies with the rutina) is a lone wolf.
Unlike what earlier works on prison codes point out (see Clemmer, 1958;
Sykes, 1974), informal norms do not seek to preserve cohesion vis-à-vis
the prison administration. Solidarity and altruism are not valued behav-
iors. On the contrary, informal norms emphasize individualism, focusing
on outlawing any act that may cause the slightest discomfort to others
(Antillano, 2015). No one becomes involved in anyone’s life. Each is on
his own.
As in neoliberalism “outside” or “from above”, the withdrawal of the
state does not mean its absence. The state continues to intervene by
action or by omission: by controlling what enters the prison, deciding
when to act and when the action of the prison gangs is tolerated (which
in the end solves a governance problem for it and, while the profits
collected by the prison gang are externalized, is a continuous source of
income), contributing indirectly and at a distance to regulate the intra-
mural social order which, like the “free market” economy of neoliberal
utopias, would otherwise be chaotic and unfeasible.
Nor is this order outside of state regulation a realization of the neolib-
eral utopia of a self-regulating economy, in which the actors concur free
and equal, guided only by their quest to optimize their profits. Once
again similar to what happens with the economy outside the walls, the
absence of regulation allows those who have more power (in this case,
the prison gang that by the power of weapons reigns on the rest of the
prisoners) to establish asymmetric relations and appropriate most of the
surpluses. The increase in the incarcerated population, and the loss of
control by the state of intramural life, means the opportunity for certain
groups to be able to impose themselves on others and exercise hierar-
chical and force relations. The concurrence of equal and “nude” actors,
in prison, does not lead to the virtuous “invisible hand” that regulates the
market, but to incessant conflict, to violence as a form of relationship.
Just the kind of order that the oldest prisoners remember as the one that
prevailed before the power of the Carro was imposed. In Peonía, more
than Rousseau, Hobbes rules.
Neither the withdrawal of the State nor the existence of a group that
exercises power over the rest is sufficient to explain neither this order
nor the nature of neoliberalism. As in the emergence of neoliberalism
from above, which only achieved its take-off and consolidation from
the exploitation of new economic niches (new markets, such as those
of Eastern Europe but also with the privatization and commodification
of previously public goods and services; financialization, but especially
accumulation by dispossession in peripheral countries and of nature; the
cheapening of labor and the deregulation of the labor market, etc.), this
social order that emulates neoliberalism is sustained by availability and
other economic opportunities associated with the increase in the incar-
cerated population, the colonization by the logic of the market of spheres
previously guaranteed (although it was precariously) by the provision of
the State, the subordination of practically all aspects of life in seclusion
to drive-market rationality.
The growth of the prison population from the 1990s on, not only
meant the overflow of state regulation and the breakdown of the precar-
ious balance among the prisoners, but also the emergence of extraor-
dinary opportunities for extraction of revenues and exploitation of the
population. With the collection of extortive taxes, slave labor, the expan-
sion of the internal market, businesses that are operated abroad, taking
advantage of the protection provided by the prison, the prison is an
immense source of wealth for those who control it. This availability
of increasing rents due to the increase in the prison population (to
which the process of monetization of the poor by the redistributive poli-
cies implemented between 2002 and 2015 contributed paradoxically,
which allow prison gangs to extort money from prisoners and their
families, as well as finance wasteful consumption inside the prison) in
a deregulated context, resulted in the emergence and consolidation of
a fraction of prisoners with the capacity to govern the other inmates
and to reappropriate these rents, reshaping relations with the rest of
the population and superimposing logics of plunder over the logic of
dominance. The criminalization of burgeoning illegal economies, partic-
ularly the drug trafficking business, involved the flow of prisoners to
prison with economic power who contributed to reshaping relations
within the prison, both with the authorities, buying favors and privileges,
148 A. Antillano
and among the prisoners themselves, establishing marked inequalities

of resources and power (on the role of the narco in internal relations
within Latin American prisons, see Nuñez, 2007; Ariza & Iturralde, this
volume). Dealers of some importance usually occupy relevant positions
in the Carro (in general, the members of the gang come from privi-
leged positions in different illegal economies, so they usually have better
conditions that challenge the population even before they enter prison),
while the drug barons are protected by the heads of the jail, enjoying
a lifestyle full of luxuries and privileges. The market of drugs within
the prison (and to a lesser extent other illicit markets, such as prosti-
tution, illegal alcohol and counterfeits, and pirated products) become
a significant source for the capitalization and circulation of resources
among prisoners. In sum, the growth of the incarcerated population,
the relevance of the lumpen economy, and the monetization of the poor
(without resolving their real inclusion) favor the logic of dispossession
and accumulation by dispossession that brings life in a prison closer to
the neoliberal social order.
This neoliberal society of captives should not be viewed as the
mechanical, one-way effect of incarceration policies. Much of the litera-
ture uses what we could call a hydraulic model to explain prison gangs
and the self-governing prison social order: the growth of the prison popu-
lation exceeds the state’s capacity to control, demanding complementary
and substitute forms of governance in the hands of the own prisoners.
This explanation is insufficient since it blurs broader social configura-
tions in which both massive incarceration policies and the emergence of
prison gangs occur, especially those related to the living conditions of
the poor, from which the prison recruits its members. In a context of
fragmentation and exclusion of the popular classes, crime, and particu-
larly the informal and illegal economies, becomes an attractive alternative
for many, if not even the only option available to survive. Competition
and the ability to deploy violence, the entrepreneurial spirit that these
submerged economies require (the vitalist impulse, as Verónica Gago
calls it), are much more necessary since success and survival depend
on the ability to impose on others, eliminate competitors and effec-
tively protect itself from incessant threats, emulates the new spirit of
capitalism (Bolstansnky & Chapiello, 2002) that accompanies neolib-

eralism. Amid exclusion and precariousness, outside the world of wage
labor, segregated from formal markets and abandoned by the state, fierce
competition, calculation and courage, exploitation and domination over
others, become invaluable resources.
In this sense, the prison has an articulated and organizing effect on
these practices and provisions that precede it, which are reinforced and
enhanced in overcrowded prisons, abandoned by the state, and in which
exclusion and precariousness multiply. In turn, the prison spreads its
effects back to the world of the poor beyond its walls. The cruelty,
the unscrupulousness, the cold calculation, but also the entrepreneurial
spirit, the initiative, and the managerial capacity that we frequently
discover in the bosses, operate as a kind of habitus not only within
the prison but as we find in our work with gangs from poor neigh-
borhoods in Caracas, extrapolated to successful criminal careers once
they returned to the community (see Antillano & Sepúlveda, 2021).
The cultural and symbolic capitals that are acquired behind its walls (a
sort of “human capital”, in the neoliberal syringe, which is revalued in
prison) are invested in successful criminal careers, or forms of organiza-
tion that they impose on poor communities that exported the predatory
and domination logics incubated within. The prison expands its effects
beyond its walls. In the contexts of exclusion and precariousness of poor
communities, the “neoliberal technologies” that are incubated in the
prison find fertile ground where they can take root and prosper.
The persistence of social exclusion and punitive policies, together
with the erosion of the state’s capacity to regulate spaces of exclusion
(the poor neighborhood, the jail) and the flourishing of submerged
economies and dynamics of survival marked by violence and illegality,
offer fertile ground for accumulation by dispossession, overexploitation,
the commodification of spheres previously rule by logics other than those
of the market, and finally for social dynamics that emulate and restore
neoliberal logic from below.
These processes of de factoprivatization, dispossession, and violence
that proliferate on the margins and abandoned areas or beyond the reach
of inclusion policies, not only serve as a ferment for neoliberal restoration
150 A. Antillano
(the thousands of merchants and small owners who kept the mercan-
tilist relations alive in the words of Lenin, during Soviet Russia) but also
reveal both the intrinsically criminal nature of the neoliberal order (the
predatory logic and the violent dispute of all-against-all instituted as the
natural order of things), as well as the limits and inadequacies of many
of the efforts that tried to overcome it.
Acknowledgements I thank Rebecca Hanson and Liliana Buitrago for the

help and suggestions.
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Enduring Lock-Up: Co-Governance
and Exception in Nicaragua’s Hybrid
Carceral System
Julienne Weegels
While the Nicaraguan prison system officially functions as a progres-

sive privilege system with a humanistic reeducational penal ideology
advanced through its Penitentiary Law, overcrowding, violence and a
desperate lack of resources characterize its prisons. Even as the govern-
ment and national prison direction (DGSPN) publicly pride themselves
on their efforts to re-educate and reinsert prisoners, they have persis-
tently denied local and international human rights organizations access
to prison facilities for the investigation of reported human rights viola-
tions. Inside prison, the persistent denial of public scrutiny translates to
a culture of public secrecy. Public secrets are secrets that are “shared and
known but unspoken” (Taussig, 1999, 50). They are hinted at through
J. Weegels (B)
Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation (CEDLA),
University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
e-mail: j.h.j.weegels@uva.nl

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98602-5_6
156 J. Weegels
a veil of indirect confirmation: warning, caution, omission, indirection

and silence (Penglase 2014; Weegels, 2021). Interested in understanding
how prison life is organized, this chapter seeks to grasp the experience
of government and exception in the Nicaraguan prison system—experi-
ences marked by violence and secrecy, and revelatory of the shared nature
of power in Nicaragua’s hybrid carceral system.
This sharing of power is particularly manifest in the emergence and
maintenance of what I call co-governance arrangements. To be able
to explain the intricate workings of these arrangements, I explore the
rules that underpin them as these were recounted to me during my
extensive ethnographic research with prisoners and former prisoners of
three Nicaraguan prison facilities (2009–2016). Even if prisoners and
authorities might argue over who is actually in charge in prison (“quien
manda”), the secrets they keep involve each other to such an extent
that they arguably depend on one another for their safety and keeping.
As Elias Canetti pointed out, “secrecy lies at the very core of power”
(1984, 290). Immersed in evolving relations of loyalty, I became aware
of the extent to which life in prison is not only subject to a politics of
concealment, but that secrecy and the exercise of power are intimately
related to one another. In effect, secrecy becomes a security practice
deployed by both prisoners and authorities, to hide the ways in which
they (dis)organize prison life and its markets, and to render unspeakable
the violence and collusion they engage in to run the prison system.
Here, I will focus specifically on prisoner and authority perfor-
mances of co-governance, considering them largely as the opposing
forces that they generally position themselves to be, even as they jointly
(dis)organize prison life. After providing a brief note on methodology, I
first consider the notions of violence and governance that inform this
chapter. Then, at the hand of ethnographic vignettes, I explain how
co-governance arrangements emerge and are maintained between pris-
oners and authorities in Nicaraguan prisons. In doing so, I first explore
the formal system of prisoner consejos (councils) set up to assist the
authorities in monitoring the prison population. I then zoom in on the
overcrowded cell space where, beyond and alongside the consejos, pris-
oners establish particular internal rules and hierarchies. Following on
this, I consider how authorities (both prison guards and police officers
Enduring Lock-Up: Co-Governance … 157
fulfilling that role in police jails) engage in the extralegal use of force
against prisoners. Though authority use of violence may seem volatile or
marginal, I hold that it is part and parcel of Nicaragua’s hybrid carceral
system, as it appears to be deployed not only to adjudicate disciplinary
punishment to particular prisoners, but more systemically to maintain
the power balance in favor of the authorities. Finally, I consider the
implications of prison co-governance for the broader political economy
of exception in Nicaragua, especially after the exteriorization of these
arrangements following the 2018 protests.
A Brief Methodological Note

Taking an ethnographic approach, my prisons research took place over
the course of 31 months between 2009 and 2016 with prisoners of
a Regional Penitentiary System (SPR, 2009–2013) and a City Police
Jail (CPJ, 2015–2016). Most of these participated in a theatre-in-prison
programme that my husband, a Nicaraguan theatre artist, and I set up.
Participation in the theatre programme at the SPR fluctuated of between
8 and 23 long-sentenced prisoners, convicted to sentences of 5–30 years,
largely for violent and/or property crimes. The programme was hosted at
the penitentiary proper, which is operated by the National Penitentiary
Direction (DGSPN). As a “cultural activity,” it automatically fell under
the prison’s direction of penal re-education. The programme at the CPJ,
on the other hand, consisted of 13 shorter-sentenced prisoners, convicted
to sentences of one to five years, largely for drug-related and/or property
crimes. As a police jail, the CPJ is run by the National Police and its
“rehabilitative” programme was hosted at a community center located
away from the jail. This broader programme was initiated and run by
the local Juvenile Affairs unit.
In order to look beyond those participating in theatre, my research
included former prisoners of these two sites and a small number of
(former) prisoners who sat out their time at the capital city peniten-
tiary La Modelo, likewise run by the DGSPN. In 2015, I also hosted
a former prisoner radio show at an “urban juvenile” radio station where
I traveled with participants from my different research sites. During and
158 J. Weegels
around the radio shows I was able to discuss multiple cross-cutting topics
with my research participants, both in a group context and individu-
ally. After leaving Nicaragua in 2016, I continued to conduct follow-up
interviews with a number of my original participants. In the after-
math of the massive anti-government protests that shook the country
in 2018, I got involved in human rights research with (former) polit-
ical prisoners and their family members. Over time, this varied set of
data allowed me to acquire a comprehensive understanding of fluctu-
ating governance patterns inside and outside Nicaragua’s prison system,
thoroughly informed by (former) prisoners’ experiences.1
Conceiving of Co-Governance
Following Blundo and Le Meur’s conception of governance as “a set of
interactions (conflict, negotiation, alliance, compromise, avoidance, etc.)
resulting in more or less stabilized regulations, producing order and/or
disorder (the point is subject to diverging interpretations between stake-
holders) and defining a social field [i.e. prison]” (2009, 7) I analyze
prison governance by investigating the interactions among prisoners and
between prisoners and authorities, the relations that these interactions
produce, and the regulations these result in. Drawing on the Latin Amer-
ican governance debate, specifically on critical and localized studies of
criminal and prison governance (e.g. Antillano et al., 2016; Arias, 2006;
Carter, 2014; Darke, 2018; Darke et al., 2021; Iturralde, 2016; Jaffe,
2013; Jones & Rodgers, 2009; Penglase, 2014; Rosas, 2012, and the
other chapters in this edited volume), I seek to come to an understanding
of prison governance and the public secrecy that surrounds it as situated,
performative and relational expressions of power and morality. However,
before continuing I’d like to unsettle a premise that more “classic” prison
studies tend to be guided by, which is that notions of “good” prison
governance and security tend automatically to be related to low levels
of prison violence, while high levels of prison violence are considered a
1 See Weegels (2021) for more elaborate methodological considerations and ethical dimensions
of my long-term ethnographic engagement with (former) prisoners in Nicaragua.
result or symptom of “failed” governance (e.g. Peirce & Fondevila, 2019).

This is strongly related to the ideal that violence, in any form, is unde-
sirable and that the state should be dominant in exerting power in prison
by bureaucratic rather than coercive means.
In the same way that the failed state paradigm has come to be critiqued
(e.g. Call, 2008; Mazarr, 2014), I believe “failed” prison governance
should not be seen merely as the result of state incapacity (hence resolv-
able by increasing state capacity), but rather as the result of selective
abandonment and governance by other means (acknowledging states’ use
of violence on multiple levels). This way, and by looking beyond violence
as morally undesirable, we can more clearly address its productive work-
ings (e.g. Benjamin, 1978; Penglase, 2014; Rodgers, 2016). Violence is
however not only produced by the state or the prison-as-institution, but
also by its subjects. This points to the need for a processual rather than
static understanding of institutional structures, in which power is exerted
not only from “above” (by the authorities), but also from “below” (by the
prisoners), and the structures themselves become subject to movement
and change (Vigh, 2009). A processual understanding of prison thus
alerts us not only to the shared nature of power behind its walls, but also
to the central role that “performances of legitimation” (Beetham, 2013)
play in the constant articulation and maintenance of prisons’ “power
balances” (Sykes, 1958).
In Nicaraguan prisons, practices of violence and secrecy inform
shifting governance arrangements as well as the development of a carceral
“state of exception” (Agamben, 2005), as both prisoners and authorities
act outside of the legal framework to exert power over one another. These
governance interactions permeate not only the prison system, but also
Nicaragua’s larger system of political and state power, which is commonly
referred to by prisoners as “el Sistema.” The Sistema encompasses both
the sistema penal (prison system) and sistema judicial (judiciary), and
also more abstractly the relational system of state and non-state political
actors that are able to exert their power over and through the state appa-
ratus. As such, it encompasses a hybrid carceral system that exceeds the
limits of the formal criminal justice system. Inside prison, co-governance
arrangements are then the relational spheres for the articulation and
(re)production of this hybrid system.
160 J. Weegels
On the Face of It: Privileges and Prisoner

Consejos
On the surface, prisons in Nicaragua appear to be governed in a straight-
forward, open and legal way, where authorities abide by the penitentiary
laws (no. 473 and 745) and their re-educational ideology. This open
governance system incorporates a particular group of prisoners to help
govern prison: the consejos de internos (prisoner councils). This institu-
tionalized collaboration between authorities and prisoners constitutes the
institutional framework for co-governance. Yet it is but the tip of the
iceberg—of the Sistema—and to consider only this would be to neglect
what is hidden, metaphorically, under water. From the outside looking
in, there are three pivotal aspects of the co-governance system that remain
hidden from view: (1) prisoners’ self -governing practices, which may
be very extensive depending on the facility at hand, (2) the authorities’
extralegal governing practices, and (3) the collusion between the author-
ities and prisoners to ‘run’ the prison. Undergirding these is a shadow
economy based on the trade in illegal and illicit products (ranging from
cellphone minutes and bootleg liquor to crack cocaine). Before diving
under water, let me address the role of the prisoner consejos.
In the prisons that fall under the DGSPN, prisoners are formally
sanctioned and disciplined through the privilege system, which allocates
or withdraws privileges that are progressively accumulated or similarly
stripped. Every prisoner’s conduct is monitored in a personal booklet
(the Tarjeta de Control de Interno, TCI) where both re-educational offi-
cers and prisoner consejos keep track of prisoners’ good and sanctioned
behavior, and which is made available to the warden, chain of command
and supervising judge (juez de ejecución de la pena) on a regular basis.
The TCI is often of direct influence on the approval or disapproval of
a prisoner’s chances at obtaining early release.2 At first glance it may
seem like the privilege system works perfectly. Prisoners comply with
prison regulations most of the time, at least on the face of it, and largely
2 Yet the exact politics of early release are much more arbitrary and relate to the Sistema’s
party-political implications; early releases are regularly implemented with explicit reference to
the central government’s political will (see Weegels, 2020a).
refrain from using force against the authorities, despite their numbers
and potential for collective action. As privileges are assigned individually,
arguably every prisoner has something to lose if they would engage in
action against the system. Erving Goffman (1961, 54) classically argued
that the individualizing effect of privileges both conditions and explains
prisoner compliance. Cheliotis (2014) added that in this way, and by
playing into gendered conceptions of “good behavior”, authorities are
able to maintain order even when the allocation of privileges is incon-
sistent or arbitrary. Much in the same way the Nicaraguan privilege
system reduces the potential for collective action against the authorities,
but what complements this is that prisoners effectively help uphold this
system alongside the authorities.
According to the penitentiary law, every Nicaraguan penitentiary is
under the obligation to establish prisoner councils. Every prisoner on
the consejo is elected by the general prison population (referred to as el
colectivo, the collective) to overlook a specific area, such as orden interior
(internal order), sports, sol (sun time on the courtyard), religious activi-
ties, and visits. The area that an individual consejo-member is in charge
of thus mirrors the authorities’ division of tasks. Every prison dormi-
tory has a prisoner council consisting of one to six members, depending
on how large the population of that cell is. The Regional Penitentiary
System (SPR), for example, had 5 galerías (cellblocks). Galerías 1, 2 and
5 had dormitory-style cells with 60 to 70 prisoners in each cell, and five
to six consejo-members per cell. Galería 3, consisting of cells 11 and 12,
had up to 200 prisoners in each cell. Galería 4 consisted of 12 smaller
cells with 8 to 12 prisoners per cell and only one had consejo-member
per cell. In this way, a total of about 150 consejo-members monitored
a prisoner population of around 1100 prisoners. I say monitor, because
when prisoners leave their cells for sol , for example, the consejo-member
in charge of sol will check who went out and who stayed inside and keep
a tally for the guards. The same goes for participation in re-educational
activities, (conjugal) visits, church and so forth. Formally, then, the
consejos are in charge of monitoring prisoner participation in different
arenas, and as such, they are a body of control. Javi, a former prisoner of
the SPR of eight and a half years, explained that “with the consejo the
thing is that the authorities keep you under control through the prisoners
162 J. Weegels
themselves.”3 When I asked him if he had ever aspired to be a consejo-

member himself, he inferred that there is a normative difference between
prisoners who become consejos and those who do not:
When you’re a consejo you prefer the protection of the guards instead of
the ‘family’ inside. They [the consejos] don’t acknowledge that they’re in
the same boat, in the same sea. I looked out for my life [in prison] and to
be a consejo is to be awaiting death […] Sure, there are consejo-members
that are cool, but they even end up losing [more than they had] because
another [consejo-member] will rat on them. Prison is another world, a
difficult world. They [the consejos] are the eyes of the guards inside the
cell; they even stay awake all night… they do some good jobs [for the
guards] (laughs).4
It appears that Javi considered being a consejo on a par with being a sapo
(snitch), and indeed there are many parallels. Both have closer relations
with authorities and provide them with information that the authorities
would arguably not be able to obtain otherwise. Yet perhaps the main
difference between a sapo and a consejo is that the sapo offers his infor-
mation on the sly whereas a good consejo will try to walk the fine line
between watching out for the colectivo’s best interests without betraying
the authorities’ trust in them to monitor the prisoner population. After
all, consejos are elected and known to the general population (which is
why Javi considers being a consejo like walking around with a target on
your back), and sapos are hidden among their ranks.
Importantly, the consejo also has a public position to fulfill with
the colectivo: they are elected by the colectivo to represent them, not
only in monitoring their participation, but also in communicating
quejas (complaints) between prisoners and authorities. When a consejo-
member loses support of the colectivo, a new consejo-member has to be
appointed in his place. This is in the best interest of the collective as the
consejo is appointed, from the prisoner’s point of view, on the one hand
to minimize interaction with authorities and on the other to facilitate
fluid interaction with them when this is necessary (arranging medical
3 Javi, former SPR, 2016, private interview.

4 Idem, 2016, follow up interview.
check-ups, for example). When a consejo is ineffective, the authorities

can argue “but you chose him yourselves” and decide not to deal with
complaints. Javi made it clear that he found it very insulting to be
lectured by the authorities that you as prisoners “have organized badly.”
In their role as brokers, consejos are also sought out to resolve internal
conflicts without getting the guards involved. “The consejo of discipline
will seek a solution to the conflict, and then only report to the authorities
that the situation has been resolved,” Javi explained. The best consejo,
as such, is one who deals with authorities minimally, providing them
with the basic information they request but never duping the colec-
tivo (i.e. not “snitching” much desired information to the authorities,
for example, about secret stashes of prohibited commodities). Interest-
ingly, however, the prisoners to be elected consejo for a cell are usually
proposed by the authorities.5 As Javi explained cynically:
The jefe de sección (section chief ) would come [to the cell] to propose so-
and-so to be the new sapo, and the sapo would be right there by the star-
clad officer’s side.6 But the guardia always come with the chitchat that ‘I
need you to approve him’, because in the end they know the collective is
in charge (saben que el colectivo manda).
In Javi’s statement an interesting contradiction appears: prisoners know

that “consejos are snitches,” and the authorities know that the colec-
tivo is “actually in charge.” This enhances the notion of the consejo as
an ambivalent figure—on the one hand too close to the authorities for
comfort, on the other a necessary buffer or broker between the colectivo
and the authorities. This way, the consejo itself can be understood as a
balancing act, as a catalyst mediating between the pressures of the author-
ities and the prisoners to “run” the prison in the way they deem best. On
the balance is “quien manda” (who is in charge). Due to this role in the
5 Prerequisite for being elected onto the consejo de internos is that the prisoner has completed at
least 40% of his sentence and has advanced into the regimen laboral (work regime), the stage
before the regimen semi-abierto (semi-open regime) and regimen abierto (open regime). Those
imprisoned on drug charges or for rape are excluded from being elected.
6 Estrelludo translates literally as “starred one”, referring to the stars or stripes indicating rank
on an officer’s uniform. Stripes are low-rank, stars higher-rank. An estrelludo is thus slang for a
high-ranking officer.
164 J. Weegels
middle, consejos often endure a lot of pressure. Clearly, both prisoners

and authorities keep a close watch on them. They are expected by the
prisoners to act on their behalf, yet the authorities expect them to “think
along with us” too, and offer individual consejo-members more privi-
leges (estímulos, as they are formally referred to). This in turn blurs the
sapo-consejo distinction. Manuel, a respected lifer7 at the SPR, became a
consejo-member and was able to exert leadership in his cell for a number
of years. He often warned prisoners not to trust the authorities as “they’re
always out for their own best interests.”8 In 2013, however, his cell-
mates ran him out of his cell: the authorities had conducted a strip-search
and found everybody’s cell phone except for Manuel’s. Conclusions were
easily drawn. “Manuel was lucky not to be stabbed,” Junior said grudg-
ingly, “for being a sapo.”9 The incident underlined that there is only so
much leeway before functioning as a broker comes at the expense of one’s
own safety. Yet the exchange of information between prisoners, consejos
and authorities is pivotal to the functioning of the prison. Or, as Javi
formulated it:
Without the prisoners the authorities wouldn’t be able to run the prison,
so they pretend to have your best interests at heart. They talk to you, te
trabajan con sicología (they ‘work’ you, psychologically). You think they’re
doing you a favor, but the system doesn’t favor anyone. For example, you
haven’t seen your jaña (girlfriend) for a while and really want a [conjugal]
visit. You get along with your jefe de sección and talk to him, you know,
slip him 200 pesos maybe, to ensure he’ll take your petition higher up. Of
course, paying a guard is against the law, and it’s not pre-established [the
prices], but this happens en confianza, when you know you can count on
this guard. […] [But] the system doesn’t want guards to get friendly with
prisoners: when a guard gets along with a particular cell too well, they’ll
relocate him to another cell. The same happens when a guard doesn’t
get along with a cell at all, they’ll change him too. They’ll move him to a
7 The maximum sentence at the time was 30 years. In January 2021, in the vise of a series of
repressive laws implemented after the mass protests of 2018, a constitutional amendment was
passed to allow for natural life sentences.
8 Manuel, SPR, 2010, group discussion.
9 Junior, former SPR, 2013, private conversation. Javi also commented on the incident, but
Manuel never mentioned it himself.
well-behaved cell. But then if he gets in trouble with that cell, they’ll put
him on administrative duty, because they don’t want a guard screwing up
the system for them, you know.10
This system, according to Javi, is one where the authorities retain control
over the prisoner population by a give and take of privileges and fostering
governance relations that will always maximally benefit the system itself,
also, or perhaps especially, financially. Prisoners and authorities should
never get “too close,” but shouldn’t be on hostile terms with each other
either. Following this logic, prisoners and authorities always stand on
opposite sides of an imaginary moral divide. For the authorities, if the
prisoners are too comfortable they start “abusing the system.” Instead,
prisoners should be under the impression that they always need to work
for their privileges. This opens up a space for sapos, wishing to get on
the good side of the authorities, and sharpens the mistrust prisoners hold
toward each other for “turning sapo” (hacerse sapo). Yet authorities and
prisoners monitoring one another through the prisoner consejos is not
the only side to the co-governance system in place. While the “psychol-
ogy” underlying it pictures prisoners as interested mainly in obtaining
privileges for softening or shortening their time, more violent dynamics
provide both authorities and prisoners with ordering mechanisms to
control one another’s life behind bars.
(In)security and Self-Governing Practices

Nicaraguan penitentiaries are not built as panopticons and they do
not have electronic surveillance systems. Though the outer perime-
ters are secured by guards armed with AK-47 automatic weapons,
rounds are walked in the corridors of the cellblocks by unarmed guards
bearing truncheons. Similarly, police officers patrolling police jails do
not bear weapons inside prison. During rounds they peer through
doors made of metal bars (or metal-bar fronts of cells), yet visibility
is usually impaired by hammocks and bags with personal belongings
10 Javi, former SPR, 2016, private interview.

166 J. Weegels
hung from the bars and ceiling due to overcrowding. Officers usually
do not enter cells unannounced on their regular rounds, except during
surprise requisas (strip-searches). In the absence of continuous surveil-
lance and with heavy restrictions of access imposed on those who wish
to enter prison (including workshop facilitators, researchers and other
third persons from which a formal Ministry of Governance approval or
aval politico, attest of political sympathy extended by the government
party, is required), concealment and secrecy have become key security
practices that both prisoners and authorities engage in. Authorities to
keep hidden the extralegal governance practices they engage in (such
as corporal punishment and corruption), knowledge of which would
blemish the “revolutionary project” the government claims to uphold,
and prisoners to keep hidden the extralegal ways in which they make
money inside prison. In doing so, and taking into account that prisoners
spend much time under little or no surveillance in overcrowded spaces
with multiple other men, prisoners engage in a number of ordering and
governing practices to secure the cell space and their time inside (Frois,
2016; Skarbek, 2020; Weegels, 2017).
Here, it is norms rather than organizations that regulate prisoners’ cell-
based governance system. These norms are endogenously determined and
reflected in codes of prisoner conduct that dictate how and when soli-
darity or distrust is in place (like toward consejos, but also for example
toward so-called donados—prisoners abandoned by their families), as
well as how and when physical violence may be legitimately used against
fellow prisoners or authorities. These codes also determine the speed
and level of ascent a prisoner may accomplish up the cell-based hier-
archy. Though prisoners often refer to their cellmates as family it is a
mistake to assume that relations always start off well. It is also a mistake
to assume that the “mortification process” (Goffman, 1961) occurs only
at the hands of the authorities, especially in contexts where prisoners
have established their own governing practices. In Nicaragua, prisoners
are effectively subjected to mortifying practices at the hands of their
cellmates too. While their “civilian” self may be deployed to obtain a
good position on the inside, sidestepping such humiliation, these morti-
fying practices generally include dispossession, beatings and/or the threat
of being violated. However, rather than mortification, it may be more
appropriate to speak of adaptation processes—be they in the form of

submission or domination—as prisoners struggle to obtain a position on
the power field (see also Darke, 2018). Survival, or adaptation, in this
“cemetery of the living” implies learning one’s place—when to dominate
and when to submit, how to ascend up the hierarchy and how to keep
good relations with one’s fellow prisoners as well as the authorities in
the meantime. Importantly, keeping good relations does not necessarily
mean avoiding violence, but enduring it in the right way and resorting
to it at the right time. Former CPJ prisoner Joey’s rite of initiation and
subsequent process of adaptation illustrates this. Joey was beaten by the
police upon his arrest and when he was put in jail he explains that:
The start for me was ugly. When I came in [to the cell] they [other
prisoners] made me strip and beat me. […] They put on music and had
me walk up and down the corridor naked, whistling at me and smacking
me on the butt with their flip-flops or hands to make me dance.11
At the CPJ, prisoners outnumber on-duty guards by as many as 80 to

1, and its overcrowded cells warehouse on average 35 prisoners per 25
square meter cell. These cells tend to be very hierarchically organized.
Joey did not recount his experience of cell initiation until after his release,
as we sat in the back of a car on one of our trips to the former pris-
oner radio show. It was rare for a (former) prisoner to discuss his own
initiations to prison life: those kinds of stories were usually general-
ized, starting with “in the cell they used to…” or “I heard that…” In
this way, I had been told about sexualized rites of initiation before, like
the “baile de la botella” (dance of the bottle).12 This baile is an event
that every CPJ-prisoner will assure exists but no one will acknowledge
to have suffered, as it clearly exhibits characteristics that feed into the
11 Joey, former CPJ, 2015, conversation.

12 A similar type of initiation rite is practiced in La Modelo and referred to as the baile del
egipcio, which is more like the one Joey endured. While the egipcio does involve a “walk of
shame” it does not involve a bottle, but the stripping and smacking (with flip-flops or towels)
of a newcomer.
168 J. Weegels
(re)production of specific, dominant machista masculinities.13 Another

prisoner of the CPJ had explained to me before that,
When a group of guys in the cell gets together to make another guy dance
la botella they’ll turn up the radio, put a bottle on the floor, and the guy
made to dance has to get naked and lift this bottle up by inserting the
top of the bottle into his ass […] Then he has to dance with the other
guys, with the bottle, you know, and they’ll say sexual stuff and smack
him on the butt. If they don’t like how you dance, like if you don’t do it
right, or if you drop the bottle, they’ll beat you.14
Though the baile de la botella is a highly sexualized and cruel type of

hazing, there are rules to it:
They won’t make just anybody dance, but if they don’t like you, or if they
think you might be a perrita (i.e. gay) they’ll make you dance […] If
you refuse, you have to measure your fists (i.e. fight) with the guys that
wanted you to dance, which will be the toughest guys in the cell, and
they’ll beat you hard.”
As the event Joey described resembled the initial build-up to a baile I

hesitated to ask, afraid he might be offended or clam up, but probed if
there was any bottle involved. He directly assured me of the contrary:
No way! Back in the cell they beat me hard and made me sleep by the
side of the toilet. I spent like two weeks on that spot, I even thought of
killing myself back then. But slowly I moved further from the toilet, to
other spots on the floor, then to a hammock, and the last half year I was
on a bunk.
It may seem strange for Joey to move so abruptly from the harrowing
experience of his “welcome” to discussing the spot where he slept, but
13 For a discussion of machismo in prison see Weegels (2014).

14 Wiz, former CPJ, 2015, conversation. I had heard this story before on various occasions, as
early as 2010, when we happened upon a friend who spent two months in pre-trial detention
at the CPJ during a bus ride back from the SPR. He said he witnessed a baile in his cell and
only barely escaped being forced to participate.
he did this to indicate his rapid ascent up the cell-based hierarchy. The
hierarchy in a CPJ prison cell—as for most of the prison system—is
quite often spatially reflected, and most directly evidenced in the place
where a prisoner sleeps. The most powerful prisoners and those who have
spent the most time there will be on bunks, followed by those in the
hammocks, and then the floor—first those under the bunks, then those
in the middle of the floor, and last those on the floor closest by the toilet
or in the shower (where prisoners are most likely to acquire skin rash or
fungus). According to this rule, Joey laughs that eventually,
I got even with the guys that organized the beating, ha-ha! All four of
them were released, but three of them were caught again and came back.
That’s when I was on top and they were on the bottom [rung], so it was
my turn! I had my little group of bróderes (brothers, friends) then, and
me la desquité (I took revenge).
Joey and his friends beat his returning former cellmates and made sure
they slept on the floor this time. Fights were often over space and as such
about safeguarding (or seeking to alter) the hierarchy. Wilfredo, a former
SPR prisoner of four years, explained to me that in the prison context
your bed is a house (chante or casa) and a grouping of beds a neigh-
borhood (barrio). He noted that prisoners from the same prison barrio
will watch over one another’s bed and belongings (including your caleta –
stash) when either is absent from the cell, to prevent others from robbing
their belongings or appropriating their space.15 Similarly, a bróder will
ask for your permission to use your chante (i.e. bed) while you’re out.
Barrios on the inside and outside often converge: for example, in the
CPJ, Araña shared his bunk with his friend Ezequiel from their barrio
on the outside. Due to their friendship and Araña’s good position inside
prison, his cellmates did not haze Ezequiel when he came into the cell,
and he did not have to compete for a place to sleep. Instead, Araña let
him sleep with him on his bunk. Araña, however, had originally made it
to the top by challenging his cell’s leader, engaging in fights with most
of his cellmates, and quickly establishing himself as a key player in the
15 Wilfredo, former SPR, 2015, conversation.

170 J. Weegels
internal drug trade. Though he had relinquished those activities by the

time he attended the community center, he was able to retain his posi-
tion as a cell leader. At first, when Araña would be out at the community
center, Ezequiel would watch over his chante. Later Ezequiel himself was
also allowed out to the community center.
In La Modelo, where cellblocks are literally called by the name of
the prisoners’ barrio of origin the cells are often made up of groups
of prisoners associated with a particular (gang) territory outside prison.
In Managua, then, a particular cell often represents a particular outside
block, group or street gang. Yair, a La Modelo prisoner of three years,
explains:
We don’t steal from each other; we’re all from the same block […] on the
outside in the R.P.T. [Reparto Schick]. Our motto is: we’re all family and
we don’t fight amongst each other (todos somos familia y entre nosotros no
peleamos).16
Though the cell may be a space of violence for the newcomer, it can also
be the only space where he feels secure. Bobby and Carlos purposely
did not participate in activities on the La Modelo’s courtyards, for
example, and spent little time outside their cell. The cell or dormitory
space, however, can also become particularly dangerous, especially when
(accused of ) breaking prisoner rules—think of how Manuel was “run
out” of his cell. Though most of my research participants had not experi-
enced a stabbing firsthand, they had heard about previous stabbings, and
particularly La Modelo prisoners spoke of the ease with which someone
could “joderte” (shank you). When I asked Bobby, “but when they stab
you they don’t mean to kill you, just to hurt you right?” He shook his
head and answered,
Well, their idea is to kill you. There are guards who have been stabbed in
these fights […] [so] when there’s a confrontation they [the guards] get
nervous. They see that you’re being stabbed and they can’t even open the
door. That’s when you’re going to get killed.17
16 Yair, La Modelo, 2016, written interview over Facebook.

17 Bobby, former La Modelo, 2015, private interview.
The warnings and stories of past stabbings (and resulting deaths)

keep the threat of the shank alive to subordinate, sanction or scare
fellow prisoners out of stealing from or snitching on their cellmates.
Effectively, stealing and snitching—especially when committed up the
hierarchy rather than down it—are the two most severely punished or
“cardinal crimes,” as they breach the norms of the cell-based hierarchy
and threaten the integrity of the prisoners’ self-government.
Despite the violence and coercion used by prisoners to position them-
selves in relation to others along the lines of “who is toughest,” many
prisoners also recall their cells as being spaces of sharing. Remember how
above Yair spoke of his cellmates as “family.” Former La Modelo prisoner
Bobby similarly talked of his cell as being a “small community in which
we would rotate cleaning and cooking duties and share food brought in
by visiting family members.”18 Prisoners from the CPJ and SPR engaged
in a similar dynamic of sharing food and cleaning duties, and only cell
leaders would be exempt from complying with the latter. Yet much of
the respect that cell leaders garnered derived from their generosity in
“taking care” of their cellmates. At the CPJ, cell leader Araña occasionally
indulged his cellmates in food and marihuana, like on his birthday and
local festive holidays. Such practices of sharing, however, always hinged
on the simultaneous disposition to deploy violence against rule-breakers,
or as Araña noted “they respect me, but that’s only because I’ve beat
them all.”19 In the CPJ this balance between the use of violence and
sharing, between subordination and domination—always striving for the
latter—was guided by the ley de la gallada, or law of the roosters.
La ley de la gallada
Whereas initiation is done mostly to see where the newcomer places
himself on the pecking order through some kind of test that confronts
him with the fact that he needs to adapt to the existing rules, the
jodedera never stops. “Jodedera” stands for screwing around and having
18 Bobby, former La Modelo, 2015, private interview.

19 Araña, former CPJ, 2016, private interview.
172 J. Weegels
fun, though it refers to a potentially violent type of fun. It encompasses

everything from hanging out, joking around and annoying guards to
smoking drugs and picking fights. As such, it constitutes a particular
type of disorder endorsed by the prisoners (quite opposite to the type of
order that the authorities wish to impose), which is nonetheless bound
to the gendered order of domination and intimidation.
Prisoners of the CPJ many a time referred to each other as ladrones
(thieves) without any disapproving undertone, the take-away point being
that of the “bond of thieves,” that is, “no se roba entre ladrones” (thieves
don’t steal from one another). In the jodedera, however, picking an easy
target to steal from, for example, one that won’t fight back, being down
low on the pecking order, is qualified as a fun pastime. In that case,
taking other people’s possessions is part of the power game: “si te dormiste
te fuiste” (if you don’t watch out, you’ll be stolen from). The ladrón is
dominant, respected, and can be a little crazy. According to Wiz, a good
ladrón never lets his guard down, is always in for a good hit, will defend
his turf, and never rats on his own mates—at the CPJ these were phrased
(by those who considered themselves ladrones) to equal the traits of a
good prisoner. Following this logic, Marlon explained, “when the oppor-
tunity presents itself to rob something from someone, then, the ley de la
gallada says you take it,” after all, “anybody would.”20
CPJ prisoners, however, also referred to a particular segment of the
prisoner population as the gallada (literally, band of roosters). These
appeared to be “those in charge” (los que mandan). Particularly, they
appeared to be that segment of the prisoner population that could coerce
others at will and impose their “law” while simultaneously possessing the
prerogative to break it. Similar to the order that Rio’s favela traficantes
impose, the prisoners of the gallada both dictated the rules and broke
them: “[this] ability to produce order and disorder, to shift from what is
‘normal’ to a state of emergency where the rules are suspended, is consti-
tutive of drug-trafficker power” (Penglase, 2014, 115), or in this case,
of the gallada’s power. Though ladrones don’t steal from one another,
the gallada could dispossess newcomers, for example. Upon inquiry, Wiz
explained to the theatre facilitator that hypothetically:
20 Marlon, CPJ, 2015, group conversation.

“If you’d come in [be imprisoned], I’d immediately check out what you’re
wearing. If I like your pants you’re gonna give them to me, and I’ll give
you a pair of my shorts. If I like your shirt, you’ll hand it over and I’ll
give you a camisola (muscle-T),” he stands wide and laughs, “If I like your
shoes, which by the way I like, you’re gonna wear my chinelas (flip-flops).
And if I think you can get me money, I’ll try.”
“What if I don’t want to give you shit?” the facilitator asks.
“A turquearnos (we fight), ha!”
In this case, the appropriation of another man’s clothes follows a dynamic

that fits in with the gendered practices of “testing” that prisoners subject
each other to during initiation (such as the baile), to find out what the
standing is of the new man they are to share a cell with. It also includes
a (rather coercive) notion of sharing: a newcomer should not think he
is “better than” anyone already inside, and must accept his challenger’s
clothes in exchange for his own lest he be willing to fight to hold onto
them—a kind of radical equality imposed in the cell that is nonethe-
less grounded on the inequality of the prisoner hierarchy. As Wiz’s final
remark indicates, if you challenge those who wish to enforce this kind
of initiation you better be up for a fight, because those you challenge are
either the cell leaders or count on the gallada’s blessing. Ezequiel later
explained,
Sure, you can come in pretending to be the shit (el más chulo), but you’re
likely to get your ass kicked by the whole cell si no bajas tu huevo (if
you don’t tone down). If you manage to stay standing you’ll be respected,
claro, but most kids just get the shit kicked out of them when they try to
act tough.21
One afternoon after the 2015 prison riot at the CPJ, Marlon laid out the
participatory dynamics of the jodedera. He explained:
If you’re in the jodedera: aguantá (endure it). If you’re with them [the
ladrones, los de la gallada], you’re gonna drink with them. If you’re with
them, you’re gonna rob with them. Si ellos te hacen vuelo (if they run an
21 Ezequiel, CPJ, 2015, conversation.

174 J. Weegels
errand for you, i.e. do you a favor), you have to do them a favor. Ahí
está el pedo (that’s where the problem is). If they do you a vuelo and you
don’t do them a vuelo? Sos sapo (you’re a snitch). Why didn’t you do that
vuelo? That’s why it’s better to see it all de larguito (from far away), as far
away as possible. ‘Yeah man,’ [Marlon pretends to speak to a cellmate] ‘we
know each other from the street pero yo caí solito (but I fell alone, i.e. was
arrested alone). I was caught alone’ [he underlines]. So what if nobody
gives me food? That doesn’t matter, I won’t eat. […] Why would I want
to eat well for a second and then be all óshhh (screwed). […] Sure, you
can go around en la loquera (literally, the craziness), te mata el calambre
(it’ll take away your prison stress), time passes like this [Marlon clicks his
fingers], but do you think you’ll be able to sleep well? You’ll be cagado
(scared shitless) for going around in the vulgareo (similar to jodedera).
Why do you think they have chuzos [shanks]? Because they’re cagados.
[…] Es el encierro (it’s being locked up). Confinement makes you fight
about everything. […] So how do you make yourself feel better? Jodiendo
al otro (screwing over someone else).
Interesting in Marlon’s reflection on the dynamics of the jodedera is that

he sees it as “natural” given the circumstances of confinement. Marlon’s
own “ladrón heart” (literally, as he is in prison for robbery) understands
why they act this way. Prison is all about knowing how to aguantarla,
how to endure the lock-up, the violence, the injustices. The jodedera
provides relief from the daily reality of confinement. Smoking and having
fun with the gallada, feeling backed by them, maybe getting on top of
things yourself, makes time pass faster and relieves prison stress (“mata
el calambre”). But Marlon warns that whatever they do for you, you’re
expected to do for them. Their enemies (the authorities, the snitches,
those they have crossed) become your enemies. There is no such thing as
freeloading on others, and you cannot outsmart the gallada. For Marlon,
it was this indebtedness that kept him from joining them. Moreover, even
those of the gallada are not exempt of the logics of revenge. The violence
they produce is believed to eventually take its toll on them too, a logic
that is referred to as “la ley del hierro” (literally “the iron law” related to
“he who kills by the sword, dieth by the sword” and frequently used as
street/prison code for “what goes around comes around”). According to
the same code, Marlon made it more than clear that even if he disagreed
with how the gallada worked, he would never openly critique, much less
snitch on them. In this way, he made himself respectable, and they left
him alone. Others, like Wiz and Araña, made it quite clear that if they
were going to endure prison time, they were going to do it from the top.
It must be understood here that the gallada is not a particular gang
nor a unison group, but rather groups of prisoners who “take charge”
of things inside their cells. As such, they are the (violent) enforcers of
prisoner order, but they are not a stable group of prisoners. Instead,
the gallada is a segment of the prisoner population that is in flux as its
members are released and new prisoners eventually become part of it.
While the gallada engages in and endorses jodedera, some of its members
may also manage the prison’s illicit economy and thus police the limits
of the jodedera, too. They can exercise pressure to take a share of your
food, your clothes or even extort you for money (on the basis of “we’re
all equal and in here what’s yours is ours”), or leave you be as long as you
don’t meddle in their business. You can fight to become a part of them
or might have to fight in order not to be subjected to them. This way,
despite their presence, some prisoners are able to escape their dominance,
at least part of the time. Most prisoners participating in the community
center programme, for example, would advise how “keeping to yourself ”
keeps you out of trouble with both the gallada and the authorities. While
this practice means they do not submit to the gallada, they do not chal-
lenge their power either. What is more, being able to keep to oneself can
usually only be achieved on reputation or after going through an initial
period of confrontation, as Joey did, in which an agreement or some
form of mutual respect is established, often by abiding by the same prac-
tices as the gallada does. Araña, for example, held that he would not have
enjoyed the respect that he did at the CPJ, if he would have acted “this
way” (i.e. ‘changed’) from the beginning.22
Though at this point prison might seem exceptionally intimidating,
which of course is to some extent, I hope to have shown that all of
this violence has its own particular logic. There are particular actors who
impose and dominate according to particular norms. Practices of violence
or solidarity, while they are distributed differentially among the prisoner
22 Araña, former CPJ, 2016, private interview.

176 J. Weegels
population, ultimately depend on these norms. Not every prisoner will

manage to get on top, nor will every prisoner be subordinated, but the
way in which the hierarchy is constituted and enforced is very clear to all
those locked inside. Contrary to the often arbitrary or corrupt allocation
of privileges and administration of punishment by the authorities, this
particularly norm-based and gendered order is largely perceived as fair in
the way it clearly lays out the possible speed and level of ascent within the
prisoner hierarchy (leading to privileges of a different sort). All prisoners
acknowledge these internal power structures, and most subscribe to or
even enforce them. The logics of prisoner violence have however become
so engrained in the workings of the prison system that authorities often
rely (or arguably depend) on these self-ordering principles for the distri-
bution of scarce resources as well as for disciplining particular prisoners
(especially newcomers), too. The story of authorities placing prisoners in
particular cells to ensure they will have a “rough time,” for example, was
related to me repeatedly. When I asked Joey if the police did anything
about the initiatory beatings going on in the cells, he grinned,
The police? They don’t do anything! […] They rather put you in a partic-
ular cell to ensure you get a beating. Like with guys that have done nasty
stuff, they’ll put them in the worst cells.
The (purposeful) lack of confrontation with prisoner-on-prisoner

violence on part of the authorities, or even its clear usage to their benefit,
demonstrates how engrained these practices are in prison governance
dynamics. As (part of ) the disciplinary function of the authorities is
delegated to the prisoners, the de facto condition of co-governance is
sustained.23 To maintain the upper hand in this system, however, the
authorities deploy violence themselves as well. Yet for the system to work
this is concealed and veiled in public secrecy, through the systemic denial
of its occurrence.
23 Realizing that in this way they catered to the authorities, some CPJ-prisoners said that they
stopped beating newcomers in their cell because they noticed that it was what the police wanted
them to do, and argued that it went against prisoner code.
The Heavy Hand of Authority
There are two ways in which the authorities receive you at the peniten-
tiary. The first is that they don’t beat you, they just shave your head, give
you a number and take your picture. Second is that they beat and kick
the shit out of you and throw you cuffed into the calabozo.24 They do
this most of all with the dangerous guys, or those coming in on long
sentences, so they understand that the officers are in charge of the pris-
oners and not the other way around (el funcionario manda al reo y no el
reo al funcionario).25
Most prisoners were beaten upon their arrests and for a long time I
thought this practice did not occur at the penitentiaries, as these oper-
ated under the ideological banner of re-education (claiming, in their
institutional slogan, to be humanist). Yet when I asked Javi about what
entering the SPR was like, he told me the above. His last point is pivotal:
prison officers also use violence to make sure that prisoners understand
who is in charge (quien manda). In this way, then, beating a potentially
subversive prisoner can be understood as a governing practice. As it is
recurrent and instrumental, it can be understood as a systemic aspect
of the co-governance system. According to Javi, especially “dangerous”
and long-sentenced prisoners are received with violence. These prisoners,
who come in on high profile crimes such as first degree murder and
organized crime, including (international) drug trafficking and armed
robbery, are those prisoners who might easily attain a high standing
within the prisoners’ own hierarchy due to their presumed knowledge of
violence and/or the illicit economy. Given the weight of prisoner hierar-
chies it becomes vital for the authorities to clarify that, despite what these
prisoners may see or hear, they are in charge. Beside “playing” with pris-
oner privileges by accepting bribes or imposing obstacles to “trabarle a
24 Calabozos are small, one- or two-person isolation cells where prisoners are kept when they
are sanctioned. When in the calabozo you only get sun time once a week. Usually more than
the amount of prisoners they were built for occupy these cells.
25 Javi, former SPR, 2016, private interview on WhatsApp.
178 J. Weegels
uno” (keep a prisoner stuck), extralegal force is the authorities’ foremost

resource of demonstrating their advantage.26
In this way, the use of violence by authorities acts as a security clip of
sorts on co-governance arrangements in place, to prevent the equilibrium
from shifting too far in the direction of the prisoners. Yet it is a balance
of extremes, as extralegal force is used directly to subject and subordi-
nate prisoners. As such, it antagonizes, coercing prisoners into obedience,
but also reveals to them their existential vulnerability. Just as the gallada
is allowed to break its own rules, the authorities—through their use of
extralegal violence—demonstrate that they too can break the laws that
bind them, without any legal consequence. This leaves room to inter-
pret the co-governance system as approximate to a state of exception, as
“[t]he state of exception is an anomic space in which what is at stake is a
force of law without law” (Agamben, 2005, 35). In other words, behind
closed doors and in guaranteed secrecy, prison has all the preconditions
to evolve and devolve into situations where law itself is lawless. That is
not to say that life in prison is entirely unpredictable, but rather that its
predictability is not provided by the rule of law. Instead, prisoners have
carved out a space to provide a level of predictability for themselves and
their fellow cellmates. Authority use of violence, in this sense, serves the
purpose of disrupting the balance of daily life as much as it is considered
by prisoners to be part and parcel of that daily life—a possibility always
to be taken into account.
Yet even though the use of physical violence as a disciplinary tool
by prison authorities is against the law, it is not necessarily considered
illegitimate: many believe that authorities should be able to “teach a pris-
oner a lesson” or to physically reprimand transgressions, especially when
these transgressions negatively affect a particular officer or “the system”
itself. Certainly, officers legitimize the use of force against prisoners who
challenge their authority—much as the government at large has legit-
imized the use of force against protesters. It is pivotal to understand,
then, that seeking social order and applying the rule of law are not the
same thing (Parnell & Kane, 2003, 6). Numerous studies of policing
26In this vein, extensive beatings were also used to reestablish el mando (command) after
the 2009 riot at the SPR, the 2017 riot at the CPJ, and—as I have argued elsewhere—the
protesting population during the 2018 uprising (see Weegels, 2018c, 2019).
and prison governance have demonstrated that law enforcement does not
necessarily occur in a law abiding fashion (Beek et al., 2017; Denyer
Willis, 2015; Fassin, 2013, 2017; Gutiérrez Rivera, 2013). This mani-
fests in the disdain or disregard of human or prisoner rights by police
forces, special units and penal institutions across the globe—affecting
particular intersections of gender, race and/or class disproportionately.27
In this sense, the deployment of violence by authorities in Nicaragua’s
prisons is no exception. What is exceptional, perhaps, is that these
disciplinary practices coexist with re-educational practices and ideolo-
gies. In that sense, the extralegal use of force against prisoners becomes
telling of the discrepancies between the politico-ideological discourse (re-
education) and the reality of practice reflected in the use of an Agambean
“force of law” rather than a Weberian “rule of law.” Following this logic,
jurisprudence (such as prisoner rights) loses its practical standing. As they
pay for their wrongdoing, prisoners need to aguantar (endure) the full
weight of the “law” that is brought to bear upon them (“que les caiga todo
el peso de la ley”). In a video clip sent to the newspaper Hoy,28 filmed
by a prisoner with his cell phone, we can see how eight prisoners have
been taken to stand against the wall outside their cell so their cell can
be searched. There, the penitentiary officers, who outnumber the pris-
oners, order them to strip naked and face the wall with their hands on
their heads. Two types of officers are present: white-and-green uniformed
penitentiary officers, and dark blue uniformed guards. One of the offi-
cers, in white-and-green, proceeds to beat all of the (naked) prisoners,
presumably with a baton or a doubled belt, while the dark blue officers
stand grouped around the prisoners. The prisoner who filmed the scene
from the bars of his cell across the hallway repeatedly states “See, see
what they do to us, this is so you can see, you hear that [the whipping]?
They’re beating them up, see? Look, so you see that we prisoners don’t
tell lies.”
27 See especially work on Brazil’s police and prison system (Biondi, 2016; Darke, 2018; Denyer
Willis, 2015; Penglase, 2014). I have argued that much the same dynamics count for Nicaragua
(Weegels, 2018a; 2020b).
28 “Reos denuncian abusos en Penitenciario Nacional La Modelo,” retrievable on newspaper
Hoy’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdQL2Kl_tIQ (published on 21
December 2015, last viewed 27 September 2020).
180 J. Weegels
While the threat and reality of authority violence is integral the way
in which the authorities impose a force of law outside of the rule
of law (that is, a state of exception), what is at stake in concealing
this violence for onlookers is not the perceived legitimacy of a partic-
ular violent “incident,” but of that of the discourse surrounding the
entire re-educational model. The ideologically incorruptible nature of
the prison officer is paramount in the construction of this discourse.
To keep it in place, authority abuses and authority collusion in prison’s
illicit economies must remain concealed. Pivotal in this sense is that
Nicaragua’s system of penal re-education is projected as a political project
and as such anchored in the Sandinista state. Perhaps even more so
than with the communitarian policing model, which I have argued else-
where justifies the use of police violence against particular transgressors
of “community,” the integrity and efficacy of the prison system is not to
be questioned (Weegels, 2018a, 2018b). As I mentioned in the introduc-
tion, Nicaragua’s foremost human rights organizations – the independent
Centro Nicaragüense de Derechos Humanos (CENIDH) and Comisión
Permanente de los Derechos Humanos (CPDH)—have been barred from
accessing the prison system as of 2008, coinciding more or less with
the return to power of Daniel Ortega, leader of the Sandinista National
Liberation Front (FSLN) in 2007. The number of reports of human
rights violations at the hands of state authorities have only increased,
however.29 Considering the purposeful politics of concealment and
policing of access to the prison system, in combination with numerous
denouncements of police abuse (533 in 2016 alone, rocketing to over
2,000 injuries, 325 deaths and 1,600 arbitrary detentions following the
2018 protests),30 authority deployment of violence against prisoners and
29 In 2015, for example, the state-organized Procuraduría para la Defensa de los Derechos
Humanos (PPDH) held the Ministry of Governance responsible for obscuring prisoner deaths
occurring, according to them, due to the lack of medical attention, torture, and suicide, at the
rate of one death per month. See “Un reo muere cada mes en las cárceles de Nicaragua, según
procurador de DDHH,” El Nuevo Diario, 26 February 2015; “Denuncian caótica situación de
cárceles en Nicaragua,” AFP, 2 March 2015.
30 See for example the independent investigative report on the events that occurred between 18
April and 30 May 2018 (GIEI, 2018), the Interamerican Human Rights Commission annual
report (2018, 424), and the more recent human rights report “Silence at any cost: State tactics
to deepen the repression in Nicaragua” (Amnesty International, 2021).
detainees, as well as anyone who is perceived to oppose their governance

system, can be deemed systemic. Still, while prisoners protest by sewing
their mouths shut, going on hunger strikes or rioting, there is little else
they can do in the face of this systemic violence, and there is excruciat-
ingly little popular support for them or their family members standing
outside the jails with their cardboard signs denouncing the mistreatment
of their loved ones. Those who do speak up wish to remain anonymous
out of fear for retaliation, which is an omnipresent threat that govern-
ment authorities mobilize to instill a profound sense of insecurity in
those who dare to question the way power is exerted inside prisons.31
Conclusions
In this chapter I explored the ways in which prison is co-governed
by prisoners and authorities in Nicaragua. This co-governance system
balances power relations between prisoners and authorities through a
complex set of interactions, which result in more or less stabilized regu-
lations around the use of violence and the management of different
prison markets. Though analyzing the full extent of these arrangements
goes beyond the scope of this article, I have analyzed violence and
secrecy as the foremost regulatory and boundary-defining governance
practices in place. The deployment of both violence and secrecy should
be understood as integral to prison governance relations as prisoners and
authorities use these both as disciplinary tools and means to demonstrate
quien manda (who is in charge). The authorities and those prisoners “in
charge,” then, are mutually constitutive of the surveilling, governing and
(dis)ordering practices that organize prison life.
While inside prison co-governance arrangements then provide signif-
icant space for prisoner movement, they are also the relational spheres
for the articulation of the Sistema’s hybrid power. According to Sykes
31 Even though political prisoners and their family members receive more public support
following the 2018 protests, many of them are subjected to constant police harassment and
in-prison surveillance, including coercion to sign forms that state their loved ones are in “per-
fect physical and psychological conditions” and in which they vow not to denounce the prison
system publicly (personal interviews with family members of political prisoners, October 2020).
182 J. Weegels
(1958) this “sharing” of power on part of the authorities pointed to

the “defects of total power,” yet I would argue that in Nicaragua the
authorities’ capacity to act outside, above, and beyond the law (in part
by balancing or sharing their power with non-state political or crim-
inal actors), fosters a level of control that does not disrupt the totalizing
effects of power as the “force of law.” Given that prisoners participate
in the emergence and maintenance of this state of exception too, we
should consider it not just as a condition imposed from above, but also
as a “political fact” articulated from below. This brings me back to the
contingent and performative nature of prison—particularly to the acts
that (de)legitimize both prisoner and state power and authority.
As a carceral institution but also a state of exception, prison needs
to be performed by both prisoners and authorities. On the legal end,
the custodial regime requires a performance of obedience from the pris-
oners, and the prisoners require a performance of the basic guarantees
of the law from the authorities. On this premise, prisoners and authori-
ties establish a basic organization of daily life inside prison that provides
basic tenets of security. It is in this light that re-education is performed
both by prisoners and authorities as the legal purpose of imprisonment.
On the other hand, however, the custodial regime seeks a control over
prison life that exceeds the premise of the law and the limits of the
legal. Similarly, prisoners seek a control over prison life that exceeds the
limits of their confinement. It is in this extralegal sphere, largely veiled
in public secrecy, that both sides perform acts of (de)legitimation toward
one another in order to establish who is in charge. It is also here that
the governance entanglement thickens—where the prisoner can perform
his resistance to the Sistema, but where he is simultaneously unable to
escape it, as the full weight of the “law” can come to be exerted on
him if and when necessary. This points to an inherent paradox for resis-
tance under a state of exception, as resistance itself becomes incorporated
into the argument for the prolongation or expansion of exception. The
current situation on the margins of the law of more than 140 imprisoned
protesters and dissidents points precisely to this paradox, as well as the
dangers of Nicaragua’s process of carceral hybridization.
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Co-Governance of Dialogue: Hegemony
in a Brazilian Prison
Vitor Stegemann Dieter
Introduction: The Global South and Penal

Governance
Brazil has the third largest prison population in the world (World Prison
Brief, 2020) holding more than 720,000 individuals in its prison system
(DEPEN, 2019) and their conditions are typically described as inhu-
mane according to human right standards (Human Rights Watch, 1998;
Zackeski et al., 2016). Its crowding rates are almost triple than those offi-
cially admitted (DEPEN, 2019) and houses a population that not only
suffers from the excessive deprivations (CNJ, 2012), but also often suffer
from institutional violence and contract otherwise preventable illnesses
inside (DEPEN, 2019, 52–53). The overall picture has led the Brazilian
V. Stegemann Dieter (B)

ICPC, Curitiba, Brasil

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98602-5_7
188 V. Stegemann Dieter
Federal Supreme Court (2015) to define the prison system in a ‘state of

unconstitutionality’.
Studies have given increasing attention to the overall problems of the
system (Pereira, 2017; Ungar, 2003) and the reasons for the Brazilian
mass incarceration (Azevedo & Cifali, 2016; Fonseca, 2017). Yet, in
this process, researchers have often failed to address how the prison
culture, the prisoners and immediate authorities have reacted to adapt
(Crewe, 2007), survive (Darke & Garces, 2017) and, potentially, trans-
form (Avila, 2018) their own dire circumstances. Nevertheless, emerging
studies on the Global South (Carrington et al., 2016) and on prison
governance (Darke et al., 2017) have been increasingly addressing that
gap. While this field has only recently emerged, it has already pointed
to the limitations of understanding imprisonment in the Global South
from abstract human rights standards (Jefferson, 2005) and the potential
new forms of order (Darke, 2018) and control (Cerbini, 2017) that are
far from the image of a prison simply ruled by coercion.
This chapter intends to contribute to those emerging debates drawing
from an ethnography in Brazilian prisons that, through the agency of
inmates, prison staff and prison governors, has transformed the domi-
nant governance culture creating a co-governance of ‘dialogue’. As my
results point, this is a process that involves complex power relations
between those agents. I argue that co-governance is the product of inter-
actions between different spheres of prison governance that emerges as
an output of power relations in prison from the bottom-up. While most
studies have focused on the coercive dimension of prison (Foucault,
1995; Goffman, 1961; Scraton et al., 1991; Wacquant, 2008), I find
that the emergence and development of co-governance should be under-
stood in tandem with the need of the prison system to have the consent
of inmates on its conditions of incarceration. In a dialogue with Gramsci,
this is a hegemony (domination through both consent and coercion) that
should be understood in terms of a project (penal politics), an appa-
ratus (management or governance of imprisonment) and interactions of
consent and coercion (relations between staff and inmates).
The chapter is divided into five sections. I start with the debates on
prison studies—with a focus on governance—in the Global North and
South, arguing that power relations are at the centre of the debate and the
Co-Governance of Dialogue … 189
theory of hegemony has potentials to innovate the field. Next, in Section

“Order in ‘Southern’ Prisons: A Methodological Inquiry into the Culture
of Prison Governance in Brazil”, I describe the ethnographic method
undertaken, with a focus on the participant observation and interviews
with inmates, staff and authorities. In Section “The Crisis of Authority:
Prison Containment, Penal Treatment and the Dialogue with Inmates”,
the results point to the experience of the ‘crisis’ of authority that staff
is undergoing due to the changes in the inmate culture and the changes
in penal policies. In the following section (Section “Hegemony and the
Layers of Governance: The Project, the Apparatus and the Production
of Consent”), I argue that we can identify three layers of hegemony
(prison governance) in prison: the first one being the penal policies that
determine the conditions and purpose of imprisonment—which in the
field represents a policy of ‘containment’—; an intermediate layer of the
management of prison governors in prison—in the field referred as a
‘penal treatment’ approach with inmates—; and, third, the interactions
between prison staff and inmates characterised by a co-governance of
‘dialogue’, in which inmates put pressure on staff to have conditions
of imprisonment changed and staff manages those demands according
to principles of security, discipline and safety. I then move on to the
conclusion reflecting on the interactive effects of these layers of gover-
nance and the attitudes of prisoners and staff to the academic debates on
co-governance.
Prison Governance and the Production

of Order
In line with Gresham Sykes’s (2007) study of an American prison in the
1950s, classic criminological research on imprisonment gave significant
importance to prisoner–staff relationships as a basis for the under-
standing of prison social order (Clemmer, 1958; Grusky, 1959; Schrag,
1954; Sykes’s 2007). Sykes’s (2007) found that the means by which
order is produced lays in a constant set of informal negotiations through
which custodians partially alleviate the pains of imprisonment suffered
by inmates in exchange for their obedience (Hancock & Jewkes, 2011;
Riley, 2002; Warr, 2016). Instead of an order based on the ‘official

commands and decrees’, control is necessarily produced through ‘nego-
tiations’ and ‘struggles’ (Darke, 2018; Garces et al., 2013; Sykes, 2007).
In that sense, prison staff are far from impartial enforcers of order, the
prison environment ‘corrupts’ and compromises their power (Jacobs,
1977; Sykes 1956), but this is the unavoidable reality behind the offi-
cial governance (Crewe et al., 2015; Scott, 2015). Brazilian studies have
also found these negotiations as pervasive arrangements that produce
order with the contribution of inmates in the precarious conditions
of prisons (Castro e Silva, 2008; Coelho, 2005; Ramalho, 2002). In
sum, following Sykes, prison governance is far from impersonal. It is an
informal negotiation enforced with and through the inmates.
While Sykes’s arguments had a great impact on prison studies (Drake
et al., 2015; Reisig, 2001), others have constructed narratives different
from or against the notion that order is a product of negotiations-
struggles or that this is a positive form of governance. Critical approaches
have argued that the great power gap between custodians and inmates
is the key social arrangement that determines order from a top-down
bureaucratic form (Crewe, 2009b; Foucault, 1995; Goffman, 1961;
Mathiesen, 1965; Rhodes, 2004). Furthermore, others have seen the
prison as a total institution suffering from a crisis of legitimacy that
should be resolved by taking prisoners’ grievances seriously (Scraton
et al., 1991; Sparks et al., 1996) and to take into account the imbalance
of power within prison (Mathiesen 1974; Matthews, 1999; Scraton et al.,
1991). In that vein, some have questioned the idea that informal negotia-
tions with inmates is a fixed condition of imprisonment (DiIulio, 1991),
positing instead for a control-security model (DiIulio, 1990; Useem &
Kimball, 1991). In effect, since the 1970s Western-affluent countries
have sought to increase forms of control that follow impersonal stan-
dards with the expansion of bureaucratic-legal accountability (Jacobs,
1977; Trulson & Marquart, 2009), spatial architectural-segregation
(Hancock & Jewkes, 2011) and the development of ‘super-max’ prison
facilities (Rhodes, 2004; Richards, 2008)—reforms expanded to the rest
of the world, including Brazil (Buntman & Muntingh, 2013; Jesus Filho,
2013; O’Day & O’Connor, 2013; Wacquant, 2008). Despite those
developments, critical research has argued that instead of creating a more
legitimate system these changes have made prison power more insidious
and elusive (Crewe 2009b; Mathiesen 1965; Rhodes 2004).
Another set of critiques emerges from a Southern criminological
perspective (Carrington et al., 2016). These studies have critically chal-
lenged notions in which the Global North sets the standards for order
and the rest of the world appears simply as an extension or a ‘less devel-
oped form’ of Western-affluent countries. Thus, scholars are calling for a
contextualised account of different prison climates (Martin et al., 2014;
also da Cunha, 2003) in which localised solutions of prison order are
not disregarded or labelled as ‘deviant’ simply because they diverge from
Western-affluent canons.
In this vein, a growing body of literature from the Global South has
been focusing on the emergence of forms of co-governance in prison
(Darke et al., 2017). A relevant reference to this argument can be found
in Sacha Darke’s ethnography in a Rio de Janeiro lockup (Darke, 2014b,
2018). In an environment of understaffing, overcrowding and other
deprivations, prisoners were necessary collaborators of governance. The
few existing staff relied on a body of ‘trusties’ that supported the disci-
pline and order of the staff. Far from being agents of disorder and
violence, ‘trusties’ promoted a balanced equilibrium in which inmates
collaborated to ‘maintain order and facilitate survival’. For Darke it is
from the ‘conviviality’ of inmates—largely informed by their common
cultural embeddedness—that order and survival are co-produced in
prisons in the precarious conditions of the Global South.
Seen from a Southern criminology perspective, the recent literature
on prisons (such as the contributions in this book) contributes with
more than a diverse set of localised narratives on the production of order.
Nevertheless, they have paid less attention to power relations as struggles,
and often neglect the conflicting ways by which struggles produce order.
For instance, in Dias and Salla (2017) gang relations in Brazilian prison
can be seen as an extension of the institutional violent order of prison
to the non-affiliated prisoners; whereas in Darke and Karam (2016) the
key to understand the under-resourced Latin American prison is the
collaboration between prisoners and staff—providing agency and making
inapplicable the concept of total institution in the Global South.1 In such

accounts, while mass incarceration and inhumane conditions are frowned
upon, the underlying assumption is of a prison order in which struggles
are not inexistant, but already resolved by the informal prison culture
and a prison policy that appears almost fixed or static (authoritarian
or collaborative). In that sense, ‘Southern’ prison studies suffer from a
relative underdevelopment of power relations within the prison and the
disputes that exist between different projects of prison governance.
Thus, the concept of power stands out in its relevance. Of course,
Foucauldian theory has most famously explored the relations between
power and imprisonment (Ignatieff, 1981; Matthews, 2014). Foucault’s
classic exploration of the relations between discipline and domination
in total institutions (Foucault, 1995) has been fruitful in debates on
the forms of prison domination in Western-affluent countries (Cohen,
1985; Crewe, 2009b; Matthews, 1999; Welch, 2009) and in ‘Southern’
prisons (Cerbini, 2017; Ramalho, 2002). However, while these contri-
butions have focused on the power-knowledge that produce domination
in prison, they have not given the same attention to the conflicting
tensions, struggles and agencies of prisoners, staff and authorities that
often produce resistance and transformation (Garland, 1993; Sparks
et al., 1996). The relations between the authorities and subordinate
groups is of increasing significance to the understanding of the Global
South due to the aforementioned debates on the emergence of prison
co-governance (Darke, 2018; Macaulay, 2017). In this line of inquiry,
this chapter ventures into the theory of hegemony (Gramsci, 1992) as a
possible productive venue to further explore the agentic and interactive
dimension between prisoners, inmate collectives, staff and authorities in
prison.
1 It is worth noticing that the ‘defects of total institutions’ have been suggested by Sykes (2007)
in his study of a prison in New Jersey. In effect, other prisons in the Global North have also
relied on prisoners to maintain order (Trulson & Marquart, 2009) and the interaction between
gangs and the institution are still pervasive in United States prisons (Lessing, 2017).
In Gramsci, hegemony is a form of domination2 (Thomas, 2009) that

seeks to attain the consent of the subaltern groups (Crehan, 2002; Green,
2011; Liguori, 2011). Following Gramsci’s (1992, 12), it can be initially
described as ‘The “spontaneous” consent given by the great masses of the
population to the general direction imposed on social life by the domi-
nant fundamental group’. More specifically, hegemony exists as a project
of power that is dynamically constructed and reproduced in its appara-
tuses (Hoare & Sperber, 2016) to maintain subordination of subaltern
groups (Ciavolella, 2014). But hegemony is always dynamic. Against a
stricter cultural or post-marxist (Mouffe et al., 1979) reading of Gramsci
(for a critique McKay, 2014) in critical philological Gramscian studies,
scholars have underscored the integration between consent and coer-
cion in hegemony (Boothman, 2008; Fontana, 1993; Thomas, 2009).
Modern societies integrate uses of coercion to a purpose of consent
and are constantly transforming and adapting their hegemony through
the apparatuses of civil society and the State (Thomas, 2013)—such as
schools, the media, churches, etc. (for our purposes, the prison system).
The historical context that comprises both larger structural forces and
the agency of groups and individuals around a particular hegemony is
what comprises a hegemonic project and a set of apparatuses that seek to
maintain hegemony over subaltern groups in determinate circumstances
(Thomas, 2009).
Therefore, establishing a dialogue with Gramsci’s theory of power,
in which the Modern democratic State seeks the consent of subaltern
groups, I propose to think with Gramsci but beyond him to reflect on
2 Against Perry Anderson (1976), much of the literature on Gramsci has seen hegemony as the
development of domination, not the opposite of domination. This increasingly prevalent reading
(Boothman, 2008; Fontana, 1993; Thomas, 2009) argues that hegemony seeks the consent of
its subjects but maintains the threat of coercion and discipline. In other words, instead of an
opposition—in which hegemony translates to consent and domination means coercion, both
being different political projects of power—, hegemony and domination both rely on different
degrees of consent and coercion. The difference between both concepts is that the fundamental
orientation of hegemony is to obtain the willing cooperation of its subjects—‘consent’ and
‘coercion by consent’ (Thomas, 2009, 165)—, whereas pure domination seeks the coercion of
the subjects for their cooperation (‘consent by coercion’). Furthermore, having hegemony means
that domination remains a resource in times of crisis to re-establish the dominant project of
power through force.
prison order as a hegemony that is in perpetual struggle and transfor-

mation. My hypothesis is that prisons in Brazil need to be understood
as more than environments of authoritarian coercion, they are consti-
tuted by a praxis of consent with prisoners, but this does not make them
spaces devoid of coercion or struggles. In other words, can the practices,
discourses and interactions of the Brazilian prison be better understood
from the vantage point of struggles for hegemony? This leads to a reflec-
tion upon the degree of consent to maintain order and the parallels with
Gramscian theory to the understanding of hegemony as a project (the
politics of prison), an apparatus (the prison) and a set of groups (inmates
and authorities)—responding to consent and coercion—to elucidate the
understanding of power in its different moments to which corresponds
forms of prison governance.
Order in ‘Southern’ Prisons: A Methodological

Inquiry into the Culture of Prison Governance
in Brazil
In prison studies, ethnographies have been able to refrain from abstract-
modelling to provide the ‘localised’ setting (Armstrong & Jefferson,
2017) in which experiences (Comfort, 2003; Cunha, 2014) and power
relations occur (Crewe, 2015; Rhodes, 2015). This is especially rele-
vant for the Global South, where it is necessary to understand prison
in its power relations beyond distant abstract frameworks and closer
to the immediate ways of governing prisons (Darke, 2018; Jefferson &
Gaborit, 2015). In that vein our ethnography explores more than the
discourses around prison, to include the shared practices and experiences
that construct relations of power.
The research was designed to understand the prison context in a
State of Brazil—in the South with a total prison population of approx-
imately 40 thousand prisoners—with authorities, immediate prison
staff and prisoners in three prisons (two of them maximum-security
units) and a police lockup. Fieldwork between October 2016 and April
2017 consisted of different tools of data collection: participant obser-

vation, interviews (n = 52) and focus groups. After the collection of
data, the material was organised, coded and then narratively articu-
lated (Benaquisto, 2008; Katz, 2002). Important terms and concepts
had to be adapted from colloquial Brazilian Portuguese to academic
English. In the results section of this chapter all terms with inverted
commas are concepts that were used in that native cultural context of
participants (such as ‘ideology’, ‘the crime’, etc.), occasionally, when the
circumstances demand, the Portuguese term is written next in brackets.
Greater opportunities for participant observation emerged in one
particular prison, the EOC (pseudonym) with approximately 600
inmates. The prison was relevant in the region for imprisoning the
so-called ‘problematic prisoners’, especially those for violent crimes or
lengthy sentences, and members of the Brazilian inmate group, ‘PCC’
(standing for ‘Primeiro Comando da Capital’). Inmates were isolated
in their cells most of their time, with three hours of yard and strictly
regulated visiting procedures a day on the weekend. Furthermore, secu-
rity measures are greater: the ubiquity of CCTV cameras, frisking
procedures, severe restriction on the circulation of inmates, disciplined
dressing codes, reduced access to items brought by visitors, length of time
in the yard, etc.
My unparalleled access to the ‘deep’ parts of prison occurred due to a
set of positive circumstances that allowed me to observe the interactions
between prisoners and staff. While in the other prisons I had access to a
separate part of prison in which I interviewed participants, at the EOC
I could go much beyond that. The office where I was initially holding
interviews was ‘deep’ within the prison, consequently I had the opportu-
nity to move to some other spaces where officers were working (such as
the wings in prison) and establish rapport. In addition I could engage in
conversations with prisoners doing chores or those waiting for a meeting
with staff.
Slowly my presence in the corridors and open offices became more
organic. As I interviewed more prisoners and met them in the halls, or as
I had lunch with the staff, I built a relationship and could ‘hang around’
prison. This allowed me to circulate through parts of the prison without
supervision—never the immediate spaces next to the prison cells or the
yard. Considering possible security concerns, I used my best judgement

to circulate, avoiding a breach of trust that could put me at risk. Overall,
these conditions gave me a first-hand impression of the rapport between
the staff and prisoners, which, added to my extended participation in
the field, allowed me to triangulate (Flick, 2004) my impressions and
the interviews at the EOC and other prisons with the interviews with
ex-convicts and prison staff in the streets.
The Crisis of Authority: Prison Containment,

Penal Treatment and the Dialogue
with Inmates
The perception of my participants is that one of the features that has
changed the most in their prisons in the last years is the imposition of
authority of staff over inmates. This is as a product of two large factors:
a change in the culture of the penal department and in the prisoners’
culture.
A major issue for the prison officers working in the ‘deep parts’ of
prison [fundão da cadeia], is the feeling that their authority has been
undermined due to the lack of support from the authorities. This is
partly due to a change of governance culture from prison governors.
The EOC deputy governor explains that from his experience there are
two ways of governing prison: the ‘penal treatment’ governance and the
‘colonel’ governance.3 In the recent past most prisons were governed
3 As it will be further developed in this section, ‘penal treatment governance’ [administração de

tratamento penal] is a form of governance in which the prison governors and other authorities
within the hierarchy of prison seeks to attain order from inmates by having an attitude that is
concerned with the improvement of the legitimacy of prison in the eyes of prisoners (such as
being procedurally fair and showing an effort to attend the needs of prisoners when possible). A
‘colonel governance’ [administração de coronel] seeks order by distributing favours and instilling
obedience among the prisoners (through the display of authority by staff ). In Brazilian history,
the ‘colonel’ [coronel] is a reference to rural elites that acted as a local authority exerting
political power through violence and the exchange of favours. The ‘colonel’ was a wealthy man
that maintained a squad of gunmen, while protecting and distributing favours to those were
on his side—establishing a rapport of dependency and fear. ‘We still have to consider personal
favours of every description, from arranging jobs in the public service to the smallest acts of
homage. It is under this heading that paternalism occurs, as well as its opposite: withholding
through a ‘colonel’ way, but changes of government and other facts

have altered the upper management of prison governors to increasingly
favoured governors with what he deems a ‘penal treatment’ approach.
My staff participants in the lower hierarchies of the EOC prison expe-
rience the change to ‘penal treatment’ as something that worsened their
work. One typical narrative states that the decline in their authority is
the fault of ‘human right groups’. Such staff describe their duties as being
daily harassed in their stressful work. They suffer to maintain order with
understaffing in dangerous conditions while ‘human rights groups’ focus
their attention on prisoners’ demands.
But there are also alternative views among the staff. Those interviewed
on the outside and the more senior staff members refer to these argu-
ments in the ‘deep jail’ [fundão da cadeia] as a ‘police mentality’. This
other group of officers complain about prison conditions but see their
work as one of mediating issues with prisoners. In their view, the ‘police
mentality’ often causes problems due to the lack of tact with inmates.
For these other staff, this mentality is not purely ideological but also
connected to a preference for a more easy-going system in which they
can issue orders without contestation.
Participants also situate these two governance approaches within an
overarching penal policy—that of ‘containment’ [contenção] of pris-
oners. All sort of issues in prison creates a great deal of stress for
inmates that affect the security team. For the chief of security and the
prison governors, the current inmate culture is not willing to simply
accept ‘containment’—referred to the practice of being locked up under
a subservient discipline. The ‘penal treatment’ approach of the prison
governors tries to meet the demands of prisoners and fellow staff, which
is contrasted with the ‘colonel’ attitude of governors that keep their office
door shut without meddling too much in ‘deep’ parts of ‘jail’.
bread and water from one’s opponents’ (Leal, 2009, 14). Thus, those that benefited from
them saw in the paternalistic patronage of ‘colonels’ a value for the community and a positive
contribution to social order, to which the authority of the ‘colonel’ appeared indisputable. In
that sense, as we will see there are parallels between the notion of the ‘colonel’ approach and
the informal ‘negotiations’ found by Castro e Silva (2008)—and more distant connections with
Sykes (2007) in which reducing the deprivations of captives was exchanged for their obedience
to the personalised authority of custodians.
Yet behind their approach as governors, a system of ‘containment’ is

pervasive beyond a local governance culture. Despite managerial changes,
‘containment’ is the dominant culture of the penal department4 and the
prison system. A suicide in prison allows me to understand this point.
The day after its occurrence, the prison environment was different. The
silence of the wings and the emptiness of yards and common spaces
build a tension among the few prisoners in the corridors and workshops.
A suicide in a prison cell (shared by around nine inmates) often could
mean a homicide. Prisoners are tense. On the other hand, the staff appear
much more relaxed than most days. As we converse about the suicide:
Deputy governor: “Wow, I feel angry when I hear the phone

ringing, because I already know, when the
phone rings I say ... ‘Omg, what is it now?”
Chief of security: “Death! This time I thought it was an
escape. Death would brighten the day, right?
I thought it was an escape”
Deputy governor: “I just know I thought: some bad shit
happened”
Me: “What is worse …? Is it an escape or a death?”
Chief of security and “Escape, man!”
deputy governor:
Chief of security: “Escapes opens up an inquiry, right?”
Assistant: “Escape opens an inquiry, involves prison
staff, there’s an investigation.”
Chief of security: “Death, call the morgue because it is between
them [prisoners], you understand?”
Entailed in the penal department philosophy of ‘containment’, an

escape is motive to put the administration into scrutiny, while death
is investigated by the police and remains as a problem between pris-
oners that does not affect as greatly the prison administration. In fact,
4The penal department is the overarching administrative body of prisons attached to the State
government.
an escape attempt forced the prison governor to open an inquiry against

a staff member that had been negligent, but the weird circumstances of
the suicide were resolved with the visit of a forensic expert determining
the cause of death. In a similar sense, the State government has been
dealing with some of the overcrowding by installing cargo containers as
prison cells. That means that even if the local prison governance culture
may adapt and change from a ‘colonel’ approach—keen on making pris-
oners obey without contestation—to a ‘penal treatment’—responding to
prisoners’ demands—, the larger culture of the penal department remains
attached to its view of ‘containing’ prisoners as their main goal.
A ‘containing’ penal culture is different from a wider ‘rehabilitative’
[re-educação] penal policy, which is in tandem with a transformation of
practices of control.
A practical demonstration of these changes of prison policy culture
that affect the authority of staff is the reduction of prison workshops
(called ‘sectors’). Prison staff posit that the lack of workshops has under-
mined their authority because the shortage of resources damages their
capacity to manage prisons properly. Prison workshops gave prisoners
more time out of their cell, a wage—however meagre—and allowed
them to progress their sentencing conditions to better prisons faster.
Common prison staff argue that prison ‘sectors’ were used in a trade-off
for social control—improving their authority on the custody of pris-
oners. Ex-convicts and inmate participants were aware of this trade-off
and hold a great deal of contempt for prisoners that work in the ‘sectors’.
However, prison staff seem to also believe that the provision of reha-
bilitative activities—especially in the ‘closed’ prison regimes5 —gave the
institution more legitimacy with the individual prisoner. Yet the ‘sectors’
5 The Brazilian legal system divides prison regimes in three: ‘closed’, ‘semi-open’ and ‘open’.
Prisoners are sent to each prison according to the length of their sentences and the gravity of the
crime, they then progress to other prisons as they do their time without disciplinary sanctions.
There are many types of ‘closed’ prisons, such as hyper-max units, special rehabilitative units,
jails in police precincts, units for prisoners on remand, etc., and sometimes they are mixed
with the other regimes (combining semi-open or open regimes). In the field however, a ‘closed’
prison can gain a particular meaning, which is the condition by which the authorities (prison
governor and staff ) govern the prison. In this ethnographic sense, in a ‘closed’ or ‘more closed’
prison, inmates spend more time in their cells and have more security constrains; whereas in
an ‘open’ ‘more open’ prison, inmates have more liberties within prison.
were slowly dismantled due to prison disturbances (on the part of pris-
oners), strikes (on the part of staff ), disruption (upon the discovery of
corruption schemes) and, most importantly, the lack of proper funds to
maintain the activities.
The ‘sectors’ usually remaining in ‘closed’ prisons are four: the
‘cleaning’ [faxina] (a group of inmates that clean and distribute food),
the ‘warehouse’ (that controls stocks of non-perishable goods), the ‘craft-
work’ (to which prisoners could sign up, buy the materials and work by
themselves in their cells) and the ‘school’ (5 to 10 students once or twice
a week).
In the relatively recent past many other prisoners found activities such
as the kitchen, artistic activities, professional trainings, gardening and
even industrial shop-floors within prison, among other possibilities. My
staff participants stress that the reduction of ‘sectors’ mostly happened in
the average ‘closed’ prisons. In effect, some special prisons constructed
to house a small number of well-behaved inmates and other ‘semi-open’
prisons actually are better equipped and provide all sorts of rehabilita-
tive programmes. Yet in the majority of common ‘closed’ prisons, the
larger culture of ‘containment’ lacks the interest in effectively investing
in those activities and there is very little in terms of ‘rehabilitation’. The
problem of course is that the reduction or lack of workshops backfires
proper ‘containment’ in the long run because it undermines an impor-
tant part of prison control over inmates—the trade-off with staff and
greater legitimacy of prison. As a prisoner at the EOC prison argued:
Why is the prisoner in prison? To comply with a measure that will re-
educate [reeducar] or rehabilitate [ressocializar], right? But what do we
have here to rehabilitate ourselves other than hunger and cold?
A third element that affected the control of staff over inmates is the
reduction of time spent in prison (speeding parole and a progression
to ‘open’ prison regimes) and the lesser effect of official disciplinary
sanctions—both criminal policies created to manage the increasing over-
crowding. Authorities interviewed share a similar assessment of the
prison: its nearly reaching an unsustainable peak of overcrowding. In the
last decades, legal changes and a culture of imprisonment have dramati-

cally increased the flow of people at the ‘entrance door’ to prison—more
arrests, more convictions and longer sentences. Instead of following the
trend of building new prisons to deal with the ‘entrance door’ of pris-
oners, current administrations have created a local regulatory reform and
a judicial cultural change that opens the ‘back door’ of prison in the
form of early releases. A new policy of shortening sentences (which only
affects those already convicted not the sentencing standards) is creating
a constant change of prisoners and leaving prison staff alone to deal with
the overload of arrivals and departures.
In order to reduce overcrowding, authorities rely on extra work from
prison staff to deal with the greater in-and-out flow of prisoners. This
has been undermining the relations between the staff union and the
upper authorities. The extra work from staff is the solution to which they
need to rely in a situation in which they cannot expect larger structural
changes in the sentencing standards or in the problem of policing and
crime. As they see it, their reform of ‘opening the back door’ does put
pressure on staff, but it is one of the few available ways to deal with
their problem of worsening prison conditions from an administrative
and criminal justice perspective: the excess of convictions, the increasing
length in sentencing, the limited capacity to expand the prison system
and the increasing overcrowding.
Finally, a fourth element that plays into the crisis of the authority of
the prison system is the increasing reliance on prisoners and their families
to maintain the system working. Together with the State, the family is
an essential provider of everyday goods. Penitentiaries differ significantly
but, in general, the State provides little: a grey pair of tracksuit pants,
a white t-shirt and flip-flop sandals (if available in their size). Other
goods that should be provided by the State are scarce. Prisoners call the
lack of access to goods and the pains that follow incarceration in those
circumstances the ‘suffering’ or the ‘oppression’.
The ‘suffering’ is the psychological experience of being deprived
behind the walls of the prison with limited clout for change. In theory,
families could help out by bringing a ‘parcel’ [sacola] with some goods in
their visits. Nevertheless, a simple visit from a family member demanded
to overcome what they feel as substantial bureaucratic measures from the
penal department and the prison unit. Such measures are imposed to
maintain control over prison (avoiding illegal goods, riots, violence, etc.)
Bureaucracy effectively produces a lot of strain in addition to being time
consuming and costly to overwhelmingly poor working-class families.
The experience of inmates is that imprisonment means the limited
catering from the government and a terrible quality of goods with great
impediments to bring support from the outside. This is not a matter of
pure lack of resources in the context. Scarcity could be partially allevi-
ated with the support of their families, but even when families have the
means and the willingness to help out, they are often unable to do so
in a significant way due to bureaucratic impediments: the prison unit
maintains a closed list of type of items and the quantity they can bring
in (according to staff and prisoners, utterly insufficient). It also requires
interviews in different parts of the region, background checks, a plurality
of documents, limits the people who can visit (and greatly restricts the
number of them), etc. Among the few things the unit provides, prisoners
describe a ‘rancid’ toothpaste, a toothbrush, a bar of soap to wash clothes
and a disposable razor, each of these items, only once per month. New
towels seem to be absent from the State’s inventories. Toilet paper is,
for prisoners, a luxury, rarely seen and not offered by the prison system.
Prison cells are considerably cold during winter and excessively hot in the
summer. Cells accumulate mould, the latrine clogs frequently, they have
no warm running water, no electric sockets and must share cells with
prisoners sleeping on the floor. Not to mention the complaints about
the awful quality of the food—and its meagre quantity. The quantity
and quality of goods is so meagre that the prison partially subsists due to
the outside. As one prisoner shared:
It will never be enough, if you weigh the packed meal here, it will be 300
grams [11 ounces] at most. It’s one at lunch, one at dinner. [...] actually
as they say, they don’t feed us, they just let us survive. You feel me?
But this puts great pressure onto families and prisoners themselves, as he
later continues:
[T]he prisoner has the right to be close to their families because they meet
the needs that the State lacks, a parcel with groceries [sacola], hygiene
material, clothes, towels, etc. and that is in the guidelines, not perks, just
our rights. However, since […it] can only be delivered on weekdays and
we cannot make paid purchases, if our wife has a registered job today, she
can’t bring a parcel on weekdays. She may lose her job, if she loses her
job… do you have a child? […] you only know what you’re capable of
when you see a child of yours asking for food.
The reliance on families is such an important feature of prison that one

of the most relevant classification is between inmates that ‘suffer’ prison
more or less: those that have family support and those that do not.
In fact, some participants preferred to stay in substantially worse ‘jails’
[cadeias], with less ventilation, more overcrowding per cell (up to 50
prisoners) and no open yard, if that meant their family could make an
occasional visit. According to them, while conditions in ‘jails’ might be
significantly worse, they are often closer to the neighbourhoods of their
families and have less bureaucratic barriers for food and other products.
In that vein, it is the PCC, common prisoners and family members that
constantly brought up the issue of their precariousness conditions to the
prison governors and ‘human right groups’ to pressure the government.
Social workers in prison share their perception of this process. According
to them, the prison used to produce many goods that supplied some
of the needs of prisoners, such as soap and food, however these services
either closed, were outsourced or privatised. Individual prisons can offer
less to inmates and the immediate prison authorities are incapable of
resolving the problem of shortages in goods, so prisoners turned to the
PCC to voice their issues to the outside. The PCC grew to articulate the
demands of prisoners and increasingly became the organised mediator
between families and the authorities. Governments need to consider the
voice of families and they need to reduce friction with prisoners in order
to have less disturbances.
Prison officers argue that up to the mid and late 2000s their authority
over prisoners has been undermined due to the changes caused by the
‘ideology’ of the prevailing prison gang, the PCC. A major cause of their
diminished authority is the collective behaviour of prisoners. While in
the past they had to deal with a plurality of gangs creating disorder
in prison, the fragmentation of inmates favoured institutional control.
This form of authority has been partially undermined as prisoners seek
accountability from the staff ’s actions. In the eyes of officers acting in the
‘deep’ parts of prison, this has created a negative expectation that their
decisions are questionable. To some extent now their acts need to be
backed by convincing arguments, which must flow through the complex
prison regulations and their relations with management. Thus, there is
a general feeling that they are left to their own devices in their duties
against a collective organisation of inmates.
However, despite the complaints of prison staff, it is noticeable that
there is also a hidden, but important positive aspect to this change in the
culture of prisoners. It created two venues to produce order: one through
the individual rapport with prisoners; and the other, through the PCC
as a collective representative of inmates. This appeared as a feature of
imprisonment in regions where the PCC ‘predominated’. For them, the
PCC appears scattered through prison units and organising inmates. Yet
this is not a universal phenomenon. The organisation of the PCC has
mostly affected one type of prisoner—the prisoners coming from the
‘world of the crime’ [mundo do crime],6 representing those from more
marginalised backgrounds and active in criminal activities (theft, drug
dealing, etc.).
Thus, prisoners have not remained passive in face of the State negli-
gence; they have reacted by organising themselves. Nevertheless, the
austerity of the State affects more than the organisation of inmates,
it affects the daily work of the security team and their rapport with
inmates. I observe in the work of the security team of the EOC prison
how local prison staff must cope with the structural problems of living
conditions and security caused by such austerity policies. The practice of
accepting prisoners to have a ‘dialogue’ about issues in the ‘deep jail’ is
part of a governance culture that was marginal in the times of the ‘gangs’
[quadrilhas], but it is increasingly becoming important to deal with PCC
6 In the Brazilian prison and streets culture, the term ‘the crime’ [o crime] refers to a culture
of (self-labelled) ‘criminals’. Therefore, the native use of ‘the crime’ leads back to a group of
individual, sharing the same field (marginalised, deviant street culture or the prison culture)
with a shared meanings and common cultural understandings.
prisons. For some officers, the chiefs of security, staff and inmates often
have to ‘dialogue’ about the problems of the prison. The general rule is
that PCC prisoners became the first to come for a ‘dialogue’ with the
administration on behalf of inmates. Yet ‘dialogue’ also means going into
the ‘deep jail’ [fundão da cadeia] to understand the needs and demands
of prisoners. I could observe the security team in their office making
efforts to establish as much rapport with the inmates as possible. Most
prisoners meet with them to deal with individual problems, but inmate
leadership also discusses collective issues with the chief of security, for
instance, the entrance of a television, changes in the food menu or the
allocation of an inmate to their cells.
The collective pressures of the inmates through the representatives
(often PCC members) structurally pushes the security team to ‘dialogue’.
The government does not provide the adequate tools for this ‘dialogue’.
Given its failure to address the precarious conditions of prison, it leaves
the practical problems to each prison governor, their chiefs of security
and the staff most immediately dealing with prisoners. In a focus group,
the prison staff argue that in order to have security and control over the
inmates, they must build rapport and ‘dialogue’ with prisoners. Just like
in the prison environment, they do not see this as a ‘negotiation’ [nego-
ciação]. They insist that the ‘conversations’ they establish with prisoners
is not the same as ‘negotiations’ that used to happen in the recent past.
As explained by a chief of security:
The word ‘negotiate’ [negociação] sounds quite strong [laughter] see, well,
I’m going to talk about my experience. For you to have control of the
unit’s discipline, we have to talk [conversar]. If you don’t talk, you won’t
get anywhere [... In the past it was different]. For example, if the prisoner
was committing a misdemeanour, you would enter [the cell] or in the
yard, or in the wing, you would see the prisoner and lead him to the
little room [salinha, suggesting beatings or extortion]. You don’t do that
today, why not? Why do you lack the will? No. Because they close you
off and you don’t. Because at that time the wing on average at [prison]
revolved around what, 132, or 120. An average of 130 prisoners, I got
tired of doing that. [Pointing to the other prison staff] [Him] for sure too.
Today you’ll never do that, because due to the ‘voice of the Command’
[prisoners of the PCC] they go, they close you. ‘No... wait, sir, let’s talk’.
I mean, the conversation would go up there to the inspectorate to find

out what was his sanction, the conversation will start there.
In other words, these ‘conversations’ or ‘talks’ are not understood as

‘negotiations’. These informal arrangements mean a willingness of the
security team to balance the pressure of inmates and the precarious
conditions of the system through ‘dialogue’. In the current system,
inmates have the opportunity to ‘converse’ with the chief of security to
seek solutions to their daily problems. While the dominant system in the
recent past—with an inmate society socially fragmented—directed the
security team to use less ‘dialogue’ and more ‘negotiated’ attitudes, the
advent of the PCC made possible the formation of an ‘understanding’
between the authorities and prisoners. But for both prisoners and offi-
cers this is a matter of push-and-pull between a more lenient regime
or a tougher ‘containment’ stance (more ‘open’ or ‘closed’ prison). The
strain from both staff and prisoners is felt during the daily activities of
both groups, although they do talk and seek compromises, there is a
deep despise from one to the other. Common culture among prisoners
sees officers as that which causes their ‘oppression’, they are untrust-
worthy, corrupt by nature and abuse their power. The average staff sees
inmates as disobedient, irritating, whimsical and a danger to their lives
outside. In such context, surely an ‘understanding’ between the exten-
sion of ‘containment’ is possible, but it is always unstable, it is constantly
mutating. ‘Dialogue’ with inmates—and especially those where the PCC
is present—does have positive effects on the short and medium term
both on security and order, but is, ultimately, felt as a heavy burden for
the authorities.
Hegemony and the Layers of Governance:

The Project, the Apparatus
and the Production of Consent
Results in the previous section showed the inmate/prison interactions
that shape relationships from the bottom-up. They indicated a ‘crisis’ of
governance affected by the recent changes in the inmate culture and the
penal politics that constrain social arrangements in prison. A positive

framework to understand these results is the dimension of power, which
in my view, due to the dynamics of struggle, can be explored beyond a
Foucauldian lens.
In this sense, a dialogue with Gramsci (1992) is useful due to his theo-
retical contribution to understand power in modern societies—that is,
his theory of hegemony.7 Hegemony is a framework of the power rela-
tions that shape interactions between the State (including the apparatus
in civil society) and its subalterns, in which the former seeks the consent
of the latter to a determinate project of domination—seeking consent
without abdicating the use of coercion (Boothman, 2008; Fontana,
1993; Thomas, 2009). Criminology has often neglected a dialogue with
the radical and critical though of Gramsci (among a few notable excep-
tions: Hall, 1991; Stephenson, 2015) and has not yet considered the
implications of his thought to understand imprisonment. Nevertheless,
in a dialogue that follows the steps of recent developments in Grams-
cian philological studies (Boothman, 2008; Frosini et al., 2004; Thomas,
2009), there are significant contributions that allows us to understand
the tensions and struggles around imprisonment in modern democratic
societies through the guise of hegemony. Establishing a dialogue between
those contributions and my findings, I analyse prison order as a project
by which the hegemonic apparatus (prison) within a particular insti-
tutional context seeks the domination (using coercion and consent) of
its subaltern groups (prisoners). Drawing from this framework and the
literature on prison governance, I argue that the interaction of the hege-
mony of the prison system with the organisational power of the PCC has
shaped a specific form of inmate and staff governance: a co-governance of
‘dialogue’.8 In a theoretically oriented perspective, hegemony situates the
7 It is worth pointing out that this use of hegemony differs from the predominant approach in
the Brazilian criminological literature, such as Dias (2011). There, it is often connected with
the adjectives of ‘economic’ and ‘political’, drawing from Norbert Elias’s (1996)—which refers
to the reasons of wars and the struggles between States, therefore military force, domination and
sovereignty. Gramsci uses hegemony as a Modern form of power associated to the production
of consent in the apparatuses of society—not a concept of a sovereign force over a territory or
people.
8 ‘Dialogue’ [diálogo] here follows the meaning given by participants in the findings. Co-
governance means co-production of order between inmates and authorities. In contemporary
emergence of ‘dialogue’ as a product of a project of domination (a penal

politics) and an apparatus (the prison) that establishes a relation of coer-
cion and, more importantly, consent with subaltern groups (prisoners)
in which their organisation puts power relations under strain.
With this framework in mind, I find three levels of power relations
and governance that materialise a political and cultural hegemony of the
prison system (Table 1). The first level is constituted by a project of hege-
mony set around policies of imprisonment, in other words, the general
framework in which the prison is projected and by which prisoners are
expected to undergo social conformity. A second intermediate level of
managerial power within the prison, in which the concrete apparatus of
prison must be governed. Third, a base level of rapport between imme-
diate authorities and inmates, in which the interactions seek to attain the
consent of prisoners—but this is a key moment of tensions and struggles.
In a dialogue with Gramscian thought I suggest that the hegemony of the
Table 1 Hegemony, prison governance, actors and alternative ideological

models
Type/level of
Hegemony of Layer of Key actors and Ideological
an apparatus governance power holders alternatives
Hegemonic Prison Policies Government & ‘Containment’
project Judicial system ‘Rehabilitation’
or ‘Custody’
Hegemonic Prison governance Prison governors & ‘Colonel’ or
apparatus specialists ‘Police
mentality’
‘Penal
Treatment’
Production of Interactions of Prison staff with ‘Negotiation’
consent and order (informal the inmate ‘Dialogue’
domination governance or culture
co-governance)
studies the plurality of ways it has been used (Akoensi, 2014; Darke 2018);Weegels, 2019)
has expanded the term, in which it often means the informal arrangements between staff and
inmates that produce order in precarious settings—in which, with the exception of the precari-
ousness, is not distant from Gresham Sykes’s classical study on prison. In my view, considering
the contemporary uses, the term co-governance can be translated as the interactions and arrange-
ments between staff and inmates that produce order on the prison-floor—the interactions that
can exists in non-hyper-maximum units, as seen from below rather than top-down.
prison system (its governance) needs to have a certain degree of social

conformity from prisoners (see Carrabine, 2005; Sparks et al., 1996),
which occurs through the interactions of those three levels creating both
the structures and the agencies that adapt, resist or transform them.
The first level comprises the wider penal policies that determine the
number of prisoners, the length of imprisonment, the conditions of
control and the general living conditions in prison. In other words, the
hegemonic project to which an apparatus is established (the prison and
its conditions) and a purpose for the social conformity of prisoners. In
the findings, we have seen that in ‘closed’ prisons the State has moved
towards a governance culture that emphasises the ‘containment’9 of pris-
oners rather than their rehabilitation. Although there are practices of
rehabilitation ongoing in more ‘open’ prisons—which house a part of
the prison population—, prison staff found that in the conventional
‘closed’ prisons, larger state politics have favoured the internment (Birk-
beck, 2011) of prisoners. While the government has invested in the
prison system as a means to deal with crime through mass incarcera-
tion (affecting prison construction and overcrowding), it has also reduced
its investment in the conditions that enable rehabilitation (see Coelho,
2005; Ramalho, 2002). These policies affect the authority of prison staff
because they dismantle a plurality of means by which officers can exert
individualised control over inmates. For example, the increasing flux of
prisoners makes it difficult to establish rapport between inmates and
staff, and the reduction of ‘sectors’ and other ‘perks’ they could distribute
to those who submitted to their authority. Furthermore, the consequence
of expanding imprisonment with less investment in prison conditions is
that the government expects the system to do more with less. Yet these
costs do not disappear. Instead, they are outsourced to the inmates, their
families and the voluntarism of prison officers. This further fosters social
exclusion, marginalisation and the reliance of prisoners on the good will
9 ‘Containment’ here is used in relation to the usage in the field, not the term containment
as theorised by Wacquant (2009) for whom, generally speaking, containment speaks of a state
policy of ‘hemming in’ the problems and the dangerous classes in the ‘hyper-ghetto’ and in
the prison. Although there are possible parallels between the idea in the field and Wacquant’s
concept, ‘containment’ means the reclusion of prisoners to the prison and to their cells until
they serve their sentences without offering much in terms of activities.
of the immediate authorities to overcome their needs. This reflects an

enhanced form of deprivation that, as other studies show, most of the
prison population already experience on the outside (Jefferson, 2014;
Moore, 1978; Wacquant, 2009)—something that some have theorised
as an ‘expansive notion of confinement’ in the Global South (Jefferson,
2014, 46).
The practice of incarceration through ‘containment’ punishes inmates
by intensifying the experience of deprivation. Therefore, there are impor-
tant differences between the prisons examined in this research and the
goals of prison reformers in the late eighteenth century (Ignatieff, 1978),
the panopticon ideal that Foucault found in the nineteenth century
(Foucault, 1995), the therapeutic approach of asylums during the post-
war period (Goffman, 1961; Mathiesen, 1965) or the psychological
power of the 21st medium-security British prison (Crewe, 2009b; see
also Rhodes, 2004). Findings underscore a project of adapting pris-
oners to the institution through the ‘sufferings’ or the ‘oppression’ (as
prisoners name the experience of imprisonment) of scarcity and depri-
vations, instead of focusing on correcting the soul through moralisation,
labour and therapeutic programs or a meticulous operation that seeks to
maximise docility and utility.
Nevertheless, this is not a pre-modern form of punishment. The
‘oppression’ or the feeling of ‘sufferings’ is a form of punishment that
is quite distant from the hard and visible violence typical of punish-
ment in the tortures and abuses of late eighteenth-century Europe—such
as the spectacle of the scaffold (Foucault, 1995)—or in the nineteenth-
century fields of Brazil—the whippings and floggings of slaves (Zaffaroni
et al., 2011). Asserting that there is no project of discipline equiva-
lent to the reformers of the nineteenth century or a model of prison
akin to the Global North, in my view, is not to say that the Brazilian
prison lacks a democratic project (Holston, 2008), neither is it back-
wardly pre-modern (Birkbeck, 2011), nor it maintains control through
sheer coercion (Wacquant 2008).
Surely, it is a general form of slow violence10 —that ‘occurs gradually

and out of sight’ (Nixon, 2011, 2)—present in all forms of prisons in
both the Global North and South. Yet the project of prison punish-
ment through ‘containment’ appears to differ from the aforementioned
projects of discipline—especially when taken into consideration that
super-max and medium-security prisons in the Global North often
add psychiatric/therapeutic interventions, are less precarious and more
intensely reduces contact of the prisoner with the outside (Crewe, 2009a;
Mathiesen, 1965; Rhodes, 2004). In the ‘containment’ discussed here,
punishment is experienced through the creation of a deprivation as arti-
ficial barrier to the outside (of work, leisure, consumption, etc.), while
demanding from the outside to pay for those inside. The contacts of
inmates to the outside plays a major role in surviving the scarcity of
imprisonment (Dieter & Freitas, 2020). Importantly, precariousness is
not simply a product of Brazil being a poor or ‘failed’ State. State
authorities are not passive, but rather actively producing precarious
conditions—State neglect is an active feature. The ‘sufferings’ or ‘oppres-
sion’ within prison mean more than removing opportunities for work
and leisure; it also artificially fosters deprivation, while demanding from
the prisoners and their families to use their own resources to alleviate
their deprivation.
The artificial barrier from the outside through bureaucratic
measures—justified due to security concerns—is a built-in feature (an
active neglect from the part of authorities) that instils deprivation while
also demanding from prisoners to mobilise their own capacities (to over-
come their precarious condition). As a result of these contradictory signs,
prisoners feel the psychological strain of poverty in prison as a soft power
(Nye, 1990), that is a quite efficient way of subordination. The critical
10 Violence is often thought of as immediate and explosive, but Nixon (2011, 2) claims for
the need to engage with ‘a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular
nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive’: slow violence. Since its inception, the
original use of this term to understand the impact of environmental changes to the poor (Nixon,
2011) has been expanded to understand the effects of patriarchy on women (Christian &
Dowler, 2019), State and racial relations (Ward, 2015), border control (Bugge, 2019), housing
dispossession (Pain, 2019), etc., and it is appropriate here to contrast forms of punishment,
such as the floggings of slaves in nineteenth-century Brazil (the fast or spectacular violence);
to those Modern pains of imprisonment that prisoners experience coming from the precarious
conditions they are constrained into living.
research in the field has pointed the possible political-economy conse-

quences of imprisonment (Melossi & Pavarini, 2018; Wacquant, 2009;
Zaffaroni et al., 2011), the pains of imprisonment or the idea of less eligi-
bility (the ‘deterrent principle’ in Rusche & Kirchheimer, 2003, 6). These
might be a common, or combined, feature in both wealthier and poorer
countries, but the different form by which order is produced points
that there is an ethico-political consequence as well. Results suggest an
unequal strain being experienced in the Brazilian context of research. By
intensifying scarcity, the prison gets inmates to be more discipline and
proactively cooperating, because they need help from the authorities to
see their minimal conditions met. The conditions of prisoners do not
ameliorate in their daily-lives depending on their attendance to thera-
peutic programmes, neither if they simply behave with discipline: they
must seek out their families, talk to prison officers (demanding, cooper-
ating, etc.) and organise with other prisoners to overcome deprivations
(Cerbini, 2017), while the penal system is increasingly creating barriers
against these. In sum, the ‘oppression’ or ‘suffering’ is more than a bodily
pain of scarcity or precariousness, it involves a proactive dimension in
which survival means socially conforming to a project of subordination.
Thus, the ‘sufferings’ or the ‘oppression’ are an integral part of the
discipline of ‘containment’ in the local context. In practice this hege-
monic project needs the proactive engagement of inmates to overcome
the conditions of imprisonment. The passive consent to order (self-
imposed discipline) is connected to having the benefit of visiting rights
and some of the conditions of imprisonment relaxed, but they must also
actively engage with the system of authority as the legitimate channel to
ameliorate their pains. The contribution of inmates to their own condi-
tion of subordination allows the system at a large scale to exist, because it
is otherwise incapable of managing the flux of prisoners given its limited
resources (also Darke, 2018). This might appear paradoxical, but in the
daily practices of authorities and prisoners we see hegemony in operation:
the modern form of domination manages to attain the proactive engage-
ment of subaltern in their own conditions of subordination. A willing
agency from the part of the inmates for their survival (or even their
resistance to the ‘sufferings’) produces the outcome of reproducing the
system of domination.11 In this aspect I argue these appear as different

forms of subordination to those in the Global North (Crewe, 2009b;
Mathiesen, 1965; Rhodes, 2004; Ugelvik, 2014). Prisoners at the EOC
feel their poverty and subalternity to the prison and need to act against
the constant push of barriers in prison that enhance their ‘sufferings’ or
their ‘oppression’ to survive. The psychological experience of ‘sufferings’
further enhances the poverty, neglect and subalternity in prison to which
the lower echelons of the Brazilian working classes are already subjected
in society—but at a higher intensity and artificially produced.
Second, the intermediate level of governance is one where local prison
governance affects power relations in the prison. Despite Gramsci never
adequately addressing prison relations in his writings, we can estab-
lish a dialogue with his concept of the hegemonic apparatus of civil
society—such as the family, schools, etc.—to reflect on the prison as
also needing an important degree of consent from prisoners. As we
have seen, the operationalisation of the prison apparatus to obtain social
conformity works in different ways depending on the type of prison
(‘closed’, ‘open’, ‘for problematic prisoners’, etc.). Some of the litera-
ture in the Global North has argued that psychological and therapeutic
programmes can be seen as a form of soft power abcdefgh12 because
they seek to obtain the social conformity of prisoners through narratives
of personal responsibility (Crewe, 2009b; Shammas, 2014). In different
ways, ‘minimum security’ and ‘open’ prisons with progressive adminis-
trations in the Global South also rely on a narrative of self-responsibility
to mobilise inmates to develop their own rehabilitate activities (Darke,
2014a; in this book; Avila, 2018; Avila & Sozzo, in this book). However,
in conventional prisons, where the ideal of rehabilitation through labour
or therapy has been dramatically reduced, governance does not simply
return to a form of authoritarian hard power (King & Morgan, 1982).
11 As we will see later, this reproduction is not static. Through the praxis of prisoners (their
organisation) and the engagement of staff, reproduction is a process of producing crises. In the
contradictory dynamics of hegemony, prison order creates struggles straining and sometimes
transforming structures.
12 Crewe (2009b, 81) argues that power in medium-security prison (in Britain) from the 1990s
onwards operates with softer forms of power than the hard power of ‘physical constraint, force,
threat and deprivation’. For Crewe (2009b, 108), soft power means ‘the coercive potential of
incentives, in the sense that […] they were effective levers for ensuring prisoner compliance’.
Instead of maintaining prison in relentless lockdown, prison governors

and other prison authorities (such as the security team) must resort
to other forms of governance to produce consent—such as embedding
fatalism (Carrabine, 2005), negotiating rules (Sykes, 2007; Symkovych,
2018) or distributing other forms of privileges and internal hierarchies
(Akoensi, 2014; Marquart & Crouch, 1984). This is especially relevant
for prisons in the Global South that, under a more conventional ‘closed’
regime, have abdicated on providing substantial activities for prisoners.
Rather than dismissing these forms of governance as ‘deviant’, relative
to Global North standards (Jefferson, 2005; Jefferson & Gaborit, 2015;
Martin et al., 2014), from a Gramscian perspective, it is possible to
understand how the prison apparatus resorts to different forms of soft
power (Nye, 1990).13
On the level of the management of the prison apparatus, the practices
of prison governors were categorised either as ‘colonel’ or ‘penal treat-
ment’ governance. Whereas a ‘colonel’ managerial approach embodies
an authority expecting obedience to the hierarchy of prison; the ‘penal
treatment’ approach seeks to produce an experience of incarceration that
is more adaptive to ease the pains of ‘containment’ through meeting
the demands of prisoners and fellow staff. At a first glance, the idea of
‘colonel’ governance appears to reflect Wacquant’s view of penal policies
in the Global South as a ‘dictatorship over the poor’ (Wacquant, 2008),
in which imprisonment in Brazil is sustained through pure coercion
(torture, exploitation and intimidation in horrendous prison conditions).
However, against Wacquant’s proposition, which glosses over any form
of interaction for legitimacy and consent, I find that both a ‘colonel’
13 Despite Crewe’s (2009b) insightful analysis of soft power in a medium-security prison (see
footnote 12), soft power has a more general meaning stemming from international relations
studies which has more resonance with Gramsci’s theory of hegemony (Jacob, 2017). In that
field of study, Nye (1990, 166) argues that this form of power ‘occurs when one country gets
other countries to want what it wants—might be called co-optive or soft power in contrast
with the hard or command power of ordering others to do what it wants’. A country must have
its form of hard power, but convincing subordinate countries might be done through cultural
influence, political values or foreign relations—‘Co-optive power - getting others to want what
you want - and soft power resources - cultural attraction, ideology, and international institutions
- are not new’ (Nye, 1990, 167). Similarly, hegemony for Gramsci means seeking that subaltern
groups consent to a certain order (‘one gets others to want what it wants’) through more than
cultural influence.
and a ‘penal treatment’ approach are well adapted to the notion of hege-
mony. ‘Colonel’ or ‘penal treatment’ approaches simply use different sets
of mechanisms to attain the consent of—most, if not all—prisoners.
While the ‘colonel’ approach sought consent through the distribution
of ‘perks’ to prisoners that behaved in accordance with the hierarchy of
authority, the ‘penal treatment’ approach seeks consent by finding an
‘understanding’ with staff for the inmates’ collective discipline. At this
intermediate level, prison governors are not passive agents of larger penal
policies and can significantly affect prison conditions. Yet there is an
interesting practical contradiction in the development of this level of
governance in the prison apparatus.
‘Penal treatment’ is a possible alternative to deal with the underlying
problems and discontents of a ‘colonel’ governance—the abuse of power,
corruption, violent disturbances, etc. Yet, precisely because it does not
transform penal policies, a ‘penal treatment’ is also useful to the gover-
nance of the apparatus. A ‘colonel’ governance amplifies the authority
of staff, while increasing the importance of the character of prisoners to
survive in prison (the capacity to establish good connections with staff
and other prisoners, the efforts to gain ‘perks’ and resources in prison,
etc.). Meanwhile, ‘penal treatment’ relies on the collective agency of pris-
oners to use their shared culture of survival in prison, while creating the
problem of reducing the experience of authority for the immediate prison
officer. This is a contradiction of the ‘penal treatment’ approach: in order
to reduce the disturbances, it relies on the organisation of inmates and
the lessening power of the immediate staff to re-establish the authority of
the apparatus. This is at the core of the perceived ‘crisis’ of imprisonment
for participants. Many staff appear discontent and boycott the attitudes
of the prison governor (and the security team) while inmates increas-
ingly put more organised pressure to meet their demands. An important
part of the prison staff remain unsympathetic to this approach, finding
their working conditions and their authority in crisis. In other words,
the project of ‘containment’ substantially undermines the idea of ‘penal
treatment’ as a model that could resolve the problems set by the penal
policies of upper authorities.
Finally, there is a last layer of governance experienced in the rapport
between security team, the ‘deep jail’ staff and the prisoners. As I have
argued some of the criminological literature (DiIulio, 1990; Useem &

Kimball, 1991) took a managerial approach to prison governance.
Indeed, results indicate the relevance of that field of decision-making in
producing order. Yet the findings in this chapter also show that beyond
the larger penal policies and the decisions taken by wardens, gover-
nance also depends on the interactions that occur between inmates and
prison officers (Castro e Silva, 2008; Sykes, 2007) and these interactions
are embedded in power relations that make consent possible towards a
type of management and penal policy. Interactions here are not fully
autonomous of the larger penal policies or the managerial governance
approach, but neither is their sole product. In effect, this is the layer from
which co-governance (Castro e Silva, 2008; Darke, 2018) can emerge
and ultimately affect the two other layers of prison hegemony.
The contributions of Gresham Sykes (2007; in Brazil see also
Ramalho, 2002)—both on prison governance and inmate culture—are
of particular relevance to this level. According to Sykes (2007, 41–
42), the prison officer relies on informal negotiations in order to attain
obedience from the captives without the use of violence. Thus, prison
order is produced by a very personal exchange between the keepers
and captives of prison. In my fieldwork, staff distinguished the form of
producing consent in two large periods. First, a previous more tradi-
tional system called a ‘negotiated’ co-governance, in which order was
produced by distributing ‘perks’ to gangs and inmates in exchange for
obedience. In this case, the staff was reliant on an unequal distribution
of power between different groups and inmates and they favour those
that submit to their authority with privileges and resources. This form
of co-governance resembles other models of prison order in the inter-
national prison research (Antillano, 2015; Marquart & Crouch, 1984;
Morelle, 2014; Tritton & Fleetwood, 2017) and Brazil (Brandão, 2011;
Lourenço & de Almeida, 2013; Santos, 2019) that might comprise
fostering negotiated arrangements with prison hierarchies to reproduce
control between prisoners themselves. This was called a ‘negotiation’ by
the participants, understood as an exchange in which each subject (staff
vis-à-vis prisoners) knew their limits.
Similarly, in an ethnography of a penitentiary in Rio de Janeiro, Castro

e Silva (2008) finds that order in prison is also understood as a ‘negoti-
ation’ in the field, or how they conceptually define it, the ‘negotiated
violence’ [violência negociada]. The ‘negotiated violence’ is a corner-
stone of the culture of informal ‘negotiations’ found as the basis of
prison order. It meant avoiding to engage in physical violence with pris-
oners—trying to talk out the problem first—but it occurred in certain
circumstances in which prisoners intends to avoid a collective punish-
ment against their cell or avoid a formal sanction that could restrict
their benefits, and therefore, depending on the gravity of the offence,
accepts (or asks for) a beating from a prison officer as an alternative
punishment (Castro e Silva, 2008, 120–122). The beating is exemplary
to other prisoners, instilling discipline, and this way both the prisoner
and officer save face. According to his ethnography, the violence means
there is an asymmetry of hierarchy, but one on which prisoners also have
some bargaining power over arrangements in prison (the ‘negotiation’ of
order). ‘In other words, negotiated violence was only possible because
both sides had instruments of power that guided this “negotiation”. If
things went according to plan (“a man’s deal”), the “situation” ended after
the punishment was carried out’ (Castro e Silva, 2008, 129). A ‘negoti-
ated’ order differed from an ‘arbitrary’ violence, because in the latter the
consent (on either part) was not possible. Interestingly, prison officers
also called their order a ‘co-governance’ [gestão compartilhada] (Castro e
Silva, 2008, 111) in which the informal interactions (in a grey legal area)
between the culture of inmates and the culture of staff produce consent.
In a second form of co-governance in this research, the staff is in
‘dialogue’ with inmates and inmate leaders seeking to produce a common
‘understanding’ by which inmates are expected to show ‘respect’ to staff.
In this case there is a homogenisation of interests among the prison
population through the representation of the PCC (Biondi, 2010). This
form of co-governance of ‘dialogue’ resembles other findings in which
inmate collectives and groups limit the hierarchical power of prison
authorities while seeking to ameliorate some of the deprivations they
experience (Darke, 2018; Narag & Jones, 2017). The current ‘dialogue’
form of co-governance here entails an arrangement acknowledged by
the intermediate managerial level and more in tune with prison regu-
lations. In this case the ‘privileges’ are not personalised distribution of
goods and conditions but relates to the problem of ‘opening’ and ‘closing’
prison—according to the pressure of prisoners and their collective disci-
plined behaviour. Thus, the interactions that ground the co-governance
of ‘dialogue’ are more concerned with the larger consent on the general
conditions of the prison regime than to paternalistic benefits.
Co-governance emerges only at the bottom level of prison order
(the level of staff-inmate interactions) seeking to produce consent with
impacts beyond that level. In both a ‘negotiated’ or ‘dialogue’ forms of
co-governance, the order produced seeks the consent of both groups.
But with the ‘predominance’ of the PCC and the change in inmate
culture, staff feel the interactions with inmates—the arrangements that
produce order—are less characterised by ‘negotiations’ (Coelho, 2005;
Ramalho, 2002)—which they understand as connoting hierarchy, goods
and privileges to a few—and more by a ‘dialogue’ (or an ‘understanding’)
experienced as a tug-of-war between a more ‘open’ or ‘closed’ prison.
Through ‘dialogue’, social conformity is produced by taking into
account their collective voices with the risk of giving prisoners excessive
power. Both ‘negotiation’ or ‘dialogue’ can be framed as co-governance—
due to the elasticity that the term has acquired in recent Global South
literature (Butler et al., 2018; Macaulay, 2017; Morelle, 2014; Tritton &
Fleetwood, 2017; Weegels, 2019) and the experience in the field [gestão
compartilhada] (also Castro e Silva, 2008)—, but the first is paternal-
istic, while the second reflects a co-governance produced through an
‘understanding’ seeking the consent of the subaltern group as a collective.
However, while seeking the consent of inmates, these forms of co-
governance concede some power to prisoners while also re-establishing
their subalternity.
In Gramsci, hegemony is an interactive process (a praxis), in which
a hegemonic project—through its apparatuses—achieves the consent of
the subaltern groups (Ciavolella, 2014). Rethinking Gramsci according
to the interactions of the prison, we can see how a ‘dialogue’ co-
governance transforms consent. It gives the subaltern some power over
the decision-making of the apparatus, but also demands from them their
discipline to ‘containment’ measures, an acceptance of their precarious
conditions—which they themselves must overcome—and the acknowl-

edgement of the authority that ‘dialogues’. Thus, ‘dialogue’ affects the
apparatus beyond the informal cultural level. From this level of interac-
tion, between staff-prisoners, we can understand how the other layers of
governance (the upper and intermediate levels), appear more clearly in
crisis.
As we have seen, the authority of prison officers and the forms
of dealing with the conditions of deprivation by the authorities are
perceived as in ‘crisis’. The ‘dialogue’ arrangement of power does not fully
empower prisoners to transform the penal project of ‘containment’—
although escapes and riots may happen—, but it puts ‘containment’ into
tensions that the ‘penal treatment’ approach is incapable of resolving and
risk breaking with the veneer of a peaceful order. In sum, the subjects
that are experiencing prison order are constantly changing and trans-
forming the meaning and form of power relations from within prison:
this is at the core of prison hegemony (its project, apparatus and praxis).
In a parallel with a Gramscian approach, consent is produced from below
(in the prison-floor) in a relationship of struggles between the ‘integral’
apparatus (the prison in its dimensions of power) and the subaltern.
Such domination is not static. The struggles that underpin these inter-
actions are transforming the hegemony of imprisonment and the project
of subordination that the penal system tries to instil.
Concluding on (Co-)governance
and Hegemony in Prison
I started my theoretical reflection with the insights from prison studies
in the Global North into the different forms of prison governance that
are negotiated with inmates (Jacobs, 1977; Sparks et al., 1996; Sykes,
2007; Trulson & Marquart, 2009) or administratively influenced and
controlled (DiIulio, 1990; Liebling, 2004; Mathiesen, 1965; Rhodes,
2004) by immediate staff (Crewe et al., 2015), upper management
(DiIulio, 1990; Jacobs, 1977; Useem & Kimball, 1991), non-custodial
specialist staff (Crewe, 2009b; Mathiesen 1965; Rhodes, 2004) and other
established institutional structures (Goffman, 1961; Hancock & Jewkes,
2011). In this process, frequently the ideal model (DiIulio, 1990) of

governance structures are reified in an abstract standard to which the
(perceived as) deviant ‘Southern’ prison is constrained (Jefferson, 2005).
However, way too frequently, ideal governance practices of prison in
Western-affluent countries provide a mould that is far from humanising
or improving rehabilitation in the Global South (Armstrong & Jefferson,
2017; Martin, 2014).
Prison studies in the Global South have emphasised the emer-
gence of other forms of governance that provide highly localised solu-
tions to the harsher prison deprivations typically found outside non-
affluent Western countries (Armstrong & Jefferson, 2017; Bandyopad-
hyay, 2010; Cerbini, 2012; Darke, 2018; Jefferson & Gaborit, 2015).
‘Southern’ prison studies increasingly find forms of informal governance
and co-governance that often diverge from Global North governance
practices with degrees of internal (Castro e Silva, 2008; Darke, 2018) and
external (Macaulay, 2017) legitimacy. In this vein, not only the research
on ‘Southern’ prisons—as a qualitatively distinct product—is a recent
discovery, but also demands new lines of inquiry into the other forms
of governance in the Global South (Darke, 2018; Macaulay, 2017) and
the reasons for their emergence (Darke 2018; Martin et al., 2014). Yet,
the debates on the global patterns of governance have often been in little
dialogue with each other (Macaulay, 2013) and only give localised atten-
tion to the dimensions of power in these emerging forms of governance
(Cerbini, 2017). In order to further inquiry into power and the potential
governance transformations occurring in the prison apparatus through
the interaction of inmates, staff and authorities, I propose to draw from
the theory of hegemony.
In this vein, I establish a dialogue with Gramsci’s theory to argue
that prison hegemony can be understood through three different layers
of governance that translate to a project (prison policies), an apparatus
(the prison system) and the interactions (staff and inmates) that produce
consent (see Table 1).
An aspect of this argument contributes to the debates on governance
by distinguishing layers of governance and their possible interactions—
the upper penal projects of control are not detached from the inner
informal interactions within prison. The three layers that can be distin-
guished are: (1) a hegemonic project, (2) a hegemonic apparatus and (3)
the production of consent. These different layers of governance situate
the power differential in a determinate project and the establishment of
an apparatus in which those interactions gain meaning without depriving
prison officers or inmates of agency.
1. The ‘containment’ prison policies are characterised by a reduction in

activities for inmates and the development of punishment through
the experience of exacerbated deprivations (the ‘sufferings’).14 This
hegemonic project (this form of controlling inmates) is under stress
due to its extensive use by the criminal justice system.
2. At the intermediate governance of the prison apparatus, two ideal
models or styles of governance (a ‘colonel’ and ‘penal treatment’)
define the activities of staff around the reproduction of forms of
authority and the organisation of prison conditions. The ‘colonel’
management seeks the obedience of prisoners and an acknowledge-
ment of their subalternity; while the ‘penal treatment’ sees the
authority of staff as stemming from their ability to ameliorate prison
conditions and reduce confrontations with prisoners.
3. Finally, the interactions between prisoners and staff produce hege-
mony in a bottom-up fashion. At this level, two different co-
governance arrangements stand out: the ‘negotiations’ based on the
distribution of ‘perks’ and of a hierarchy of groups to reproduce
control; and the ‘dialogue’ in which consent is sought through a
common understanding with the ‘carceral masses’ as a collective
‘body’—experienced as a tug-of-war by the prison staff.
Overall, the interest of authorities is to reproduce the project of hege-

mony, yet we must also underscore that each governance solution further
develops inherent problems—contradictions, limits, tensions, etc.—so
that hegemony is experienced as in ‘crisis’ The difficulty in attaining
14 Among other things, the current ‘crisis’ of ‘containment’ comprises mass incarceration, the
deterioration of prison conditions for staff and prisoners, a great flow of prisoners and the lack
of rehabilitative attention at their more conventional ‘closed’ regimes.
consent permanently is at the heart of the current ‘crisis’ of prison gover-

nance. With few exceptions, prisons in the Global South and North
need more than coercion to function. Co-governance is a dimension of
that interactive production of subordination through consent. And yet, it
often produces the group organisation and the resistance that leads hege-
monic projects into ‘crisis’. Occasionally power relations become more
visible, authority is not recognised (King & Morgan, 1982) and inmates
react (Sykes, 2007) against their position of subalternity (Scraton et al.,
1991; Thompson, 2016). From a Gramscian perspective, the prison can
be seen as a particular apparatus in Modern societies of maintaining
hegemony, always at the risk of losing it.
Thus, we can return to some reflections raised earlier, in which hege-
mony (as a critical form of domination in Gramsci) helps us understand
prison order and its different forms of governance in the Global South.
Are we still reliant on the image of Brazilian prisons as authoritarian
containment that lack legitimacy? Or does the image of the prison from
the Global North needs to be replaced by something fundamentally
different—where the survival of precarious conditions, are marked by
a collaboration between the interests of prisoners and the authorities? If
Brazilian prisons can be seen as a proxy to Latin American prisons or
to the current debates on imprisonment in the Global South, then we
can think of this prison order contributing to understanding power in
tandem with the Global North.
Strikingly different is that the precariousness of prison conditions
(wellbeing and understaffing) does lead to different forms of maintaining
order—in our case I identified the possibilities of ‘negotiations’ (of ‘perks
and privileges’) or ‘dialogue’ (over conditions of imprisonment). Never-
theless, forms of producing consent in prison are also strategies of power
that share common points of conversation with prison studies at a global
scale. Less than sheer lack of control (Adorno & Salla, 2007), competing
violence (Holston, 2008) or authoritarian coercion (Wacquant, 2008),
we find substantial order in prisons (comprising similarly a slow violence
and a soft power). When the order produced with inmates is seen merely
as an output of precariousness and violence, we lose something in that
representation.
The EOC prison may not be the ideal model of total institution,
but neither are most prisons in the Global North (Farrington, 1992;
Ignatieff, 1981). Prisons share a fundamental component of competing
interests for power—the production of control, order and conditions is
always a political and cultural factor, between authorities and prisoners.
Thus, observing the interactions—conversations, bureaucratic arrange-
ments, compromises, rehabilitative programmes, etc.—of this order is
crucial to understand how power is exerted. However, the idea of the
‘collaboration’ between authorities and prisoners should be taken more
carefully. The ‘dialogue’—or even an ‘understanding’—are occurring in
a hegemonic setting where authorities and prisoners struggle around
different interests—where they seek compromises, but do not give up on
their interests. The struggles for power in ‘Southern’ penal apparatuses
have not disappeared simply because prisoners need to survive in precar-
ious conditions and the understaffed staff accept the inmate’s leverage of
power. Struggles are rather set in a different stage, one of reducing or
increasing their ‘containment’ to prison—to what extent can the prison
staff use inmates to subordinate them? To what extent can prisoners
resist the power of the penal institution? Those are key questions that
are constantly being addressed within the walls of a Brazilian prison.
Therefore, debates and concepts produced in the Global North, such
as ‘negotiation’ (Sykes, 2007), ‘control-security’ (DiIulio, 1990), ‘legit-
imacy’ (Sparks & Bottoms, 1995), ‘discipline’ (Foucault, 1995), etc.,
are still useful to discuss aspects of imprisonment in the Global South.
Yet not as imported categories, neither as a pure opposition. The polit-
ical and cultural dimension (hegemony) of prisons in the Global South
merits an understanding that neither discards nor uncritically incor-
porates these discussions. Instead, as hegemony allows us to see, the
‘Southern’ prison, compared to those in the Global North, develops in
uneven and combined ways, where both have much to learn from one
another.
In sum, co-governance has been the centre of a promising debate on
new developments of prison order in the Global South (Macaulay, 2017).
The plurality of ways in which this concept has been used allows us
to reflect upon it as the interactions that produce order in formal and
informal ways. Hegemony takes us a step further. It helps us understand
that these interactions are co-producing order but not without struggles
and which may benefit the authorities—to facilitate subordination—or
prisoners—to oppose domination. As such it works as a reminder of the
deep overt and covert struggles occurring in the prison setting that are
not fully resolved with managerial changes and improvements on the
interaction between inmates and the immediate staff. The prison system,
its humanitarian challenges and its transformations are necessarily a part
of the debate that must also include the wider projects of power and the
purposes of imprisonment in the society without neglecting the agency of
prisoners towards or against prison order. Thus, if hegemony is a compo-
nent of penal power in Modern democratic societies (including the
Global South), our reflections here invite us to think what comprises the
counter-hegemony of imprisonment, and the extent by which a Southern
criminology can provide not just a conversation with the Global North
but a global contribution to counter-hegemony.
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A Decolonial and Depatriarchal Approach
to Women’s Imprisonment:
Co-governance, Legal Pluralism
and Gender at Santa Mónica Prison, Perú
Lucia Bracco Bruce
In the last few years, research about prisons in the Global South has
started to analyse the power dynamics between prison staff and pris-
oners. This scholarship gives an account of forms of inner organisation
and negotiatory practices which demonstrate the diversity of governance
structures, which differ from those described by research experiences in
the Global North. It has opened our understanding about prisons, partic-
ularly in the Latin American region, by acknowledging the complexities
of political and social dynamics of imprisonment in the South, distancing
from simplistic definitions of prisons that focus on their precariousness
and deprivations. However, most of the research has been done in men’s
prisons. Thus, with this chapter, I join the effort of scholars who are
L. B. Bruce (B)
Research Group in Forensic and Penitentiary Psychology, Pontifical Catholic
University of Peru, Lima, Peru
e-mail: lucia.bracco@pucp.pe

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98602-5_8
234 L. B. Bruce
engaged with the decolonisation of criminology and prison studies and

emphasise the need to introduce a gender-epistemology that seeks to
depatriarchalise them.
This chapter is based on an ethnography in Santa Mónica, a women’s
prison in Lima, Perú; to introduce a gender perspective not only implies
a focus on women’s experiences but also highlights the need for a feminist
analysis of prison and imprisonment. Following Hannah-Moffat (2001),
I propose that governance is always gendered. In particular, I argue
that Santa Mónica functions through a co-governance with prisoner-
delegates who have the role of intermediaries or “interface brokers”
(Long, 1999, 1). Furthermore, I analyse how social life is moulded by
formal and informal intertwined legal systems, creating what De Sousa
Santos (2002, 2006) defines as a “hybrid legal system”. Thus, prison is a
site of “interlegality” (De Sousa Santos, 2002, 243) where national law
and customary law superimpose and interpenetrate the subjects’ actions
and minds. I base my analysis on the empirical data produced during
a six-month ethnographic study at Santa Mónica prison. I attended
the prison four days a week for six months and engaged in a system-
atic participatory observation of prisoners’ daily activities. In addition, I
organised Group and Individual Reflective Discussions (Montero, 2006)
with art-based/visual-method techniques, which allowed the creation
of an open dialogue with women prisoners about the intersections of
punishment, imprisonment and gender.
In this chapter, I start by defining Santa Mónica as a patriarchal ware-
house prison (Irwin, 2004). Then, I present a brief theoretical perspective
about decolonisation and depatriarchalisation in dialogue with recent
studies of prison. Moving into the analysis of Santa Mónica, through
examples of situations of prison’s daily life, I describe how the co-
governance and the hybrid legal system functions. Finally, I conclude
on the importance of recognising different types of political and social
organisations, not only as the result of errors or of failed development
processes in the Global South but also as an alternative configuration
that may lead to the reconfiguration of how we conceptualise prison and
imprisonment. In the same line, I highlight the importance of acknowl-
edging women prisoners not only as moulded by patriarchal structures
A Decolonial and Depatriarchal Approach … 235
but also of recognising the ambivalences and the possibilities to organise

and engage in semi-autonomous actions while imprisoned.
Santa Mónica: A Patriarchal Warehouse Prison

In the last thirty years, national governments in Latin America have
engaged in a populist punitive attitude towards crime (Sozzo, 2016). As a
consequence, the region has become the “new mass carceral zone” (Darke
& Garces, 2017, 2), propelling an exponential increase in the peni-
tentiary population and the reproduction of warehouse prisons (Irwin,
2004) in the region, and contributing towards overcrowded prisons with
precarious and inhumane living conditions.
Despite the fact that the inhumane conditions are consistent in men’s
and women’s prisons in Latin America, by introducing a feminist epis-
temology it should be acknowledged that imprisonment experiences are
different. Furthermore, prisons cannot be seen as gender-neutral insti-
tutions. Globally, feminist scholars have long maintained that prisons
are a state-sponsored and patriarchally managed establishments, where
women’s needs and experiences remain unidentified, or are subsumed
within policies that prioritise the needs of a majority male prison
population (Carlen, 1983; Heidensohn & Silvestri, 2012; Moore &
Scranton, 2014). Latin America is not an exception. Over the last four
decades, Latin American feminist scholars have denounced the undigni-
fied imprisonment conditions of women prisoners, which include the
hindering of their human rights and the invisibility and neglect of
women prisoners’ needs in comparison to an overwhelming male peni-
tentiary population (Aniyar de Castro, 1986, 2002; Azaola, 1995, 2005;
Del Olmo, 1998; Lagarde, 1992).
Santa Mónica can be defined as a patriarchal warehouse prison.
The prison opened in 1952 with a capacity for 250 women. It was
imagined in accordance with so-called modern principles, focussed on
rehabilitative values including re-education and re-adaptation to society
(Boutron & Constant, 2013). At the time I conducted my fieldwork,
Santa Mónica had a capacity for 450 women and there were 707 pris-
oners. Thus, it had 57 per cent overcrowding (INPE, 2018). In line
236 L. B. Bruce
with what feminist criminological research has demonstrated in prisons

globally, in Santa Mónica the alleged resocialisation is based on stereo-
typical gender roles. Hence, education and labour activities in women’s
prisons tend to reproduce and discipline women into the performance
of traditional femininity (Carlen, 1983). Formal workshops focus on
the reinforcement of habits and occupations traditionally “assigned” to
women, including cooking, cleaning and the manufacture of arts and
crafts or fashion.
In reference to the penitentiary population in Santa Mónica, of the
707 prisoners, 58% have been sentenced while 42% are on remand,
21% have been sentenced to between 1 and 5 years and 22% between
5 and 15 years. The statistics show that 51% were imprisoned for
drug-trafficking,1 20% for robbery, 5% for homicide, 3% for extor-
tion, 2% for kidnapping, 1% for sexual-related crimes and 18% for
“other crimes”. According to the statistics report, women prisoners are
a group comprised of mostly young and middle-aged women, who are
predominantly poor, unemployed or underemployed, single and likely
to be caring for young children and who were engaged in mostly
non-violent crimes, particularly associated with drug-trafficking offences
(INPE, 2018; INEI, 2016).
With regard to authorities, Santa Mónica operates with a Main
Director, an “Alcaide” (chief of security), a Chief of the Treatment Area
and a Chief of the Administration Area. I will not give a detailed report
of the prison staff, but just to offer some numbers, there are between 20
and 25 security staff (it depends on the day and the numbers include
external and internal security), and seven psychologists each day.2 There
1 To understand the huge increase in Latin American imprisonment in general and that in Perú
in particular, scholars have insisted that it is necessary to look at the impacts of the American
“War on Drugs” (Ariza and Iturralde, 2019; Diaz-Cotto, 2005; Norton-Hawk, 2010; Reynolds,
2008). As a regional phenomenon, there is a high percentage of women imprisoned for drug-
related crimes. Mexico (44%), Colombia (48%) and Brazil (60.6%) also show high percentages
of women imprisoned for drug-related crimes (Institute for Criminal Policy Research, 2016;
WOLA, 2016). In Perú, 55% of women are imprisoned for drug-related crimes and are over-
represented in this offence category in comparison to men (17%) (INPE, 2018).
2 The psychologists work in Santa Mónica from Monday to Friday. Given the number of
psychologists in Santa Mónica, each psychologist gives professional attention to approximately
100 prisoners. Their responsabilities include periodic psychological evaluations, group therapy,
individual therapy, counselling, organisation of institutional events, creation of psychological
has been an association between the ratio of staff and prisoners and state’s
capacity to govern prisons in Latin America. In the next point, I intro-
duce scholarship that has started to analyse governance in prisons in the
Global South, particularly Latin America.
Towards a Decolonial and Depatriarchal

Analysis of Prisons in the Global South
The academic hegemony of the Global North has generated significant
contributions to criminology, but has tended to universalise crimino-
logical phenomena around the globe (Carrington, Hogg, Scott et al.,
2019; Carrington, Hogg & Sozzo, 2016; Martin et al., 2014). Main-
stream criminology generally reproduces a “universal” view of the prison.
As Sim (2009, 9) suggests, the idea of an alleged modern prison has
been “taken for granted”: in other words, the conceptualisation of an
institution with top-down logic that its legitimacy lies in its capability
to inflict pain and fear into the lives of the confined. Following this
scheme, Martin et al. (2014, 3) explain that prisons outside the context
of Europe, North America and Australia have been analysed in terms of
“the” prison. This idea assumes that there is a traditional and modern
model of prison which resembles what the authors defines as “Western
prisons” (Martin et al., 2014, 4).3
Therefore, prisons located outside the Global North tend to be defined
by their deficiencies (Martin et al., 2014). They have been perceived
as too complicated, too dangerous, not sufficiently developed or lawless
spaces (Bandyopadhyay et al., 2013; Garces et al., 2013).
reports for the prisoners’ trials, administration tasks and daily “emergencies”, among others. I
was not able to establish the “ideal” number of prison staff needed for Santa Mónica, but taking
into account the expectancy of “resocialisation” and the prison’s overcrowding, it is evident that
the staff have a high rate of work overload.
3 Neither do I want to homogenise the “Western prison”: arguably there are also very many
different prisons in the West/North. In this case, the term is used to reference a political binary
and the power relationships that have been constituted between the North and the South,
Western and Non-Western.
238 L. B. Bruce
In line with the concept of “coloniality of knowledge” (Dussel, 2000)

introduced by decolonial authors, Southern Criminologists problema-
tise the Global North/Global South power dynamics in the construction
of academic knowledge. Hence, recent studies recognise prisons in
the Global South, particularly in Latin America, as negotiation sites:
complex environments that operate within oppressive circumstances, and
yet can contribute to the reproduction and/or development of unique
forms of subjectivity and resistance (Darke, 2013; Darke & Karam,
2016; Hazathy & Muller, 2016).
In the last few years, there has been mounting literature regarding
governance dynamics in Latin American prisons. These ethnographic
studies demonstrate that prisons would not be able to operate without
the active participation of the imprisoned subjects, which replaces the
bureaucratic administration and establishes order within prison (Antil-
lano, 2017; Garces et al., 2013). Studies conducted on male prisons in
Brazil (Darke, 2013, 2019; Nunes & Salla, 2017), Venezuela (Antillano,
2017; Birkbeck, 2011), Honduras (Carter, 2014), Nicaragua (Weegels,
2017) and Perú (Pérez Guadalupe, 1994; Postema et al., 2017; Veeken,
2000) introduce the varied dynamics of self- and co-governance of
prisons, and highlight the activeness and inner organisation of prisoners
(in some cases violent and coercive) to try to fulfil their basic needs and
live in more dignified conditions.
Nonetheless, the majority of research about governance has been done
in men’s prisons. Following Renzetti (2018), I suggest that the academic
disciplines exist within a patriarchal system. Therefore, mainstream crim-
inology is still one of the most masculinised social fields (Britton, 2000),
and gender is not a concept that has always been discussed in research
about punishment (Bosworth & Kaufman, 2013; Howe, 1994). In
response, to engage with a feminist perspective in criminology and prison
studies not only implies a focus on women as offenders and prisoners
but it also means to engage in a gender-specific critique of punishment
using a gender-aware epistemology and analytical framework (Howe,
1994). Moreover, following decolonial feminist María Galindo (2015),
I propose that it is not possible to decolonise without simultaneously
depatriarchalise. Galindo links colonialism and patriarchy to give an
account of domination practices, and how we need to engage in a perma-

nent process of sabotage and disobedience. This means permanently
questioning our common sense in order to reconceptualise the role of
women in Latin America and theoretical concepts, which may lead to the
construction of new utopias and horizons of struggle (Galindo, 2015).
Therefore, as already mentioned, feminist criminologists have
discussed prison as a patriarchal institution that propagates disciplining,
focussed on perceived notions of “adequate” femininity and womanhood,
and also seeking the refeminisation of women prisoners (Antony, 2007;
Bosworth, 1999; Carlen, 1983; Hannah-Moffatt, 1995, 2001; Lagarde,
1992). As relevant and necessary as such research has been, it offers a
partial understanding of women in prison. I do not seek to minimise
patriarchal inequities, but I aim to highlight that women prisoners are,
at the same time, active subjects and wilful agents (Bosworth, 1999; Fili,
2013). Therefore, seeking to engage in what Galindo refers to as a sabo-
taging process, I question partial, rigid or static conceptualisations of the
prisons and women prisoners, to focus on the ambivalences, paradoxes
and contradictions of women’s imprisonment experiences.
Santa Mónica’s Governance and Legal

Systems
Recent scholars who are analysing governance dynamics in Latin Amer-
ican prisons, discuss the constitution of formal and informal orders,
and the existence of informal dynamics of survival as a way to cope
with mass incarceration and overcrowded environments (see for example:
Prison Service Journal: Special Edition Informal Dynamics of Survival
in Latin American Prisons). This valuable debate opens up the possi-
bility of describing prisons’ dynamics and understanding them in relation
to how prisons operate in the Global North. Yet, I will try to go one
step further and propose to question the separation of orders, to high-
light their intermingled dynamics in everyday life and in the penitentiary
actors’ (authorities, prison staff and prisoners) minds and acts.
The prison’s formal order is generally associated with its capacity
as a state institution to accomplish the penitentiary regime and its
240 L. B. Bruce
inner norms, as well as maintaining control and authority within the

prison (Pérez Guadalupe & Nuñovero, 2019). This definition refers to
the prison as a state confinement institution with written regularised
procedures and normative standards that determine a prisoner’s formal
institutionalisation (Martin et al., 2014). On the other hand, scholars
who analyse prisons’ dynamics in Latin America usually refer to the
informal order to discuss prisoners’ collective organisation, and how pris-
oners co-administrate the institution by substituting or complementing
the responsibility of the state (Antillano, 2015; Darke, 2013, 2019).
In everyday praxis, it is not possible to observe such binary distinc-
tions between formal and informal orders. Furthermore, I argue that the
conceptualisation of prison as a site of multiple order is linked to the
presence of multiple legal systems and that can be analysed through a
legal pluralist perspective. For example, Darke (2019) suggests that most
Brazilian prisons operate within a multi-layered normative order, based
on the intersection of bureaucratic regulations and organically produced
rules of conviviality, based on the informal collective organisation and
the interpersonal relationships with prison staff. Following Antillano’s
conceptualisation (2015), I propose that orders and their normative-legal
systems (national and customary laws) are intertwined and operate inter-
dependently. In fact, I refer to Santa Mónica as a site co-governance
where orders are interdependent and linked to what De Sousa Santos
(2002, 2006) has defined as a hybrid legal system. By suggesting Santa
Mónica operates through co-governance, I do not intend to refer to
constant cooperation or to the lack of conflicts, but to acknowledge
the interdependency of both alleged separated orders. Thus, interdepen-
dency or complementary status does not exclude hierarchies, conflict or
confrontation. As Navarro and Sozzo (2020) suggest it resembles more a
continuum between contestation and collaboration.
In this section, I introduce the figure of the delegate, as an inter-
mediary or an “interface broker” (Long, 1999, 1). Then, I refer to the
coverage of prisoners’ basic needs, and how this provides one concrete
example of how co-governance operates in Santa Mónica. Finally, I
will analyse the hybrid legal system in Santa Mónica, which is used
strategically by prisoners, prison staff and authorities.
The Delegates: The “Interface Brokers”

of Prison
Santa Mónica has three pavilions (A, B and C) divided into 8 blocks
(1A, 1B, 1C, 2B, 3B, 3A, 3B, 3C). There is a General Delegate of all
the prison, and each block also has a General Delegate, a treasurer and
seven delegations: Cleaning, Food and Microwave, Disciplinary, Tele-
phone, Judicial, Health, Culture and Sports. The General Delegate of
Santa Mónica and the General Delegates of the block meet systemati-
cally with prison authorities, and they are the ones who negotiate and
inform the penitentiary population about the decisions taken in these
meetings. Furthermore, the Block’s General Delegates and the Treasurers
handle the block’s budget and organise the internal chores, such as the
cleaning of common areas, with the participation of all prisoners.
The election of delegates is a subtle negotiation between the authori-
ties, prison staff and prisoners. There is not a homogeneous way to do it,
as it may have some variations between the blocks. Candidates are usually
selected by the authorities, and when choosing a prisoner, they take into
consideration their disciplinary records, previous delegates’ opinions and
prisoners’ views. Then, the candidacy is presented at the block’s general
assemblies to be publicly legitimised by the population. In that sense,
the prisoners vote to accept or reject the candidate. Nonetheless, the
rejection of a candidate is not always direct and explicit. Sometimes
a delegate is accepted but not necessarily legitimised by the prisoners.
Consequently, prisoners will agree to the candidacy in front of author-
ities but will operate to discharge her. Other prisoners will not follow
their norms and criteria, and conflicts will arise. Indeed, without pris-
oners’ legitimisation, they will engage in acts to demonstrate the delegate
is not capable of creating a good conviviality inside the block, and there
will be no other option than to propose new elections.
Authorities expect them to act upon their role (without explicitly
threatening their power), but, interestingly, it seems delegates do not gain
any formal recognition for their work. In Santa Mónica, to be able to
apply to penitentiary benefits, women prisoners must attend educational
or labour workshops. Their attendance provides them signatures that
demonstrate their positive motivation towards resocialisation. Their role
242 L. B. Bruce
as delegates does not provide them with any signatures. In fact, formally,
they do not have flexibility regarding the attendance of the manda-
tory educational or labour workshops, creating a double burden (triple
if they are mothers and have their children inside prison). Informally,
given their interpersonal relationship with staff and authorities, delegates
may have more flexibility to not attend the workshops or to move more
freely inside prison. However, these possibilities are not formalised, but
they may or may not occur depending on the staff-delegate relation-
ship and may vary over time. Consequently, although delegates have an
essential role in prison’s co-governance, their authority and the structural
conditions to engage in their role are fragile and ambivalent.
Despite that fact, I refer to the delegates as “interface brokers” (Long,
1999). Using Long’s definition, delegates are intermediaries that are
needed when lifeworlds or social fields intersect. As the author (1999, 3)
suggests, interface brokers are subjects capable of manoeuvring between
actors, and in his words, “creating room for manoeuvre implies a degree
of consent, a degree of negotiation and thus a degree of power, as mani-
fested in the possibility of exerting some control, prerogative, authority
and capacity for action, be it front- or backstage, for flickering moments
or for more sustained periods”. The delegates must be able to negotiate
with the authorities and create strategies to keep a sense of equilibrium
of power between the authorities’ need for order and security, and the
intention of maintaining or improving prisoners’ well-being.
Co-financing Prisoners’ Basic Needs

Regarding the basic economic living costs of imprisonment, in over-
crowded men’s prisons in some contexts of Latin America, research
suggests that prisoners mandatorily pay a quota to obtain a cell or a bed.
If they do not have economic resources, it is likely they will sleep on
the corridor floor or be expelled from the pavilions (Antillano, 2015;
Pérez Guadalupe, 2000; Weegels, 2017). The prisoners in Santa Mónica
made a clear distinction between a male prison and Santa Mónica. As
one participant identified: “In here we don’t have to pay for the cell or the
mattress. In a men’s prison, you have to pay to be accommodated […] In
here everybody, mandatorily, has a place to sleep and food to eat. There is no
quota for that ”.4
In the case of Santa Mónica, the state provides some of the prisoners’
basic needs for rest and nourishment, but prisoners themselves, organ-
ised by the delegates, have to cover the labour and the inputs needed to
properly maintain the blocks and pavilions. To cover the block’s expenses,
prisoners pay a weekly quota to their block´s Treasurer.5 Additionally,
there is a rotational system of two prison services that allows each block
to produce more income. Each week a block is responsible for: (a) the
rental of chairs and tables on visit days and (b) selling boiled water
to prisoners. With these incomes it is possible for each block to fulfil
their cleaning expenses, the maintenance of the bathrooms, painting
of the pavilions, the decoration of the blocks and cells (for example,
the possibility of buying curtains for cells or Christmas decorations for
the corridors) and to purchase collective goods such as microwaves,
televisions or DVD players (which are installed in the block’s corridors).
The prison, as a state-governed institution, would not be capable
of funding the women prisoners’ basic needs during imprisonment.
Co-governance implies the consolidation of an informal-legitimised
economic organisation among prisoners and the co-coverage of their
basic needs. The financial resources produced due to the informal-
legitimised organisation are not used to cover individual needs, but to
ensure prisoner’s collective basic needs of cleaning, maintenance and
nourishing. In any sense, this argument intends to minimise the precar-
iousness in imprisonment living conditions in Santa Mónica. It aims to
recognise the semi-autonomous role of prisoners in co-governance and to
4 Women prisoners get money from their visits, from their informal work inside prison (for
example, some prisoners outsource their cleaning duties, and other prisoners are contracted
to do them), and work in formal labour workshops. There are two different types of labour
workshops: working autonomously and working for a private company. Some prisoners engage
in creating goods (shoes, clothes, bijouterie, etc.) and services (hairdressing, food, and kiosks)
and selling their products inside prison and outside prison through their external connections.
On the other hand, in the last years, private companies are also contracting women prisoners
to produce their goods. In Santa Mónica, women work in a jean and a leather company.
5 The participants mentioned different quota amounts which oscillated between 1.5 and 20
soles (USD 0.40 and USD 5.5) weekly. It is plausible that the quotas vary per block.
244 L. B. Bruce
make visible their labour and the economic resources they must provide
to live in more dignified conditions.
Interlegality in Santa Mónica: “God May

Forgive Sin, but He Does Not Forgive
a Scandal”
In her approach to analyse social life and conflict solving, Griffiths (2002,
2005, 2011) questions the rise of the nation-state paradigm of law, which
refers to sovereignty embodied in a single site represented by govern-
mental nation-state institutions. It is important to recognise the plural
legal conditions within a space and how dynamic legal systems coexist,
and official and non-official rules coexist and shape societies (Griffiths,
2011; Moore, 2015). The legal systems are always in negotiation and
are always being remade (De Sousa Santos, 2006; Moore, 1973, 1978).
De Sousa Santos (2002) states that in sites where multiple legal systems
coexist, the boundaries are porous and there is a creation of interlegality
which produces a hybrid legal system. Consequently, in everyday life,
the legal systems are lived in an interactional and intersubjective manner,
and because of that, they superimpose, interpenetrate and are mixed in
individuals’ minds and actions (De Sousa Santos, 2002).
In Santa Mónica, both nation-state and customary law regulate the
wide range of spheres of the legal and social life of prison, providing
agreements and mechanisms of social regulation that enable conviviality.
To explain the hybrid legal system in Santa Mónica, I will refer to a
popular Peruvian saying mentioned by a participant while describing
everyday life in prison: “God may forgive a sin, but He does not forgive a
scandal”. By extrapolating the saying to prison life, the participant stated
that in Santa Mónica subtle transgressions were allowed (the sins), but
not open, public and conflictual ones (the scandals).
The sins and the scandals. In Santa Mónica, authorities and prison
staff “prefer not to look” (Cerbini, 2017, 34) at the subtle transgressions
of prisoners, and “are inclined towards a liberal atmosphere within the
prison” (Bandyopadhyay, 2010, 404), until they perceive the dilution
of their authority and “tighten the rope” (Bandyopadhyay, 2010). Also,

prisoners accept some of the staff actions that hinder their rights to secure
access to services and goods, until they believe they are systematically
abusing their position.
In research conducted in the San Pedro prison in Bolivia, Cerbini
(2017) suggests that the absence of surveillance, classification and sched-
ules and the concept of prison as a modern disciplinary apparatus is not a
loss of control by the authorities but a demonstration of their power. By
“not looking” at the open transgressions (which include the use of drugs
and the presence of women), an alternative governmentality and norma-
tive system in prison is installed that transforms an alleged panopticon
into an “anti-panopticon” (Cerbini, 2017, 31). The transgressions of the
prisoners at Santa Mónica are not as open as those described by Cerbini
in San Pedro but are closer to subtle sins. Globally, prisons, as patriar-
chal institutions, have tighter control of women prisoners (Antony, 2007;
Bex, 2016; Bosworth & Kaufman, 2013; Moore & Scranton, 2014),
which explains how explicit transgressions of the nation-state’s laws are
more permissible in men’s prisons than in women’s prison.
Then, the sins that authorities and prison staff “prefer not to look”
at are generally associated with informal-legitimised labour actions that
prisoners engage in to earn economic resources to fund imprisonment
expenses. For example, inside their cells, some prisoners prepare dishes
of salads, with vegetables their family bring them on visits, and sell them
to four regular clients. The objective is to be distanced from possible
scandals that inevitably break the tense calmness in Santa Mónica and
oblige the prison staff to make use of the nation-state law to “ tighten
the rope” to restore their authority (Bandyopadhyay, 2010). The scan-
dals are open and public transgressions of the formal law, particularly
those referring to the consumption of drugs, alcohol, mobile phones,
the use of physical violence and the engagement on open homosexual
encounters. These actions occur in Santa Mónica, the main problem is
when it became public, gossips or rumours appear, and the authorities
and prison staff feel the need to restore their authority. As a consequence
of any of these activities, and in the name of security, prison staff will
conduct requisitions or transfer prisoners to other institutions.
246 L. B. Bruce
On the other hand, as Bandyopadhyay (2010) explains, the accep-

tance of sins is not only done by authorities and prison staff but also by
prisoners. At the Central prison in Kolkata, India, something similar to
that in Santa Mónica occurs: prisoners are willing to accept some living
conditions within the prison and willing to forego some of their rights
without denouncing the authorities or prison staff. Prisoners strategi-
cally resist the hindering of their rights, theoretically defended by the
nation-state law in the Code of Criminal Execution, to face imprison-
ment to secure the access to materials, services and visits. For example,
Juana works in the Tailoring and Confection workshop, and she and the
other members have had to pay the maintenance staff several times to
connect the lights inside their working space. Juana allegedly pays to
cover the “administration costs”. She knows it does not formally fall to
her to pay for those expenses, and that it is plausible the maintenance
staff are making a profit out of her, but she prefers to pay. If not, she
confronts the possibility of encountering difficulties with bureaucratic
processes about permits that authorise the entrance of the materials she
needs to create her products. Similarly, Johana narrated that one day she
defended a new prisoner from a “bullying” situation from security staff.
After this situation, Johana recalled that during a visiting day her mother
was waiting for her, and as an act of vengeance for defending the new
prisoner, the same security officer did not allow her to cross the gate
into the main patio, alleging she had not heard Johana was called to
approach the visiting area. Johana preferred not to say anything because
she did not want her mother to be mistreated the next time she came to
visit her.
Despite the fact that prisoners are in a position of less power inside
prison, and they arguably have to endure more long-term hindering of
their rights, there are also opportunities in which they will formally
complain when they perceive a staff member has committed scandals.
Proof of this argument is the reports of mistreatment by security or treat-
ment staff to the prison authorities, human rights foundations or the
national media. For example, during my fieldwork in Santa Mónica, a
prisoner was elaborating on a discourse about the systematic economic
abuses imposed by the staff (such as Juana’s experience, mentioned above)
and was planning to call the radio to denounce it. Despite the fact that
she had accepted the same situation many times and knowing her actions
would have formal and informal repercussions, she believed a “line had
been crossed ”.
Prison is a zone of negotiated practices where everyone, to different
degrees, gains and loses something in this kind of interaction. In the
case of Santa Mónica, prison is a political society that resembles a “site
of negotiation and contestation” (Chatterjee, 2004, 74). In summary, in
this “culture of lenience”, prison staff “prefer not to look” at subtle trans-
gressions performed by prisoners, and simultaneously, prisoners accept
irregularities, arbitrary or disrespectful treatment which hinders their
rights as a strategic resistance. As Bandyopadhyay (2010, 404) concludes,
“this realm of negotiated practice is a preferred zone of interaction for the
prisoners and warders who gain something from such practice”.
Interlegality as a strategy to maintain adequate conviviality. The hybrid
legal system not only moulds the relationships between prison staff and
prisoners but it is also useful to understand how prisoners solve conflict
inside the blocks. The processing of disputes is not only related to nation-
state law but is also connected to other aspects of social life (De Sousa
Santos, 1977). In the case of Santa Mónica, disputes among prisoners
are generally solved among themselves, trying to avoid the interference
of authorities and prison staff. Prisoners try to create a smoother and
easier conviviality inside their blocks and maintain the perception of
the block as a disciplined one, to diminish the possibility of requisitions
or formal sanctions that will have repercussions in their formal judicial
processes. Also, if a requisition occurs, prison staff will not only take
drugs or mobile phones but will also confiscate other prohibited goods
(for example, small amounts of fruit or vegetables) that normally they
“prefer not to see”. In that sense, the construction of an adequate convivi-
ality provides individual emotional safety to prisoners but also maintains
a common platform where it is possible to strategically transgress the
nation-state law—to enact sins—without calling attention to it. Prisoners
prefer to prevent conflicts or settle their disputes among themselves, with
delegates as intermediaries. Only if the conflict becomes a scandal , in
other words, if it explodes or is systematically persistent, will they include
prison staff (particularly treatment staff ) and/or the authorities.
248 L. B. Bruce
The disputes are not always solved in the same way inside the blocks.
However, in general terms, prisoners have a vast repertoire for resolving
conflicts and mainly manage three levels of denunciation that move from
using customary law to national law. The denunciation can be made: (a)
to delegates, (b) to security staff and (c) to treatment staff and/or the
authorities.
The first level of denunciation or call for intervention is directed to
the delegates, especially the block’s General Delegate and Disciplinary
Delegate, and makes use of customary law, of the verbal norms and
agreements constructed by the prisoners and solved through social inter-
actions. Delegates assume the role of “dispute preventers” (De Sousa
Santos, 1977, 11) trying to observe conditions that may potentially
create a conflict to solve them beforehand. For example, each block has
a television in the corridor, bought with their communal funds. The
programming is chosen at the block’s general assemblies, conducted by
the block´s General Delegate, where generally all the assistants sign an
official act. Isabel, the General Delegate for a block, recalls that one day,
a couple of prisoners decided to change the channel to watch a different
programme. She approached them and asked if they had asked the other
prisoners if they could do that. After hearing the question, a third woman
responded, “They didn’t ask me”. The women in question responded that
the programmed show was not being transmitted at the moment. Isabel
recalled that she had to intervene and negotiate a practical and partial
solution: only while the original programme was “on holiday” could they
change the channel. As Isabel mentioned, “I didn’t want to say anything
to them, but if I didn’t do it, one thing would lead to another and prob-
lems would start. As women say here: they would have eaten them, shoes
and everything ”. Delegates assume the role of dispute preventers who
remind the other prisoners of the procedures and normative standards
inside the blocks to maintain peaceful conviviality. If the delegates do
not intervene, the problem escalates and may require the intervention
of the authorities and staff members. As seen, Isabel makes use of the
agreements but is also flexible enough to creatively transform or bend
the norms to find a solution to the problem.
General and Disciplinary Delegates also act as “dispute settlers” (De
Sousa Santos, 1977, 11) and make use of the customary law when there
are conflicts among prisoners. For example, if a conflict arises between

cellmates, the delegate can rearrange the cells, to move the allegedly “con-
flictive” prisoner to a different cell, the common room or to relocate her
in the corridor. Mainly, conflicts between cellmates occur because one of
the prisoners does not “respect the other’s space” (e.g. by inviting other
women over), personal goods get lost, they are involved in sexual activi-
ties while the other is in the room or are engaged in illegal activities. In
that sense, delegates take into consideration the social interactions, close-
ness or conflictual relationships among prisoners to create an order and
social structure inside their blocks.
The second level of denunciation involves the inclusion of the secu-
rity staff and may be solved using customary law or nation-state law.
This level is approached when conflicts among prisoners are not circum-
stantial but start to become systematic, and the delegate is not able to
put a stop to it. Unlike treatment staff, security staff have 24-hour shifts
and have a closer relationship with prisoners, which may result in a more
colloquial and trustful interaction with some prisoners. Nevertheless, it
is critical to recognise that participants clearly distinguish which security
members are more flexible and empathetic than others, and in that sense,
know what shifts are more permissive or, as they recall, “less problematic ”.
Depending on which security staff member is on duty or the level of
the conflict, there are two possible paths. On the one hand, the security
staff member will make use of the customary law and will make a “call
of attention” to the allegedly “conflictive” prisoner to soothe the situa-
tion and put a quick end to the conflict. On the other hand, the security
member may use the national law and notify a treatment member and/or
authority figure, which attracts a significant possibility of the prisoner
getting a notification on their formal legal file.
Finally, the third level of accusation is the explicit use of the national
law and approaching the treatment staff and authorities directly. Gener-
ally, this denunciation occurs when there are acts of physical, system-
atic psychological violence or the misuse of money from delegates.
Depending on the level of conflict, this kind of denunciation could
lead to being evaluated by a council which includes the Prison Director,
the Chief of the Treatment area and the Chief of the Security area.
To penalise prisoners, the authorities constrain their telephone calls,
250 L. B. Bruce
send them to the “calabozo” 6 to “meditate” on their actions or transfer

them to a different institution. Consequently, the prisoner will have
an “unfavourable” evaluation on their legal file. For example, Isabel,
the General Delegate of Santa Mónica, remembered a situation when
a delegate was accused of misusing money:
[…] there was a transfer, and we were only a few on the pavilion. Yessenia
was the delegate at the time and told us we should distribute the money
among us because we were only a small group. She committed that impru-
dence, and after she proposed everybody asked for their part [...] She said
that the new people could not benefit of that money, that it was better to start
from zero, as she has seen in other prisons, that it was fair. Some say that it
was fine, but others change their mind. Then the transferred women where
returned to Santa Mónica, […] a scandal arose in the pavilion. […] Then,
the authorities found out and passed Yessenia to Council, she was sanctioned
without phone calls for a month [...] Yessenia went to the Direction with the
other prisoners who were also delegates to say everything was alright, but the
psychologist was there and told her “you have done this, this and this”
Researcher: So the psychologist knew before, but didn´t accused her.
Isabel: Of course, they [women prisoners from the block] told her. People
didn’t stay quiet and accused her.
In the example above, we can see two characteristics of the interlegality

in Santa Mónica: first, how prisoners include authorities and treatment
staff when they regard a dispute as drastically affecting their inner organi-
sation and the (mis)use of their money. Isabel narrated a critical situation
that initially the prisoners tried to handle themselves, and when this was
not possible, it was taken to the formal council; second, how prison staff
(and not only prisoners) make use of the hybrid legal system. In this
case, Isabel also recalled that the psychologist knew about the problem
before the denunciation to authorities but had “preferred not to see”, or
6 El Calabozo or Meditacion (meditation) refers to solitary confinement in prison. It is inter-

esting how penitentiary actors have different names for it which indicates opposed significances.
Prisoners refer to it as El Calabozo, the pit, which symbolically associates it with an emotion-
ally overwhelming, dark, lonely and violent space. In contrast, the authorities and staff refer
to it as Meditacion, which presumes a different objective and emotional fluency. Indeed, it is
symbolically intended to be a space of calm and introspective reflexivity that leads to personal
transformations.
in this case “not to say”, until it was a scandal and converted into a public
debate.
The categorisation of three levels of denunciation is given here to
obtain a theoretical order that offers an understanding of the different
disciplinary processes and dispute settlements inside Santa Mónica, and
as an example of how interlegality operates. In everyday life, they are
not as separated but work according to the everyday social dynamics
of prison. Given the flexibility of the norms and procedures, agree-
ments and the dispute settlements will vary depending on the block’s
population, the delegates in charge and the prison staff responsible for
the surveillance of a particular block. In addition, the dispute settle-
ment also depends on the nature of the social interactions, the bond
created between the persons involved and the (mis)trust or the closeness
among them. What lies beneath it is how an interlegal system operates
in conjunction with the procedures and norms from the nation-state law
and customary law. Prisoners learn the “ways of prison” (Bandyopadhyay,
2010), and I am not referring to prisoners’ social life or sub-culture, but
to the idea that they must know how to create a balance between obedi-
ence and subtle transgressions, which allows the authorities to maintain
distance from the pavilions, and at the same time enables prisoners to
engage in semi-autonomous actions inside them.
Conclusions
Colonising processes in knowledge production occur in the social
sciences (Castro-Gomez & Grosfoguel, 2007) and mainstream crim-
inology (Carrington, Hogg, & Sozzo, 2016; Martin et al., 2014);
they impact on the way we understand how prisons operate outside
the context of Europe, North America and Australia by seeing them
primarily as “data mines” (Carrington, Hogg, & Sozzo, 2016, 2).
Therefore, as a way to deconstruct the concept of “the” prison, I
propose an engagement with decolonial and feminist epistemologies,
acknowledging prisons not only as the result of errors or of failed devel-
opment processes in the Global South but also aiming to recognise
prisoners’ roles, organisations and semi-autonomy while imprisoned. The
252 L. B. Bruce
idea is not to present prisons of the Global South as an “exotic, excep-

tional specimen among others” (Bandyopadhyay et al., 2013, 28). In fact,
this perspective may add reflections to the process of questioning how
we approach prisons and imprisonment globally and follows the impor-
tance of creating a debate between theories from the Global North with
epistemological perspectives and experiences from the Global South.
This chapter contributes to the understanding of governance and legal
pluralism in the gendered context of prison. As observed, there is a recon-
figuration of the traditional power dynamics of imprisonment. In that
sense, in Santa Mónica, there is a constant negotiation between author-
ities, staff members and the penitentiary population that is concretised
through the figure of the delegates. There is a transition from “governing
of ” to “governing with” that involves (usually in a surreptitious way)
dialogue and flexibility, but without denying tensions, conflicts and the
struggle for power.
This perspective also enables recognition of the multiple orders and
legal systems in Santa Mónica, which leads to analysing public insti-
tutions in Perú in general and prisons in particular as sites of legal
pluralism. In that sense, following a decolonial perspective, the lens
transforms prisoners’ participation as not only a response to the state’s
abandonment but also as a different configuration of governance. In
other words, more than centring the analysis on the precariousness of
the modern nation-state, it is possible to recognise other forms of polit-
ical and social organisation. However, the validation of a different form
of organisation may become problematic. For example, the delegates,
despite their legitimacy, have an ambivalent and fragile authority, and
they remain in an almost invisible grey area in prison governance. This
issue arguably stems from our ultimate aspirations as Peruvians to have
so-called “modern” institutions that are allegedly scientific, progressive
and a reproduction of European ones (Aguirre, 2009).
Finally, the chapter wanted to show women prisoners as active subjects
during their imprisonment. I do not intend to create a binary division
that dichotomises prisoners between victims and agents (Fili, 2013). On
the contrary, my aim is to question “the conventional binaries between
coercion and freedom, victimhood, dominance and equality” (Munro,
2013, 239) that highlight the interplay and ambivalences between both
perspectives as central to understanding women’s lived experiences of

Peruvian imprisonment.
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Evangelical Wings and Prison Governance
in Argentina
Lorena Navarro and Máximo Sozzo
Introduction
An “evangelical wing” is an area of cells within a male prison in certain
provinces in Argentina which has a peculiar hierarchy among the inmates
and a set of rules, dynamics and activities legitimized through religion.
This area enjoys considerable autonomy from prison officers and author-
ities. However, the limits to such autonomy become evident in different
ways and at different moments.
L. Navarro (B)
National Council of Scientific and Technological Research, Santa Fe,
Argentina
e-mail: lorenavnavarro@hotmail.com
L. Navarro · M. Sozzo
Fe, Argentina

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98602-5_9
260 L. Navarro and M. Sozzo
The first evangelical wings emerged in the country during the 1980s.
Since then, its number multiplied, particularly in some provincial prison
services. There are now some Argentinean male prisons in which the
majority of wings are “evangelical”. This phenomenon has an increasing
complexity and acquires a peculiar importance in terms of the articula-
tions it generates with regard to prison governance.
This chapter approaches this specific question of the governmental
dynamics in and around the evangelical wings in Argentinean male
prisons. To tackle it, we conducted fieldwork in a men’s prison in Santa
Fe city, in which 6 out of 10 wings are “evangelical”. Data collection took
place from November 2018 to April 2019. Altogether, eleven in-depth
interviews were carried out to inmates who were or had been accom-
modated in one evangelical wing in particular. Out of the total number
of interviewees, seven belonged to the evangelical wing hierarchy, three
were living in that wing but did not define themselves as “members of the
church”, and one had been expulsed from it. Likewise, nine interviews
were carried out to prison officers and authorities working at this prison:
five junior officers and four chief or senior officers. From the starting
point of our fieldwork we also discuss the growing social sciences liter-
ature on this type of spaces inside prisons that has been produced in
Argentina in the last years (Algranti & Brardinelli, 2013, 2017; Algranti,
2012, 2018; Andersen & Suarez, 2009; Andersen, 2012, 2014a, 2014b,
2015; Bosio, 2017; Brardinelli, 2012; Daroqui et al., 2009; Krmpotic &
Vallejos, 2018; Manchado, 2014, 2015, 2016a, 2016b, 2017a, 2017b,
2017c, 2018, 2019; Míguez, 2007, 2008, 2012, 2013; Montero, 2018;
Navarro, 2020; Nogueira, 2017; Rosas, 2014; Tolosa, 2016a, 2016b;
Vallejos, 2017).
The first section of this chapter briefly addresses the process of multi-
plication of evangelical wings in men’s prisons in certain Argentine
jurisdictions from the 1980s onwards, pointing out some conditions that
have played a role in its development. Then, based on the empirical
observations made in the prison studied, we describe the characteris-
tics of the prisoners’ hierarchy within an evangelical wing, indicating
their different positions and roles. In the third section, we analyze in
detail the different strategies and practices—proactive and reactive—of
order maintenance within this type of area. Finally, the last part of this
chapter addresses different crucial dimensions of power dynamics in and

around the evangelical wings, as a scheme of co-governance: the dislo-
cation of the exercise of power from state agents to non-state agents,
negotiation practices and collaborative and confrontational relationships
between these two types of agents.
In this way, we seek to make a contribution to the understanding of
the evangelical wings in Argentina—but also in other Latin American
countries where similar phenomena have been observed (Marín Alarcón,
2016; Duno-Gottberg, 2021)—in relation to the question of prison
governance. And in turn we hope to contribute from this case study to
the broader debate on the various forms of participation of prisoners in
power relations in Latin American prisons that this book addresses.
Multiplication of Evangelical Wings: Process

and Conditions
In 1987, in the context of the transition to democracy, the first “evan-
gelical wing” was established in an Argentine prison (Prison Unit No.
1) in Buenos Aires province.1 Its establishment was closely linked to an
individual initiative. When in 1983 a riot broke out in that prison, Juan
Zuccarelli, a young evangelical, offered to mediate between the inmates
and the prison authorities, but his offer was dismissed. In view of this,
that same year he applied to join the Prison Service of Buenos Aires
province, and started to work as a junior prison officer at that very
same prison. His efforts—in his dual role as a guard and an evangelical
activist—bore fruit and he succeeded in having a special wing created
with a whole set of specific rules in order to accommodate inmates of
the evangelical faith.2 These evangelical wings multiplied rapidly in the
1 Argentina is a federal state, with one Federal Prison Service and 23 provincial Prison Services.
Buenos Aires Province has the biggest provincial Prison Service, with 45% of the national
prison population in 2019. Federal prisons housed in that year 14% of the prison population
of the country. They are followed by the Prison Services of Córdoba and Santa Fe Provinces,
with 10% and 6%, respectively, of the prison population of the country in the same year.
2 Before then, evangelical ministers used to visit some prisons in Buenos Aires province, but
they did not have any special prerogatives; they just went there during visiting hours on the
same prison. In 1989, Zuccarelli was ordained an evangelical minister

and was recognized by the authorities of the Prison Service of Buenos
Aires province as the person responsible for the evangelical worship prac-
tice (Algranti & Brardinelli, 2013, 87–92; Brardinelli, 2012, 15–18;
Krmpotic & Vallejos, 2018, 57–59; Vallejos, 2017, 288–290).
Since then, evangelical wings have proliferated in Buenos Aires
province, always in male prisons. By 2013, Algranti and Brardinelli
(2013, 70) estimated that 30–50% of the wings in these prisons were
evangelical. One of the most significant outcomes of this development
was the creation of Prison Unit No. 25, an “evangelical prison” within a
prison facility complex. It was opened in 2002 and its first Governor was
Daniel Tejeda, who had started to work with guard-minister Zuccarelli
in 1990. Guards and inmates—regardless of whether they defined them-
selves as “evangelical” or not—agreed to abide by a regime in which
religion played an essential role for the construction of prison order.
Tejeda was in charge of this pilot experience until 2005, when he was
replaced by another evangelical prison officer, Daniel Suarez. Due to
different problems, Prison Unit No. 25 was eventually turned into a
prison for over 60-year-old inmates with health conditions in 2010, thus
putting an end to this peculiar experience (Krmpotic & Vallejos, 2018;
Vallejos, 2017).
In Santa Fe province, the first evangelical wing was established as late
as 2001 in Prison Unit No. 1 for men (Manchado, 2016b, 66; 2017a,
199; 2019, 18).3 Since then, these wings have also proliferated in this
jurisdiction. At present, approximately 45% of the wings in male prisons
are “evangelical” (Manchado, 2019, 18). In Prison Unit No. 2 for men,
located in Santa Fe city, where we conducted our fieldwork and as we
already mentioned, 6 out of 10 wings are “evangelical”.
It is no coincidence that recent estimates about the expansion of this
kind of wings in prisons located in these two Argentine provinces are
weekly visiting days. There have been records of these visits since the mid-1970s (Algranti &
Brardinelli, 2013, 93–95; Brardinelli, 2012, 17).
3 Likewise, in this province evangelical pastors have also visited prisons on weekly visiting days
without any official special permits since the mid-1980s at the least. Early in the1990s, one
pastor managed to persuade the authorities of Prison Unit No. 1 to grant him an additional day
and a place to organize his activities (Manchado, 2016b, 65; 2017a, 196–198; 2019, 17–18).
imprecise. This is due to the fact that often times these wings are not
formally recognized by prison authorities. Thus, it is possible to meet
prison authorities—as we did during our fieldwork—who simply deny
the existence of this kind of wings in a certain prison, sticking to formal
language when it comes to naming the different areas. But it is impos-
sible to deny their currently strong presence in the prisons of these two
jurisdictions, where this phenomenon has been studied more thoroughly
by the social sciences in the last years.
This expansion of the evangelical wings has been triggered by two
different kinds of processes. First, the growth of Pentecostalism in social
life, which manifests itself in a substantial increase in the number of
worshippers, who mostly are part of the working class (Algranti & Brar-
dinelli, 2013, 110–111; Frigerio, 1994; Míguez, 2001, 2002, 2012;
Semán, 2001; Wynarcyk, 2009). From the transition to democracy in the
1980s onwards, some religious leaders, spurred by the evangelizing zeal of
their religious doctrine, started to visit prisons to offer spiritual guidance
to people deprived from their liberty, due to their growing relationship
with the inmates’ relatives outside. Although at first these efforts faced
some opposition from prison authorities, they gradually gained greater
acceptance through different means until they crystalized in cooperation
and articulation agreements and relations (Algranti & Brardinelli, 2013,
87–94, 109–127; Brardinelli, 2012, 14–20; Manchado, 2016b, 64–67;
2017a, 195–200; 2018, 102–103; 2019, 17–19).
This greater acceptance goes hand in hand with another key process:
a significant increase in incarceration rates in the provinces of Buenos
Aires and Santa Fe, especially as of the mid-1990s. In 1996, the incar-
ceration rates in both provinces were 74 inmates per 100,000 inhabitants
and 49 per 100,000 inhabitants, respectively. In 2005, said rates went up
to 169/100,000 and 70/100,000, which meant a rise of 128% and 43%,
respectively, in one decade. After reaching a plateau, they experienced
another significant increase especially in the last five years. In 2019, the
rate was 256/100,000 in Buenos Aires province and 184/100,000 in
Santa Fe province, a rise of 51% and 163%, respectively, in a period
of fifteen years.4 As a consequence of this fast and steep increase in

the incarceration rates, problems such as overcrowding and the deteri-
oration of prisoners’ living conditions worsened, and multiple kinds of
violence and the undermining of order became commonplace in many
correctional institutions in both regions, albeit to a different extent and
periodization (Sozzo, 2007, 107–108). Under these circumstances, the
evangelical wings were regarded by some political and prison authorities
as a viable alternative to deal with this concatenation of problems that
had sparked off a serious crisis, since it proved to be a relatively effec-
tive resource for the construction of order in male prisons (Algranti &
Brardinelli, 2013, 101–104, 145–151; Andersen & Suarez, 2009, 1, 15,
16, 19; Brardinelli, 2012; Daroqui et al., 2009, 2, 9 ; Manchado, 2016b,
65–67; 2017a, 198–199; 2018, 103; 2019, 18–19).
These two macroscopic processes did not translate into an auto-
matic and immediate multiplication of evangelical wings, though. This
outcome has been made possible specifically in these two provinces
thanks to a series of struggles and negotiations involving different
stakeholders, namely political and prison authorities, prison officers,
evangelical pastors and inmates. The centrality of this mediation can
be illustrated by the fact that although these two macroscopic processes
affected the entire country, there was not a similar development in the
federal prisons. The absence of evangelical wings in this prison service
poses a very interesting question. It could be linked to different reasons.
First, the fact that the increase in the incarcerated population at the
federal level was strongly correlated with the construction of facilities,
especially during the first wave in the 1990s and 2000s, which reduced
overcrowding and overpopulation to some extent (Hathazy, 2016, 173–
178). Secondly, another factor may have been the adoption of “care and
separation units” by prison authorities to accommodate those inmates
who have, from the official viewpoint, co-existence problems in regular
wings, as a “solution” to help maintain order. The precise date when such
measure was first implemented is unknown but it was regulated in 2013
4 In both provinces, these rates do not include the number of prisoners held in custody at
police stations. These were very large numbers during the 1990s and 2000s but experienced a
strong decline in the last years.
(Andersen, 2015; García, 2019). Thirdly, the presence of prisoners’ “rep-

resentatives”—at least in certain federal prisons—acting as interlocutors
and mediators between inmates, guards and authorities could be regarded
by prison authorities as a fairly effective and already existing mechanism
to help maintain order. Last but not least, the development of evangel-
ical wings may have been blocked by the widespread conception of the
Federal Prison Service as a strong bureaucratic institution—in compar-
ison with provincial prison services—which means that its authorities
avoid any change that may be considered as a “loss of control” over the
life of the inmates (Hathazy & Muller, 2016, 122). Even more, we still
do not know whether evangelical wings have had the same degree of
development as in Santa Fe and Buenos Aires in the rest of the provinces
in Argentina.5
Hierarchy, Positions and Roles

in the Evangelical Wing
In the evangelical wings of the prison we studied,6 there is a hierarchy
among the prisoners which bears several similarities with those described
in the literature about this kind of wing in other prisons in Argentina
(Algranti & Brardinelli, 2013, 185–203; Andersen, 2014a, 205–210;
Andersen & Suarez, 2009, 11–12; Manchado, 2015, 284–285; 2016a,
43–44). Those who have different positions in this hierarchy assume
5 For example, in Córdoba province the Prison Service denies the existence of evangelical
wings, as it happens officially in other jurisdictions. From the data we have gathered through
conversations with different researchers and activists who work in prisons there, we conclude
that there would be two evangelical wings in two prisons within the Correctional Facility
Complex No. 1. Each of them would accommodate between 25 and 30 inmates, whereas each
prison houses approximately 1200 inmates. This seems to be a very limited development. The
novelty is that there would be an evangelical wing in the prison for women in this same
complex (Prison Unit No. 3), with a similar number of female inmates; there is no such thing
in the provinces of Buenos Aires and Santa Fe.
6 The “outside” church “in charge” of the religious wings in this prison is neopentecostal.
Neo-Pentecostalism is a branch of evangelical Protestantism that appeared in Argentina in the
1980s, transforming some Pentecostal doctrines, adapting them to the cultural configurations
of popular religiosity and the social needs of the poor sectors in the country (Algranti &
Brardinelli, 2013; Miguez, 2002; Semán, 2001).
diverse roles and are subjected to relations of command and obedience

among them.
At the top of the hierarchy is a man who, paradoxically, is neither an
inmate in the evangelical wing nor a Prison Service staff member, but
he is recognized as an authority by those who do live in this wing. He
is Pastor L., an evangelical minister who leads a church near the prison,
and who has done evangelistic work in the prison for two decades now
(Bosio, 2017, 7). He is referred to as the “external” pastor to differen-
tiate him from the “internal” pastor, a position filled by a prisoner. The
external pastor plays a key role in determining who can hold the position
of internal pastor as well as other important positions within the evan-
gelical wing hierarchy. Besides, he develops the general guidelines about
the rules that inmates must abide by, and the different religious prac-
tices to be held in this area of the prison. He also has a say in decisions
and actions aimed at maintaining order in the wing, as he is frequently
consulted about this matter by the internal pastor. He discusses issues
concerning the evangelical wing with correctional authorities, not only
at this specific prison but also with the authorities of the Prison Service
Directorate of Santa Fe Province. Finally, he is in charge of collecting
“tithes” and “offerings” paid by the inmates housed in the evangelical
wing, and uses this money to support the external church as well as
to buy things and make improvements in this area of the prison.7 An
inmate who did not define himself as a “member of the church”, though
he was housed in this evangelical wing, said to illustrate the relevance of
this figure: “…The external pastor is like a custodial manager in here, a
7 A tithe literally means a fixed ten percent (10%) to be paid by the inmate out of the money
he receives from the Prison Service as remuneration for the work done at the prison or as
public relief if he does not work. Unlike tithes, an offering is voluntary and the amount is
determined by the worshipper. Only in very few cases will an inmate in the evangelical wing
be exempted from paying these donations, namely, when he has no relatives to visit him and
he is paid the lowest remuneration inside the prison, or when he must use this money to help
a relative who is ill. Prisoners do not handle money inside the prison. To pay the tithe and
offerings they must follow the same steps as when they want someone from the “outside” to
withdraw money that belongs to them. First, they must fill out a form created by the Prison
Service with their particulars, the information about the beneficiary and the amount to be
transferred, and then they sign it. Then, the beneficiary—always the external pastor, in the case
of the tithe and offerings—withdraws this amount of money in a prison office. Evangelicalism
collects tithe and offerings in every evangelical wing and the external pastor is in charge of
collecting it on a monthly basis.
governor”. And the Security Supervising Officer of the prison described:

“He has direct access to high-ranking officers, he speaks directly with the
Governor, or the Prison Service Directorate authorities”.
The internal pastor also holds a high-ranking position in the evangel-
ical wing hierarchy. Unlike in the case of Buenos Aires province (Algranti
& Brardinelli, 2013, 124), according to the data we have gathered,
prison authorities do not seem to participate directly in the decision of
who should be appointed to that position; this decision is made by the
external pastor. The inmate who becomes an internal pastor must have a
religious background, which means that he has ascended the evangelical
wing hierarchy ladder and may hold that his life is a successful testi-
mony to religious conversion. A wing “leader” interviewed mentioned
the requirements an inmate must meet to become an internal pastor:
He must prove that he is consecrated to God, devoted, free from sins,

addictions and vices; his life story must be testimony to the transforming
grace of God.
In the case of the wing we studied, it had taken the internal pastor
two years to reach that position.8 He should also be held in considerable
respect inside the prison world for his knowledge of the dynamics of this
context as well as for his previous criminal career “outside”. The Security
Supervising Officer of this prison said in this regard:
He must be very clever, very sharp. In general, they are very quick-witted
and street smart, as they have already been imprisoned, they are very
smart, they can recognise problems; they can anticipate whether there
will be a problem or not.
This second aspect associates his role with that of “representatives” in

regular wings within prisons in Santa Fe province. Our understanding
8This would confirm the observations made in other Argentine prisons about the relative ease
of upward mobility in the hierarchy of these evangelical wings (Manchado, 2015, 286; 2016a,
43–44), which could be linked to a general trait of Pentecostalism as a religion (Semán, 2010,
28–29).
of this other figure is still in its early stages.9 It has experienced different
levels of importance and formalization throughout time and at different
correctional institutions (D’Amelio, 2019, 25, 36, 42–46), and by the
time we conducted fieldwork, it was declining rapidly in the male prison
in the city of Santa Fe. Anyway, the crucial difference between the
internal pastor and the “representative”—according to our work and
the research previously conducted in Santa Fe province—apparently
lies in the fact that the former does not resort to direct physical force
when performing his duties, although this obviously does not preclude
other forms of coercion (Manchado, 2016a, 48, 52–53; 2017b, 180;
2019, 22–23),10 and that he remains in his place for longer than the
representative in regular wings, whose position has always been more
unstable.11
The internal pastor sets out the rules to be followed by inmates housed
in the evangelical wing taking into account the general guidelines laid
down by the external pastor, and establishes the duties to be fulfilled
by prisoners in different hierarchical positions and the faults or offenses
for which anyone could be punished. Rules at the evangelical wing are
partially similar to those formally imposed by prison authorities, for
example: physical violence among inmates or disobedience and lack of
respect for prison officers and authorities are forbidden. But there are
other rules that deviate from those formally prescribed, such as those
that prohibit inmates from being absent from worship practices, or from
disobeying or showing disrespect for the evangelical wing authorities.
These rules aim at fulfilling two objectives at the same time. First, to
bring order that materializes in the absence of conflicts among inmates
housed in the evangelical wing, especially of a violent nature. This in
9 For an exploration about the “limpieza” (cellblock runner) in the prisons in Buenos Aires
province, who seems to have things in common with the “representative” in Santa Fe prisons,
see Míguez (2007, 34; 2008, 146–148), Ángel (2015), Andersen (2014b, 266–270), Galvani
(2010, 6–7,12,14), Montero (2018, 6–7, 15–16), and Nogueira (2017, 98–101).
10 In the context of Buenos Aires province, some authors have pointed out that direct physical
force is still exerted by internal pastors in evangelical wings—though maybe less frequently or
to a lesser degree—and in addition to other forms of coercion (Andersen, 2012, 200; 2014b,
272; 2015, 6–7; Daroqui et al, 2009, 9).
11 In recent times, the stability of “internal” pastors in the male prison in Santa Fe city seems
to be even higher than the stability of its Governors, who have been changed after short periods
in office.
turn results in the absence of coercive measures by the prison officers

and authorities and in positive evaluations about the inmates that would
enable their eligibility for parole or temporary release from prison. And
secondly—guided by the Pentecostal worldview—to promote conver-
sion, the abandonment of “worldly life”, a “change of lifestyle” produced
by the prisoner’s embracement of religion that keeps him from reof-
fending in the future. This also gives a paradoxically new religious zeal
to correctional work that has been progressively secularized along the
history of the modern prison in the country, as in other places of the
world (Sozzo, 2007, 88–93). Following the guidelines established by
the external pastor, the internal pastor also organizes the religious prac-
tices and the roles to be played by the different hierarchical positions
in these activities. But, on top of religious practices, he also organizes
general activities related to the wing daily routine, ranging from fridge
organization to cleaning chores.
The internal pastor is assisted by two lower-ranking members of the
evangelical wing hierarchy—“leaders” and “collaborators”.12 “Leaders”
may be defined as “middle management” (Algranti & Brardinelli, 2013,
192–193; Manchado, 2015, 284–285; 2016a, 43; 2018, 10) subordi-
nated to the internal pastor but with some decision-making power over
those under them in the evangelical wing hierarchy. There are between 5
and 10 leaders in the evangelical wing under study. They are inmates
with a certain religious background and a high level of compliance
with rules and religious dogma, who demonstrate great respect for the
internal pastor. As one of them put it: “We must set the example, we
are testimony [of religious conversion]. We care for testimony”. Leaders
are appointed by the internal pastor after consultation with the external
pastor.
“Collaborators” have a more “peripheral” position (Algranti & Brar-
dinelli, 2013, 189; Manchado, 2015, 284–285; 2016a, 43; 2018, 10)
and although they share “identity traits” for being “members of the
church”, they have a more flexible attitude toward religious practices and
12 In the evangelical wings of the male prison in Santa Fe city, there also exists another figure,
“el segundo” (“the second”) or “second pastor”, who is immediately under the internal pastor.
In general terms, he is the right hand of the internal pastor, his person of utmost confidence.
In the wing under study, this position was vacant.
rules, and are usually regarded by the internal pastor or the leaders as
persons in the process of religious conversion. In the evangelical wing
under study, there are 20 collaborators. Some of them are taking their
first steps in religious matters, whereas others had already been leaders
but had fallen in the hierarchy for different reasons. For example, the
internal pastor told us about someone who had smuggled a mobile
phone, which is prohibited by the rules of this area within the prison.
And under these two categories are the inmates who neither define
themselves as members of the church nor are they regarded as such by
the rest. In the evangelical wing under study, they account for around 70
percent of the population. They must participate in religious services but
not on a regular basis. Some of them do not care much about showing
interest in conversion. Despite this, as long as they do not get involved
in serious disorder, their stay in the evangelical wing is not questioned.13
One of the leaders said in this regard:
God always has a bunch of lost children, 40 out of 100 people, it is not
the whole lot. But if somehow they abide by the rules of Christianity, if
they are obedient, respectful, or even if they have vices and sins… God is
working on them, He does not abandon them; someday they will make
the decision to submit completely.
Strategies to Maintain Order

Different strategies are developed to maintain order which are basically
implemented by the prisoners in the higher echelons of the wing hier-
archy, though in certain cases prison officers and authorities may also be
involved.
13 Previous studies mention the word “ovejas” (sheep) as the term used to refer to the people
in this position within the evangelical wing structure (Andersen, 2014a, 185; Ángel, 2015, 45;
Manchado, 2015, 284–285; 2016a, 43; 2017b, 182; 2018, 104). But we have not recorded
the use of this term in our field work. As far as “non-church members” are concerned, some
are referred to as “refugiados” (“refugees”), to make specific reference to the fact that they have
come to the evangelical wing seeking security because they have had conflicts in other prison
areas, a category which has also been recorded in previous research (Andersen, 2014a, 209,
225; Algranti & Brardinelli, 2013, 59–60; Algranti, 2011, 56; Manchado, 2015, 292; 2016a,
57; 2017b, 183; Rosas, 2014, 13–14).
On the one hand, there are proactive strategies aimed at preventing

rules from being broken and prisoners housed in this wing from getting
involved in conflicts, especially of a violent nature. One of the most
important consists in deciding which inmates are taken to the evangel-
ical wing. The internal pastor plays an essential role in deciding which
prisoner is taken to his area, regardless of whether he is a newly arrived
prisoner—“ingreso” (a “new admission”)—or an inmate being transferred
from another wing in the prison where he can no longer stay for various
reasons—ranging from a change in his legal status from accused to
convicted to his participation in a violent conflict. On Thursdays, when
new admissions arrive at the male prison of Santa Fe city, the pastors are
allowed to go to the holding cells where they are put or, if there is no
room left there, to the corridors where they stand handcuffed to the bar
of an elevated window waiting to be taken to their wing. In this context,
the pastors interview the “new admissions” and try to determine whether
they have a serious conflict with someone already housed in their own
wing. If there is no conflict, the newly arrived may request or be offered
by the internal pastor to be accommodated in the evangelical wing. This
agreement is then approved by the prison authorities who ask the “new
admission” to sign a document stating his consent.14 Something similar
happens when an inmate is transferred from another wing. Nevertheless,
the prison authorities may not approve of this agreement between the
internal pastor and the inmate, or they may force the internal pastor to
take an inmate against his will. This does not happen very often but we
have been told stories during our interviews. A senior prison officer told
us the following so as to reinforce his decision-making power:
The final decision whether an inmate is taken to a wing or not is ours.

If they say everything is ok but I say no, he isn’t taken there. It they tell
me don’t put’ him in the wing but I say yes, under my responsibility, he
is taken to the wing. We always take responsibility, we have the final say.
14 Even though being taken to an evangelical wing is presented as a voluntary decision, it

is important to point out that there are limited options since a large number of the wings
in this prison are evangelical. Besides, gaining access to a regular wing seems to be more
difficult because the inmates housed there usually resist to receive “new admissions” due to the
overpopulation problem.
In the process to be admitted to the evangelical wing, there is

frequently an important step called “the practice of forgiveness”, which
is imbued with a deep religious connotation. When an eligible candi-
date has had problems with an inmate housed in this area which are not
particularly serious in the internal pastor’s opinion, both prisoners are
asked to talk and ask one another for forgiveness, and reconcile so that
they can live together in harmony. Now, if the inmate already housed
in the evangelical wing is unwilling to offer or ask for forgiveness, he
is threatened with expulsion by the internal pastor; this means that on
many occasions this forgiveness results from coercion. This is what the
pastor in the space under study told us in this regard:
Sometimes an inmate doesn´t want to forgive another. We have seen this

happening here. ’Well, if you don’t forgive him, you will have to leave
and he will get in’, and he said, ’no, it’s ok, come on, because you gave
me a chance’; because everybody has been given a chance. I haven’t met
a single one who hasn’t had some kind of problem with somebody else,
if not in this church maybe in another; yet everybody is given a chance,
come what may.
Another key preventive strategy consists in keeping the inmates

housed in the evangelical wing under permanent surveillance, mainly to
gather information about the social relationships inside the wing in order
to prevent violent conflicts from flaring up. This is achieved through
conversations held by the internal pastor himself with the inmates. In
his words:
We, as God involves a change of life, we speak to the heart of the people.
When we speak to someone, we know how he feels. I am the pastor, I
walk around and see the guys, see their faces; when they feel upset, when
they feel fine, when they want to fight.
But leaders also have an active role in this task, and in certain cases
so do collaborators, and even inmates who are not “members of the
church”.15
This also means that everyday interactions are closely monitored by
those who hold high-ranking positions in the evangelical wing hierarchy.
A collaborator said in this regard:
-If you can sense a tense atmosphere, see strange moves, exchange of
glances... You can anticipate who is going to get into trouble with whom.
Besides, because a prisoner is predictable.
-For those who know…
-Of course, we already know. You can tell by the way they are dressed,
if they are wearing a jacket… ’Why are you wearing a jacket in this
hot weather?’ You can tell by their gait, their looks. In here, we use the
expression ‘hay movida’ (feelings are running high).
And an inmate who was not a member of the church pointed out:
-Everything… the pastor watches over everything, all the time. And if
not him, the leaders.
-What do they pay attention to?
-Everything… who does drugs, who doesn´t, who does this or that.
This constant surveillance is also aimed at monitoring compliance by

inmates housed in the evangelical wing with religious and non-religious
activities organized by the internal pastor. Special attention is paid to
compliance with the schedule, for example, making sure that inmates
get in their cells before the official lock-up time, so that gatekeepers can
proceed to lock them up, or that they get on time to religious ceremonies,
especially the most important ones held at midday and in the evenings.
When the likelihood of a violent conflict is detected at an early stage,
another preventive strategy to be deployed is a sort of mediation that
involves the high-ranking positions in the evangelical wing hierarchy.
15 In some interviews critical comments were made suggesting that some inmates act as
informers of the internal pastor, and they are called “infiltrados” (“infiltrator”) or “alcahuetes”
(“grass/snitch”).
This is connected with a distinguishing feature of this type of blocks,

as observed by Míguez (2013, 14–15) and Algranti and Brardinelli
(2013, 63–65), which consists in engaging in dialogue.16 In this case,
the internal pastor or the leaders try to speak with the parties involved
in an attempt to reach a solution to pacify the situation. And only if this
does not work out, do they respond with a reactive measure of a puni-
tive nature. An inmate who was not a member of the church said in this
regard:
Here if the pastor knows that two people have a conflict, he tries to make
them talk, and he evaluates the situation to see if everything is ok; if the
conflict cannot be resolved, he tries to transfer one to a different church
to prevent the conflict from flaring up.
And a collaborator said:
When there are two people [arguing], the leaders move in to separate
them, and when someone wants to meddle in, they tell him, ’stay out of
this brother, can’t you see we’re trying to calm them down?’; they don’t
tell him, ’mind your own business, jerk!’, that kind of abuse is no longer
used, just love.
Finally, there is a preventive strategy linked to the allocation of

informal rewards that aim at influencing the behavior of those housed
in the evangelical wing, and in many cases they are successful. There
are instant and deferred rewards. First, especially in the case of some
high-ranking members within the hierarchy, these rewards translate into
a concrete possibility of “tangible” improvements in their living condi-
tions in the prison, such as having a cell of their own or being able to
leave their wings frequently to visit other sectors in the prison. Secondly,
for the far larger universe of inmates, the reward is “living in peace”;
a fact that, in the eyes of many inmates housed there, is guaranteed
16 During fieldwork we have recorded instances in which dialogue was used to neutralize poten-
tial conflicts, without the mediation of the high-ranking positions in the hierarchy, by appealing
to religious justifications. A collaborator said in this regard: “In the past I liked being armed,
now I don’t. For me the best weapon is the Bible and peace in your heart, and engage in
dialogue”.
by the regime of the evangelical wing by comparison with the regular

wing, as evidenced by the reduced rate of conflicts of a violent nature.
Thirdly, for many there is a real chance of a “penal” reward because
their stay at the evangelical wing usually contributes to their positive
evaluation by prison authorities and officers, which makes them eligible
for temporary release from prison and parole (Manchado, 2017b, 193–
197; 2018, 107). Fourthly, for some of those housed in this wing there
are also “emotional” and “spiritual” rewards related to religious conver-
sion, improvement of health and wellbeing (especially in the case of
addictions) and better family relationships (Manchado, 2017b, 189–191;
2018, 107). Finally, and also for the converts, there is a potential “eco-
nomic” reward that does not necessarily materialize during confinement
but afterward, by which they may get a job in the future and build a life
free from crime thanks to the networks of the church outside the prison
(Manchado, 2017b, 191–193; 2018, 107).
On the other hand, besides these preventive strategies, there is a series
of reactive strategies of a punitive nature to deal with infractions to
the rules detected by the evangelical wing hierarchy. These informal
disciplinary measures are similar, to some extent, to those imposed
by prison authorities—temporary solitary confinement or transfer to
another wing—although they are not necessarily intended to punish the
same kind of behavior. Then, there are disciplinary measures peculiar to
the evangelical wing, such as warnings and the performance of religious
practices. Within this framework of informal disciplinary measures, there
is no room for direct physical force, although there are coercive measures
that eventually threaten the inmate with the loss of the chance to remain
in the evangelical wing and enjoy the potential or actual rewards which
are related to it. Leaders play a key role in the detection of an infringe-
ment of the rules and the imposition of disciplinary measures, but it
is the internal pastor who decides the kind of disciplinary measure to
be imposed, after consultation with the external pastor if the infraction
is serious. Prison officers and authorities do not partake in the deci-
sion about disciplinary measures, but in certain cases their participation
is central to their implementation. The internal pastor exercises a high
degree of discretion in deciding the disciplinary measures to be imposed,
which means that similar infractions committed by different inmates
may be treated differently. Whereas this discretion is regarded as a source

of flexibility with positive outcomes by some of the inmates, some
others think it is illegitimate, especially when it translates into harsher
disciplinary measures, as evidenced by the accusations of “arbitrariness”
recorded during our fieldwork.
In the event of minor infractions—for example, having a disre-
spectful behavior toward a guard or an evangelical authority, listening
to worldly music out loud or smoking marijuana in public—especially
when committed for the first time, the disciplinary measure amounts to a
warning. The internal pastor or one of the leaders speaks with the person,
warns him of the negative consequences of persisting in that behavior
and tries to persuade him to abide by the rules of the evangelical wing.
One of the leaders said in this regard:
Many times, we basically tell them the way things should be done, or we
ask them why they are doing things wrong. Sometimes they are doing
things wrong because they are facing some problems with their family,
their marriage or the case. When people have problems, they get in
trouble; if not, they are at ease.
“Discipline” is usually exercised over those who repeat relatively

minor infractions. In this case, the punished inmate is referred to
as “disciplinado” (“the disciplined”). Being disciplined basically means
having to perform some extra religious practices together with, in certain
cases, cleaning chores in the evangelical wing. A leader described:
We have a discipline system in the church. The names of those being

disciplined for different reasons are written on a blackboard, and they will
have to do different activities during the week. One day they are called
and gathered in groups, we try to explain to them what God’s discipline
involves, and then they leave. Another day, they meet to pray and praise;
another day, they clean the wing… these are the activities to be done by
those who have committed an infraction.
In the event of more serious infractions, as defined on a case-by-case

basis and at the discretion of the internal pastor, an inmate may be held
in solitary confinement in special cells in another area of the prison. The
period of time is defined by the internal pastor not straight away but
a posteriori, thus leaving the possibility of being transferred to another
wing open. The internal pastor informs the official guards of the evan-
gelical wing that a prisoner needs some time to “reflect” in a solitary
confinement cell. Sometimes, the internal pastor escorts the inmate in
question—together with a guard—to the cell. Then, when and if the
internal pastor deems it appropriate, he goes to the cell and tells the
inmate that solitary confinement time is over and that he may return to
the evangelical wing. In any case, this period of solitary confinement is
not officially recorded by prison administrative staff as a formal disci-
plinary measure but as an instance of “segregation for self-protection”.
Unlike the other informal disciplinary measures, this requires the active
involvement of prison guards and authorities. An inmate who did not
define himself as a member of the church said in this regard:
-You mentioned there are certain rules, such as to attend worship activ-
ities, not to listen to music… what happens if someone breaks those
rules?
-Well, he is segregated, they have him segregated. And he is placed in
“buzones” (“the hole”) and may spend weeks there, then they see if they
give him a chance.
-To come back to the block?
-Yes, to come back or go to another evangelical wing.
-Is the punishment imposed always the same?
-No, not always; sometimes they transfer you directly to another evan-
gelical wing; sometimes they don’t, sometimes you are placed in solitary
confinement.17
Finally, the most serious disciplinary measure—that may follow soli-

tary confinement or not—is expulsion from the wing. Once again, the
boundaries between infractions punishable with this measure are blurred
17 We have already conducted empirical research into this dynamic related to the use of solitary
confinement cells by the internal pastors of the evangelical wings in this same male prison
in Santa Fe city, and we interviewed pastors, prison officers and authorities, and inmates in
solitary confinement cells. One of the officers we interviewed said that the imposition of these
informal disciplinary measures accounts for 80% of the use of solitary confinement cells (in
2014) (Ghiberto & Sozzo, 2016, 133–138).
and muddled. As examples of these infractions, we can mention physical

fighting but also repeated and minor non-compliances with the rules.
The internal pastor usually asks for the external pastor’s advice before
making this decision. His answer to a direct question in this regard was:
And the problem for which they can no longer stay in the wing is when
they are so stoned or drugged out that they would respect no limits, or
something went missing and everybody looks at the junkie. So for safety’s
sake, he is transferred to another wing. Or if we see that he is too stoned,
he goes to “buzones” (“the hole”) until the effect wears off and then he
either returns to the wing or is transferred to another wing.
The people with whom we talked during our fieldwork were highly
critical of the arbitrariness with which the internal pastor of the wing
under study imposed especially this kind of disciplinary measure. This
long extract of a conversation we had with a person expelled from the
unit under study is worth reproducing:
Look, I used to live in the first cell upstairs and this bloke wanted me
to leave that cell. I was on my own. He wanted me to leave the cell and
move downstairs. […] So when he told me he wanted to put another
person in that cell, kind of forcing me to leave, I refused and we argued.
Then I asked the guard if I had to leave the cell and he said that I didn´t.
So what did this dude do? He told me, ’aha, you will leave the cell by
hook or by crook’, and a few days later the same guard, the fatty, told me,
’get your stuff because we are going to get you out of the wing for safety’s
sake’, and well, I was transferred there, handcuffed and all that. And they
told me that I was being transferred because I didn’t get along with a guy
who was in the hole and was coming to the wing. I remember they told
me, and everything was ok with that guy; he already lived in our wing
[…] Because that’s what pastors do, they get you out, they get you in,
and they screw you up. And that bloke made up that story to get me
out. Obviously, the following day after work I went to fetch a couple of
things and railed at him, reproached him for getting me in trouble with
the police and asked him what kind of pastor he was. And he denied
everything before the police. Why would the officer lie to me, just get
me out on a whim?
And even a collaborator in the wing said something similar:
In the wing I am housed, the pastor makes up stories against the boys.
He has to pretend to be a pastor, but he is not. So, some people argue or
he feels envious or jealous and he resents them. So, he goes there, speaks
to the authorities, the senior officers or the officers and he tells them,
‘so-and-so doesn’t get along with such-and-such, please get him out’.
During our fieldwork nobody mentioned anything about prison offi-

cers or authorities partaking in the decision-making process relative to
this strongest measure, although they are likely to have some degree of
influence because the expelled inmate must be accommodated in another
sector in the prison, and this problem should be tackled by the prison
administrative staff. Anyway, according to the extracts we have just repro-
duced it is evident that prison authorities and officers cooperate so that
the measure may be implemented.
A Co-governance Assemblage? Dislocation,

Negotiation, Cooperation and Confrontation
From this description of the production of order in the evangelical wing
emerges a picture in which certain prisoners—essentially the internal
pastor, but also the leaders and collaborators to some extent—seem to
govern other prisoners beyond the reach of the state agents. Therefore, it
would be tempting to appeal to the idea of “self-governance” to interpret
what is going on there in terms of power relations. Actually, this term has
been incidentally used by some authors with reference to the evangelical
wings in provincial prisons in Argentina (Algranti, 2012, 29; Andersen,
2015, 1, 8; Manchado, 2014, 91).
The idea of “self-governance” has been recently introduced in the
literature on prisons in Latin America to make reference to different situ-
ations in which apparently prisoners establish relations of power inside
the prison, while prison authorities and officers step back and exclusively
guard the borders between the inside and the outside worlds (Antillano,
2015, 2017; Antillano et al. 2016; Cerbini, 2012, 2017; Darke, 2013;
2014; Macaulay, 2017; Skarbek, 2020; Sozzo, this volume; Weegels,

2017). However, even in the most extreme examples of this kind in
Latin American prisons—as evidenced by the consolidation of prisoners’
organizations like Primero Comando da Capital or Comando Vermelho in
Brazil (there is a vast literature on the subject, see the chapters by Nunes
Dias, Salla and Alvarez and Dieter Stegeman in this book)—some deci-
sions and actions by state agents are essential to the day-to-day prison
governance. In some cases, they take place within a context of collabo-
rative relations with the highest reaches of the prisoners’ hierarchy: for
example, the frequent smuggling of drugs and firearms in the prison
requires the cooperation of (at least some of ) the prison officers and
authorities (even the police) in charge of guarding the borders between
the inside and outside worlds. In some other cases, state agents’ decisions
position them in relations of confrontation with the highest reaches of
the prisoners’ hierarchy, such as, for example, when armed operations are
carried out by riot squad officers inside the prison precisely to generate
a change in the balance of power among the prisoners, as recorded
by different social researchers who have worked in these contexts and
situations.
From our point of view, this complex dimension of the roles played
by state agents—which may be more or less prominent depending on
the different situations—could be obscured by the concept of “self-
governance”. As far as the evangelical wings are concerned, the impact
of state agents’ actions and decisions is perhaps more evident than in
other cases where certain prisoners assume governance roles in Latin
America, because among other things they affect only some, not all,
sectors within the prison, thus creating an “inside-outside” dimension
within the boundaries of the prison context—as Manchado (2019, 20–
26) has rightly pointed out—this means recognizing that the exercise of
governance by some prisoners over other prisoners is somehow subjected
to a kind of geographical boundary line.
First, we should bear in mind that it is the prison authorities who
approve, though not through a formal procedure, the daily functioning
of the wing in accordance with the patterns of evangelicalism. In the
prison under study, this is the result of a process of negotiation with the
external pastor; and throughout the last decade, there has been a signif-
icant increase in the number of blocks turned into evangelical wings,
just like in the case of the prisons of this province more generally, as
we pointed out in the second section. In our fieldwork, we have not
learnt of a single case in which an external pastor’s proposal to turn
a block into an evangelical wing has been turned down by the prison
authorities; however, we cannot dismiss the possibility that this actually
happens or may have happened.18 Further and more specific research
should be conducted into this matter to shed light on this dynamic
through in-depth interviews to stakeholders specifically involved in this
kind of negotiation. However, the experience of the rise and decline of
an “evangelical prison” in the province of Buenos Aires briefly depicted
in the second section is a clear example of the constraints that may hold
back the expansion of evangelicalism in prisons, and of the way in which
prison authorities may certainly block it.19
Secondly, many decisions and actions affecting the daily functioning
of the evangelical wing made by the highest reaches of its hierarchy are
supervised by prison officers and authorities who may contest and reverse
them—though oftentimes this does not happen—thus creating a situa-
tion of tension and confrontation to a greater or lesser extent. In the
previous section we mentioned this, especially in connection with new
admissions and the imposition of disciplinary measures such as solitary
confinement and expulsion. But there is a wide range of other everyday
dynamics within the evangelical wing that trigger control measures by
state agents, oftentimes implemented by the lowest reaches of its hier-
archy such as “celadores” (gatekeepers). It is no coincidence at all that
many of these dynamics are related to people or things crossing the
boundaries of the evangelical wing. For example, every time the internal
pastor or the leaders have to leave the evangelical wing for some reason,
like on Thursdays to visit the “new admissions” or celebrate a worship
18 We have heard stories about people who oppose having the wing where they are housed
turned into an evangelical wing. This opposition, especially when voiced in a collective and
public way, may be a variable taken into account by prison authorities when it comes to
approving whether a certain block is turned into an evangelical wing or not.
19 See, in general terms and in this same sense, Brardinelli and Algranti (2013, 303; 2017,
185) and Manchado (2016a, 56, 58; 2017b, 200; 2019, 23).
service in another evangelical wing; whenever it is necessary to intro-

duce into the evangelical wing goods bought with the money collected
through tithes and offerings; when inmates housed in the evangelical
wing submit claims related to their cases that require decisions and
actions by the prison administration staff or when inmates leave the evan-
gelical wing to attend educational, labor or recreational activities.20 In all
these situations, the decisions taken by the highest reaches of the evangel-
ical wing hierarchy may be contested and reversed by the prison officers
and authorities. And this happens, though not very often. Besides, there
are other control measures implemented by prison authorities and offi-
cers inside the evangelical wing and aimed at its population. Whereas
some of them are mild and routine, such as the daily opening and closing
of the cells or the headcounts performed during the day, some others are
sporadic and potentially more controversial, such as searches. Although
they do not take place too frequently and are sometimes agreed by the
internal pastor, they must be done regularly. When these different situ-
ations arise, in the microphysics of everyday life the governance role of
state agents re-emerges and becomes tangible.21
In line with Sykes’ ideas in his classic book The Society of Captives
(1958/1999), the reality of the evangelical wings demonstrates the
fictional nature of total control by state agents of the sequestered life
inside prison,22 and makes evident, as the American author stated, a
real dislocation of part of the exercise of power from captors to captives.
As clear examples of this stand out the establishment of rules, the hier-
archy and the specific activities, as well as the preventive and reactive
strategies to maintain order implemented inside this kind of wing in the
20 Unlike what has been registered in evangelical wings in other Argentine prisons, where
they are required to devote their time exclusively to worship practices or are imposed severe
restrictions to other types of activities, inmates in the evangelical wings at the prison under
study are not required to quit labour, educational or recreational activities performed outside
the wing (Manchado, 2015, 293, 297).
21 Similar observations have recently been made by Manchado (2019, 25–27).
22 We have recently discussed the utility of Sykes’ work to analyze the reality of evangelical
wings in Argentine prisons (Navarro and Sozzo, 2020). For a more general consideration of the
work of this classical author and Latin-American prisons, see Sozzo (2020; this volume).
prison under study, which we have described in the previous sections.23

However, this dislocation has limits because, as we have just high-
lighted, state agents can make use of different resources and measures
to govern the prisoners housed in these areas whenever they decide and
circumstances so permit.
This dislocation in the exercise of power can be exclusively seen as the
result of a “top-down” dynamic, as the term “outsourcing” used in some
works on evangelical wings in Argentina seems to suggest (Andersen
& Suárez, 2009, 15–19; Andersen, 2012, 199–201; 2014b, 252, 258,
260; 2015, 2; Daroqui et al., 2009, 2). In this perspective, it is the state
authorities who transfer these governance roles to the highest reaches of
the evangelical hierarchy, because it is instrumental in achieving their
goal of maintaining prison order.24 Besides, this interpretation gives the
impression that evangelical wings are instruments fully controlled by
those who set them up, that is, state authorities.25
Undoubtedly, this “top-down” transference effectively occurs in this
kind of wings in Argentine prisons. However, it is essential not to
lose sight of the “bottom-up” dynamic—and also “outside-in”—that has
contributed to generate this dislocation as an outcome. From the view-
point of those who foster their establishment but do not form part of
the Prison Service structure—that is, external pastors and inmates—
evangelical wings may be considered a “conquest” whose creation and
operation demanded and occasionally still demand overcoming certain
resistance and obstacles mounted by prison authorities and officers. By
23 As Sykes also pointed out, this dislocation does not grant the same roles (and benefits) to all
prisoners in the prison governance. As we have seen in the previous sections, the complex hierar-
chical structure of the evangelical wing assigns different tasks (and rewards) to the inmates who
hold different positions: the internal pastor, leaders, collaborators and non-church members. We
also analyzed the key role played by a stakeholder who does not live in the prison or belong to
the Prison Service—the external pastor. This complex assemblage is established informally with
the consent of prison authorities and guards, who make sure that this is not mentioned in the
official records or given an official name.
24 It has been suggested that “outsourcing” is not exclusive to evangelical wings because it also
takes place in regular wings, making reference to the role of the “limpieza” (cellblock runner)
in the province of Buenos Aires (Andersen, 2014b, 266–270).
25 In other works, we can find the concept of “delegation”—or even “outsourcing”—although
it is not clearly connected with a strong conception of evangelical wings as a mere instrument
of the state authorities (Algranti, 2012, 30; Algranti & Brardinelli, 2013, 45; Manchado, 2014,
91; 2015, 295; 2016a; 56; 2017c, 15).
rescuing this dynamic, it becomes evident that there are limits to the
instrumentalization of evangelical wings by state authorities, which is
undoubtedly always aimed at but is not always necessarily achieved.
From our viewpoint, transfer and conquest may be regarded as the two
sides of the same complex process, which has gained significant strength
in contemporary prisons in Argentina precisely because it has succeeded
in putting together the “top-down” and “bottom-up”, the “outside-in”
and “inside-out” components.26
In the evangelical wings, negotiations between guards and inmates
clearly play a significant and inevitable role to maintain order. Previous
social research into this kind of blocks in Argentine prisons has described
this feature and, in some cases, it has explicitly mentioned the term
“negotiation” (Algranti, 2018, 562; Krmpotic & Vallejos, 2018, 51, 57,
64; Manchado, 2019, 14–15, 27; Vallejos, 2017, 291, 296).27 As we
said, the establishment of an evangelical wing is in itself the result of
a process of negotiation between the external pastor and the prison
authorities. Negotiation is also present on many other crucial occasions
in connection with the preventive and reactive strategies to maintain
order we described in the foregoing section. For example, the decision
concerning new admissions to the evangelical wing and the imposition
of disciplinary measures such as solitary confinement or expulsion. These
negotiations do not eliminate structural imbalances between guards and
26 Sometimes when discussing the establishment and expansion of evangelical wings, it is

suggested that this dislocation of the exercise of power from the guards to the inmates has
taken place quite recently. However, references to a past time when prison staff exerted effective
control and surveillance of what happened inside the wings cannot be substantiated with solid
historical data, and pose the risk of conveying a mythical picture of the situation. The work of
Neuman and Irurzun in the 1960s (1968, 45–61) introduces a series of elements precisely in
the opposite direction. For a generalization along the same lines about prisons in Latin America,
see Birbeck (2011, 315–316). Anyway, this is a subject to be more thoroughly researched in
the future.
27 The idea of “reciprocity” has been previously used in some texts on evangelical wings
(Manchado, 2015, 295; 2016a, 50–56; 2016b, 71–72; 2017a, 182; 2017b, 200–201)—thus
rescuing previous exercises to analyze the relations between inmates and guards in Argentine
prisons, but without making reference to evangelicalism (Míguez, 2007, 28–35; 2008, 149–
163)—to analyze the relations between the hierarchy of this kind of wings and the prison
authorities and officers. Algranti and Brardinelli, for their part, have coined the expressions
“intra-prison transactions” or “intra-prison transaction complex” as they paid special attention
to the idea of “earning some profit” (Algranti & Brardinelli 2013, 32; 47–49, 152–158).
inmates, but it would not be an exaggeration to say that, in certain situa-

tions, such imbalance is somewhat redressed, especially when the internal
pastor includes the external pastor in the process. Throughout our field-
work, we have heard different stories by “celadores” (gatekeepers) who felt
impotent and resentful about being often overruled by the internal pastor
with the help of the external pastor during negotiations, which ended up
involving the highest reaches of the Prison Service and resulted in deci-
sions and actions they considered inappropriate. As we moved upwards
in the prison hierarchy, though, the stories presented an opposite view
and emphasized the capacity of state authorities to eventually impose
decisions as illustrated in several remarks reproduced in the foregoing
section.
Finally, these relations of power marked by dislocation—between
transfer and conquest—and by permanent negotiation—between guards
and inmates—entail a continuum of relations between both parties,
ranging from collaboration on one end to confrontation on the other
one. Some researchers who work on prisons in Latin America have
recently described some situations—to some extent as an alternative to
the idea of “self-governance”—as a regime of “co-governance” between
guards and inmates (Avila & Sozzo, this volume; Bracco, 2020, 45–
50, 95–128; Bracco, this volume; Darke, 2018, 139–197, 279–321;
Skarbek, 2020; Sozzo, this volume; Stegemann Dieter, this volume;
Weegels, 2019; Weegels, this volume). In fact, this term—or similar
expressions such as “shared governance” or “joint management”—has
also been used in connection with evangelical wings in Argentine prisons,
although incidentally in most cases and without defining the scope of
its meaning (Algranti, 2018, 562; Algranti & Brardinelli, 2013, 44–46,
2017, 181; Andersen, 2014b, 259, 262; 2015, 2; Manchado, 2015, 295;
2018, 102; 2019, 21–22). This concept certainly helps avoid the prob-
lems posed by the idea of “self-governance” mentioned above, but it may
lead us to think that the relations between guards and inmates are only of
a collaborative nature. Cooperation between both parties can certainly be
observed on a constant basis. This is strongly promoted by the sermons—
supported by the evangelical ethics of obedience and respect—being
constantly preached by the hierarchy of this kind of blocks. There are
many examples of this, which have practical and symbolical purposes,
among which we can mention: the fact that the internal pastor and
leaders make prisoners get in their cells before the official lock-up time
thus facilitating the gatekeepers’ duties; or when the internal pastor
makes the decision that an inmate should be held in solitary confinement
and informs the gatekeeper, who opens the wing so that both punished
and punisher may leave it and make together, escorted by an officer, all
their way to the confinement cells; or when the internal pastor shares
with the gatekeeper (and vice versa) information about a newly arrived
at the evangelical wing relative to his “broncas” (grudges) and “boletas”
(obligations of revenge); or when the prison authorities ask the internal
pastor to welcome an inmate transferred from another sector because
he has had a conflict there and the pastor accepts. On many occasions
while conducting fieldwork, we have come across references to this coop-
eration—including some criticism of the proximity with the prison staff
that entails—voiced by inmates and prison authorities alike.
However, there are also situations of tension and confrontation, as we
have already mentioned (Manchado, 2016a, 54–55, 58; 2017c, 15–17;
2019, 15, 28). When the internal pastor’s decisions are contested by the
prison guards and authorities, situations of tension and confrontation
crop up, and the matter may be resolved in favor of one party over the
other depending on the circumstances, in the context of a process in
which the conflict may or may not escalate as times goes by. In some
cases, the internal pastor may come to the conclusion that insisting on
the contested decision is not worth the effort and that it is better to give
up. But he may also decide the opposite—thus generating new instances
of dialogue with the prison stakeholders involved or with other ones—
and involve the external pastor when he deems it necessary, thus opening
up other possibilities of negotiation as mentioned before. For example,
we have recorded in our fieldwork several stories about a recent change in
the attitude of this prison authorities toward the imposition of solitary
confinement by internal pastors. They have adopted a more restrictive
attitude, which has spurred tension and confrontation. This gives this
assemblage of prison governance a certain level of instability and fluidity.
Only if this aspect is included within the scope of the concept of co-
governance, will it become pertinent to understand the phenomenon
of evangelical wings in some provincial prisons in Argentina. Therefore,

shared but also potentially contested governance.
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Alternatives?
The “Prisoner-Entrepreneur”:
Responsibilization and Co-governance
at Punta de Rieles Prison in Uruguay
Fernando Avila and Máximo Sozzo
Introduction
Latin American prisons are generally characterized by informality, over-
crowding, violence and human rights violations (Darke & Karam, 2016;
Sozzo, this volume-a). Although this characterization is largely accurate,
exceptional prison settings that challenge these general features can be
found within this region of the Global South.
F. Avila (B)
University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
e-mail: fernando.avila@mail.utoronto.ca
M. Sozzo
Fe, Argentina

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98602-5_10
298 F. Avila and M. Sozzo
Whereas the overall Uruguayan prison system certainly exhibits the

disturbing regional characteristics mentioned above,1 Punta de Rieles,
a medium-security prison in Montevideo known as the “prison-town”,
has achieved enhanced order with negligible violence rates2 through
a radically different way of organizing and governing imprisonment.
Holding roughly 600 male prisoners convicted of a range of offences,
including serious crimes like robbery and homicide, Punta de Rieles
has the appearance of a poor neighbourhood of a Latin American
city with a vibrant social and economic life. Most prison officers are
unarmed civilian women,3 and the warden4 in office at the time the
fieldwork was performed was also a civilian, a former Tupamaro and
1 According to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Penitentiary Affairs of Uruguay, 44 pris-

oners died under custody in 2016, 47 in 2017, 37 in 2018 and 44 in 2019—on a total prison
population of around 11,000 prisoners. In some prisons, they documented up to five prisoners
injured in violent situations per day in 2016 and up to three in 2018. They also reported
overcrowding and extended physical restrictions such as lockdown of groups of prisoners in
cells and wings for 23 hours a day (Comisionado Parlamentario Penitenciario del Parlamento
del Uruguay, 2016a, 2016b, 2017, 2018, 2019).
2 None of the officially registered deaths occurred at Punta de Rieles prison. The number
of prisoners injured in violent situations in this prison is very low with not more than two
prisoners injured per semester, as estimated by the Health Administration Office located inside
the prison.
3 The prison perimeter is under custody of the army in keeping with Law 18717 enacted in
2011, by which the Defence Ministry is in charge of securing the perimeter of a number of
prisons including Punta de Rieles. Inside the prison there are two kinds of prison officers:
traditional uniformed police officers, mostly assigned to security issues, and unarmed civilian
officers. The latter were introduced after a penal reform in 2010 when the government created
the National Institute of Rehabilitation to unify the national prison system and to put an end
to police control over prisons (Vigna, 2016a, 2016b).
4 The prison was inaugurated in 2010—after being used as a detention centre for female polit-
ical prisoners during the last dictatorship between 1972 and 1985. But it was not until 2012,
when a civilian warden (Rolando Arbesún) began to implement a whole series of innovations
in the governance style, that Punta de Rieles acquired the unique features that characterize it
today. Rolando Arbesún served as warden until 2015 with Luis Parodi as vice-warden, who
then served as warden until May 2020. Parodi resigned to his position shortly after a new
national government was elected defeating the “Frente Amplio”, the centre-left coalition that
had been in office since 2005.
The “Prisoner-Entrepreneur”: Responsibilization and Co-governance … 299
“educador social” (popular educator ).5 The authorities banned segrega-

tion and sought to increase the prisoners’ autonomy. Prisoners are thus
allowed to move freely within the prison, have cell phones, use the
Internet, organize cultural activities, own and run businesses and work-
shops that provide job opportunities for other prisoners, and produce
goods and services that are sold inside and outside the prison. A solidarity
fund owned and administered by prisoners and the authorities provide
the prisoner-entrepreneurs with interest-free loans for developing their
projects.
Responsibilization plays a fundamental role in this prison as a strategy
deployed by the prison authorities and officers to make prisoners respon-
sible, with broad levels of autonomy, for developing an open range
of activities that authorities consider “positive”. Most of the officially
promoted activities, of which the production of goods and services is the
most frequent, are materialized by the prisoners’ initiative. Prisoners are
encouraged to design their project to develop the productive activity they
have chosen, and to draft a formal request to obtain the prison author-
ities’ approval and support to carry it out (Avila, 2020; Avila & Sozzo,
2020).
This chapter focuses on the “prisoner-entrepreneur” as an agent
in governmental relations at Punta de Rieles prison. These “prisoner-
entrepreneurs” occupy a unique position in this prison’s population.
They are subjected to responsibilization and requested to engage in a
“positive use” of time and develop forms of self-governance. However,
as “employers” of other prisoners, they simultaneously become and act
as government agents and structure the field of action of the “prisoner-
employees” in a way that largely resembles wage labour outside the prison
walls. In turn, this governmental role implies not only collaboration but
also friction with the state agents, especially with prison officers. Based
on a semi-ethnography (Owen, 1998, 21; Rowe, 2015, 350) conducted
5 Tupamaros was a left-wing urban guerrilla movement in Uruguay in the 1960s and 1970s.
As to the term “Educador Social”, there is no equivalent career name in English. The closest
translation is “social pedagogue” or “popular educator” where “popular” refers to “popular
classes” as opposed to upper social classes—including peasants, the unemployed and the working
class. The “educador social” is trained to work with disadvantaged groups in order to promote
their active participation and engagement in social life, thus reducing social exclusion through
educational strategies and practices.
at Punta de Rieles prison between 2017 and 2019,6 this chapter addresses
the unusual place of “prisoner-entrepreneurs” in terms of their govern-
mental role and links with state agents, as a peculiar form of governance
in this non-traditional Latin American prison.
In the following section we will explain how responsibilization is
deployed at Punta de Rieles as a key governing strategy to “activate” pris-
oners, and how this strategy acquires peculiar characteristics that differ to
some extent from those identified in Global North prison contexts. The
next section will describe how entrepreneurism and productive activities
are a key component of governance and daily life in this prison setting.
In the fourth section we will analyze the role of prisoner-entrepreneurs,
not only as agents of self-governance, but also as agents of governance for
their prisoner-employees. In the final section, we will focus on the rela-
tions that develop between prisoners and state agents. We will analyze the
specific features of the co-governance that arises from this interaction in
the light of recent studies in the literature on Latin American prisons.
Governing Through a Peculiar

Responsibilization Strategy
The governance strategy of the Punta de Rieles prison authorities involves
a very specific form of responsibilization. The use of responsibiliza-
tion strategies in prisons has been documented and theorized by several
scholars from the Global North (Ballesteros-Pena, 2018; Crewe, 2007,
2009, 2011a, 2011b; Garland, 1997; Goodman, 2012; Hannah-Moffat,
2000, 2001).
6 The research involved more than 450 hours of fieldwork with informal conversations and
diverse social interactions, more than sixty semi-structured interviews with prisoners, prison
officers, the former warden and the warden-in-office at the time of the fieldwork. The interviews
were private and could take place anywhere inside the prison (squares, inside shops, inside
buildings, or sitting by the street). Some scholars have pointed out that prison ethnography is
not a simple enterprise, and that researchers may find many obstacles on attempting to access
the field and documents, and to interview prisoners with privacy (Crewe, 2006, 348–352).
Nonetheless, the authorities and officers of this prison simplified the research enormously,
allowing access to every site and every document, taking pictures, walking alone and freely
without a fixed agenda, and participating as an observer in board meetings and discussions.
When responsibilization is deployed in Global North prison settings,

responsibilized prisoners have a range of choices that are structured,
promoted and monitored by the prison authorities and officers. If pris-
oners choose to act outside this range, a state sanction is triggered against
them. If prisoners choose to act within this range of officially promoted
choices, the authorities and officers still monitor their actions closely
and carefully evaluate their performance, and hand out certain privi-
leges according to their performance. Nothing like this occurs when
responsibilization is applied to subjects of governance who are “included”
in society (Rose, 2000, 334). For example, in the state initiatives in
the name of crime prevention that seek to hold residents of an urban
area responsible for managing their own risks of being victims of crime
(O’Malley, 1992, 1996), there is no subsequent state intervention to
monitor whether or not they pursued the promoted course of action. In
the case of Northern carceral institutions, “individuals can be governed
through their freedom to choose” (Rose & Miller, 1992, 201), but the
responsibilization strategy deployed also involves direct and constant
interventions by state agents that go well beyond simply governing “at
a distance” (Miller & Rose, 1990).
The responsibilization strategy at Punta de Rieles prison shows a
number of peculiar features that differ partly from those described in
Global North prisons (Avila & Sozzo, 2020, 6–9, 17–19). The Punta
de Rieles authorities promote prisoner responsibilization through a set
of discourses and practices that we have defined as the “imperative of
activation”. The warden meets every group of newcomers personally in a
welcome meeting, which is when he delivers two key messages that define
the prison’s organization and governance. These messages are reinforced
formally by the guards and informally by other prisoners. Firstly, he
informs that the prison will not tolerate any humiliation or abuse from
any officer to a prisoner or from a prisoner to another prisoner, and that
there are two golden rules that if broken will result in transfer to a tradi-
tional prison: drug dealing and using a knife to attack another person.
Secondly, he tells the prisoners that they have to be “active”. Passive
obedience is not enough. Instead, they have to think about what to do
with their time, they have to do something, thus generating a commit-
ment to engage in a “positive” behaviour that can be oriented in different
directions. The warden will not explicitly say that sustained inactivity can
lead to transfer to a traditional prison, but the newcomers know that this
can happen through the information they gather informally from other
prisoners.
An important characteristic of the “imperative of activation” is the
absence of predefined or compulsory programs set by the prison insti-
tution. Activities are voluntary, flowing and dynamic, and most of them
start and continue under the prisoners’ initiative. These activities must
be valued as positive by the prison authorities, who formally authorize
them. They range from the production of goods and services to attending
secondary school or taking a university course, from conducting a show
on the community radio to participating in the drama group. Some sort
of reformative philosophy can be traced in the official discourse. This
philosophy is unrelated to the idea of “treatment” and “expert” knowl-
edge. Its underlying ethos is to persuade the prisoners to become active
citizens. The authorities rely on techniques of responsibilization and self-
governance to get prisoners vested in their own future, while meeting
institutional aims. Put in the warden’s words, the idea is to help prisoners
“to find a different place for life’s struggles, if they want to”. The prison
authorities actively seek to get prisoners deeply involved in this life trans-
forming process. They create an open obligation that the prisoners can
fulfil in many, though limited, ways that are not necessarily pre-set by the
authorities. Thus, the prisoners actively engage in this process selecting
their own paths between these different possibilities.
Unlike most prisons, Punta de Rieles allows prisoners a great deal of
autonomy in their everyday life. The prisoners are encouraged to deal
with their problems and find solutions by themselves. Prisoners at Punta
de Rieles are not subjected to any form of classification, so they are
all authorized to walk freely within the perimeter from 8 am to 6 pm
every day. Early in the morning, the streets come to life resulting in
an intense social, economic and cultural life. The circulation of people
is more intense on visitors’ days,7 when the streets are crowded with
7 Prisoners have three days per week for visits. Most of them value the security for their families
during the visit time at Punta de Rieles, contrasting it with the previous experiences at other
prisons.
prisoners and families walking around, playing soccer with their chil-
dren, having lunch at the restaurants, or just buying groceries to enjoy
a meal with their visitors. It is common to see groups of prisoners chat-
ting, debating, playing music, walking around, or working. The walls
are covered with graffiti and banners inviting everyone to a diverse range
of activities: from gender violence prevention or addiction treatment to
chess, garden keeping and learning English. Some of the activities are
offered by prisoners, and admission is open to everyone including prison
officers. Every day, the prisoners leave their wing8 for their activities.
They are not escorted or controlled by prison officers. Every now and
then, the prison officers visit the sites where the activities are carried out,
though the level of surveillance and supervision is relatively low. This
unique level of autonomy becomes manifest in their institutionalized
and unmonitored right to use cell phones, the Internet and social media,
all of which is normally prohibited in Uruguayan prisons. This access
to technology poses two main advantages to prisoners: it re-establishes,
helps maintain, and improves social bonds with family and friends, and
it also allows some of the prisoners to run their businesses more effi-
ciently, since they can use the Internet to manage their bank accounts
and buy supplies and sell their products outside the prison. This greater
autonomy for the prisoners shows that the Punta de Rieles’ responsibi-
lization strategy, unlike the Global North experiences, is characterized
not by “tightness”, but by “looseness”.
Another distinctive characteristic of this governing strategy at Punta de
Rieles prison is its “informal” nature. Free, flowing and direct commu-
nication between prison authorities/officers and prisoners is encouraged.
The warden himself fosters a friendly and direct relation with the pris-
oners, taking walks around the prison every day and meeting with them
in different contexts and situations. His office works with an “open
doors” policy: any prisoner can see him without a previous appointment.
Civilian prison officers also seek to develop a direct relationship with
the prisoners. This daily, informal and personal contact is the basis to
8 All the wings are closed, but the cells inside them are always unlocked, so that prisoners can
move freely inside the wing, even when the access gate is locked.
achieve high levels of trust and legitimacy. Closely related, the responsi-
bilization strategy in this prison context is also characterized by its “lay”
nature. The ethos of prison authorities and officers is strongly linked
to the idea of assistance, but it is based on lay experience and under-
standing and not on expert knowledge and rehabilitation and treatment
techniques. The prison authorities communicate with prisoners using
lay language, relying on persuasion to get them to actively engage in
a productive use of time, as promoted by the prison. This informality
contributes to a more horizontal relation between prisoners and prison
authorities/officers at Punta de Rieles.
Finally, despite the strong link between responsibiliziation and indi-
vidualization, the governing strategy at Punta de Rieles coexists with
“collectivist” and mutual aid mechanisms and dynamics. For example,
the solidarity fund, finances repair or improvement of common prison
areas and grants no-interest loans to support new “productive” projects.
All allocation of funds is decided through a democratic process by which
the prisoners decided what initiatives to support. Interestingly, project
failure and insolvency do not compromise the prisoner’s situation or
negatively impact his record, and any outstanding debt is waived.
The next section will focus on how, through this process of responsibi-
lization, a prisoner at Punta de Rieles can engage in productive activities
and ultimately become an entrepreneur.
The Role of Productive Activities

and Entrepreneurism
The enormous significance of the labour and productive activities at this
prison is evidenced by the fact that most of the prisoners—8 out of 10—
work in some way.9 Every prisoner is strongly encouraged to engage in
productive activities: working for the prison (in maintenance), working
for a private employer (another prisoner or a free person or company
9 In contrast, only 38% of inmates carried out some type of labour activities in 2017, 39%
in 2018 and 36% in 2019 in the entire prison system of Uruguay, according to the official
reports (Comisionado Parlamentario Penitenciario del Parlamento del Uruguay, 2016b, 2017,
2018, 2019).
that runs a business inside the prison10 ), or becoming an entrepreneur

himself. The most frequent option is working for an employer (around
50% of prisoners) followed by working for the prison in maintenance
(around 25% of prisoners),11 whereas the least frequent though most
appreciated, is becoming an entrepreneur (around 10% of prisoners).
The official stimulus for engaging in productive activities starts in
the entry wing, the only permanently locked wing of the prison where
newcomers are held for a month under “observation” before being
admitted or rejected. Newcomers are invited to join groups of volunteers
that work with different employers in order to network and to explore
the prison looking for a paid job in case they are finally admitted to Punta
de Rieles. Job seeking is a personal endeavour. The applicant must nego-
tiate with the owner of the business, whether another prisoner or a free
citizen, or with the prison officer in charge of the prison area where main-
tenance is needed (such as the gardens or kitchens). Once both parties
reach an agreement, they must present a note to the prison’s Labour
Office providing details about the agreement and requesting approval of
the employment relationship. The Labour Office meets every week, and
its intervention is required to control and avoid underpayment and fake
employment, and to keep track of every labour relationship.12
The prisoner-entrepreneurs own and manage around 50 businesses
that hire other prisoners as employees, and that sell their goods/services
10 In November 2019, there were two businesses owned by former Punta de Rieles prisoners
who had started them while in prison and kept them running after release. One is a brick
factory with four employees, and the other is an industrial bakery with 84 employees, the
biggest employer at the prison. There are also two businesses owned by citizens who were never
imprisoned: one is a brick factory with two employees, and the other is a recycling company
with 29 employees.
11 Most of the labour activities inside prisons in Latin America are frequently related to main-
tenance (as cleaning and cooking). At Punta de Rieles, according to the official data provided
by the prison Labour Office, in June 2017 these maintenance activities involved only 28% of
the inmates that worked inside the prison (136 out of 479). In November 2019 it was 30%
of the working inmates (149 out of 490).
12 There are at least two strong incentives for prisoners to engage in a labour relationship. The
first is the possibility of sentence reduction. The Uruguayan law—Article 13 of Law 17897—
allows for sentence reduction for prisoners who have worked or studied during their time of
confinement: two days of work or study are equivalent to one day of imprisonment. The second
incentive is the increased availability of services and goods the prisoners can access inside the
prison once they have a paid job.
to prisoners, prison officers and people outside the prison. The list of
active businesses in 2019 included several groceries, ten brick facto-
ries, one crafts shop, two restaurants, seven food stores, one hardware
store, two smithies, one candy shop, one laundry, one minimarket,
two bakeries, two barbershops, one personal-hygiene items store, one
house-cleaning items store, two tattoo shops, a recycling company, a
greengrocer’s, two farms, a flower shop and a furniture store, among
others.
Becoming an entrepreneur can be considered a status upgrade in
the social world of this peculiar prison. Besides the fact that they earn
more money and provide jobs to others, the entrepreneurial role influ-
ences self-esteem, family consideration and peer respect. The process to
become an entrepreneur is simple. First, the prisoner must write a peti-
tion to explaining his project, stating whether it is an individual or a
group project, the number of job positions he expects to create, and the
place where the business will be located. Given the increasing number
of projects, there are few available buildings. Hence, the prisoners them-
selves must find a suitable site and actually build the facility where they
plan to establish their business.
If the project is approved by the authorities, the prisoner and the
prison administration will sign a contract. The document establishes
guidelines and requirements to operate, as well as prisoners’ rights and
duties. The clauses define things such as: who the persons authorized to
carry out the activity are, that the prison only lends the physical space
for the business to operate while the rest of the items for setting up and
running the business must be provided by the prisoner, the commis-
sion per transaction to be paid to the prison which they refer to as the
“canon”, the contribution to be paid to the solidarity fund, that the
project does not have a fixed term of duration and can be concluded
by either of the parties with 60 days’ notice unless there is a serious
irregularity that enables immediate closure. These serious irregularities
include repeated failure to pay salaries, occurrence of accidents at the
workplace due to not having the necessary safety equipment, informal
money transfers to suppliers, repeated situations of misconduct by the
members of the business at the workplace, and illegal activities carried
out by employees with the consent of the business owner.
Once the paperwork is finished, the prisoner can request a no-interest

loan from the prisoners’ solidarity fund. The fund works as a commu-
nity development bank13 and is run by a board of directors made up of
prisoners, the warden and one civilian prison officer. The director of the
fund is a prisoner elected by his peers. Every business owner can partici-
pate in the decisions they make about who to loan money to, or whether
money should be invested in improving a given building or service for
the prisoners or their families. The fund’s capital consists of the contribu-
tion paid by the prisoners for each sale. The contributions are less than
5% of the sale and yield a monthly income of USD2,000 for the fund.
According to information provided by the president of the fund during
an interview in early 2017, the fund had at least 30 active loans and
savings for USD10,000.
As mentioned previously, the significant degree of autonomy of the
prisoners allows them to comply with the “imperative of activation” in
many different ways, including other types of activities that the prison
authorities value as positive and that are associated with educational
and cultural projects. Nonetheless, data show that the vast majority of
prisoners decide to engage in a productive activity either as workers or
as entrepreneurs. In either case, monitoring by the prison authorities
and officers is minimal and only aims to control two simple though
crucial aspects: that they are actually performing the “positive activity”,
and they do not commit any serious transgression (use of knives and
drug-dealing). If the prisoner consistently fails to engage in any positive
activity or commits a serious transgression, he is eventually transferred
to a regular prison. The transfer practices set the boundaries to the
responsibilization strategy. This strategy builds and shapes specific power
alignments and relations between the authorities/officers and the pris-
oners. In the next section we will analyze how the prisoner-entrepreneur
plays a dual role in these power alignments and relations.
13Community development banks are institutions that make small collateral-free loans, such as
microcredits, to impoverished people to create sustainable self-employment businesses (Yunus,
1998).
The Prisoner-Entrepreneur as an Agent

of Self-Governance and as an Agent
for the Governance of Others
At the core of the “imperative to be active” at Punta de Rieles prison
is the will to get the prisoners to become involved in their own life, to
get them to make choices, and to use their time in prison positively. As
mentioned earlier, it is an open-ended obligation that rests on a mandate
that can be fulfilled in many ways, and these ways are not necessarily
pre-established by the authorities. The prisoners enjoy a broad margin of
autonomy to decide how to become active.
The prisoners who decide to actively engage in a productive activity
somehow internalize the goals set by the authorities through the official
discourse. Thus, the prisoners begin to regulate their own lives according
to those normative expectations (Crewe, 2007, 258; Garland, 1997,
191). The conditions that facilitate self-governance rest on acknowl-
edging the possibility of being an ideally different person—a “productive
subject”, an “entrepreneur” (Rose, 1999a, 11), on the normative view
about what they are and what they could be, and on the incentive
provided by the prison administration to close that gap set by normative
expectations.
Entrepreneurs value their position and the status attached to their role.
Prisoners perceive the change towards a different way of doing things in
life as a free and autonomous decision, and they emphasize the lack of
fixed or compulsory programs and activities as something that differen-
tiates this prison from others when it comes to prison work, and that
also adds value to their achievements. Furthermore, the participation of
the prison administration is sometimes described as passive, as limited
to not hindering the process. In this sense, the administration appears
as providing tools and opportunities, or at least as not obstructing the
prisoners’ initiative. There is a clear link between how prisoners visualize
their change (i.e., as something not imposed but chosen), and the notion
of government at a distance: the prison administration acts indirectly
upon the wishes and choices of prisoners, forging a symmetry between
the official objectives and the prisoners’ attempts to make life worth-
while. The feeling of making autonomous decisions towards change
described by some prisoners opens a path to the notion of self-fulfilment
through productive behaviour.
You have to get rid of the prisoner in your head in order to be able to
work here. You have to focus on something different, to feel you are a
worker. For this to work for me I had to believe that I am a businessman
and not a prisoner. (Prisoner JC. Entrepreneur)
The civilian guard is not a person who tells you what to do. You start
to think about change because of the open environment, that you are
working all day, that you are thinking that you have to get up early to go
to work. As the days go by you realize that you have to make a change.
It’s good, it’s a life changer. But they don’t force you: those who want to,
change, those who don’t, leave. They give you the tools and you choose
whether you want to stay here or to leave. (Prisoner J)
Here I have the possibility to do things, I can make a proposal and if my

proposal is coherent, I can carry it forward (…) there is space to propose
and to do (…) We say that we [the prisoners] make the change and it is
because we make it ourselves. (Prisoner M)
But unlike the other ways in which a prisoner can be active, becoming
an entrepreneur at Punta de Rieles comes together with specific obliga-
tions that go well beyond self-governance. As mentioned previously, the
agreement signed between the prison administration and the prisoner-
entrepreneur establishes some guidelines that obligate the latter to
control his employees and holds him responsible for their behaviour.
In some way, therefore, as “prisoner-employers”, entrepreneurs become
and act as governmental agents, and they structure the field of action
of the “prisoner-employees”. This set of obligations place these pris-
oners in a different role: prisoner-entrepreneurs are not only actors
who govern themselves through their freedom and choices aligned
with a broader project laid out by the prison authorities, but in their
role as entrepreneurs-employers they also exercise governance over their
prisoner-employee reinforcing the rules of the prison by voluntarily
embedding them in the rules of their own business. For example,

“you have to work according to the tasks and schedule of the work-
place”, “you can’t sell or consume drugs here”, “you can´t fight with
other prisoner-employees here” and “you have to obey the orders of the
prisoner-entrepreneur”.
I have strict rules here with the boys who work with me. In this sector,
I have never made any trouble [for the prison]. When the guys come
looking for a job, the rules are no drugs, you are not going to walk
around, no fights (…) if they do that, they leave automatically (…) We
must respect what we have built with effort. (Prisoner JC. Entrepreneur)
FA: Are you responsible for your employees’ behaviour?

J: Yes, we have rules, we have a schedule. It is a regular job, so there
is a schedule and there are rules. (Prisoner JR. Entrepreneur)
This dual role influences the way in which prisoners relate to each other
and to the prison administration. The labour relationship begins with
a private negotiation between prisoners. Entrepreneurs understand that
in order to avoid misunderstandings and future problems they need to
be careful and extremely precise when communicating to the future
employee the requirements, boundaries and rules of the business, and
discussing the prisoner-entrepreneur’s own goals and his decision “to
change” and do things differently (and legally). Clarity is key at this stage
because the prisoner-entrepreneur is about to start a hierarchical relation-
ship with another prisoner. If this relationship breaks or ends badly, it can
have negative consequences for the prisoner-entrepreneur.
It is difficult to be an entrepreneur within the system without compli-

cating your future path when you decide to change (…) if you are in a
different prison tomorrow you could face certain complaints [from other
prisoners for your decisions today] (…) and that implies that you have
to have certain conversations prior to giving a job position to another
prisoner. A lot goes into that talk, you need to be sure that the other
[prisoner] understands that you are looking for change and you don’t
want trouble. (Prisoner R. Entrepreneur)
I have had an employee for a month now. I searched until the right
person came along (…) Sometimes I have to tell him off, but nothing
serious (…) Obviously, if the guards catch him committing an infraction,
if they search the business premises and find a joint or whatever, I’m the
one that will be in trouble, in the case that my employee has the [illegal]
things in his possession, the business is harmed (…) Obviously we tell
the employee [the rules] clearly (…) and if he follows those rules, the
business continues to work well without being tainted. (Prisoner ML.
Entrepreneur)
It is within labour relationships that the role of the prisoner-entrepreneur

as an agent for the governance of others is most visible. Indeed, in
addition to persuasion, prisoner-entrepreneurs can resort to redundancy
as the final sanction for the prisoner-employee who violates business
rules. The threat of redundancy also allows the prisoner-entrepreneur
to demand the prisoner-employee to correct and improve his activity.
Redundancy forces the former prisoner-employee to find another job
in the prison to replace the income he had from his previous job,
and it also creates an unfavourable precedent, since the reason for
his getting fired is rapidly known throughout the prison. In addition,
the prisoner-entrepreneur has to inform the Labour Office about the
redundancy, which entails two important consequences for the former
prisoner-employee. First, because employment is recorded on each pris-
oner’s file, the time unemployed does not earn credit towards sentence
reduction. Second, unemployment added to lack of engagement in other
activities—implies the prisoner is not complying with the “imperative
of activation” encouraged by the prison authorities and guards, and
with time, this could lead to difficulties for the prisoner to secure his
permanence at this non-conventional prison.
[My business] is like any business: there are rules, if an employee doesn’t
comply, he’s out. (Prisoner AD. Entrepreneur)
FA: Have you ever fired an employee?

C : Yes, one. It was a problem. There’s no reason why I have to put up
with someone selling marihuana here. He worked for me, and he
was selling drugs here.
FA: Why is his selling a problem for you?

C : It brings problems! I have been in prison for 12 years, and if the
guards come and catch him with drugs, who do you think they are
going to put into the spot? It’s gonna be the entrepreneur. I told
him to stop selling drugs or to quit. And he said he was quitting.
Of course! Do you want to sell drugs in my brick factory? Fuck off!
(Prisoner CC. Entrepreneur)
One day I found out that [a prisoner] took a sandwich from me through
the window [from my food store], one of the guys in here [an employee]
gave it to him. And I called him, I asked him and he denied it, so I fired
him. (Prisoner FD. Entrepreneur)
Thus, as prisoner-entrepreneurs value their position and status and have

a clear understanding of what is at stake if someone contravenes the
rules, they tend to be careful when hiring a new employee and to strictly
monitor their employees’ behaviour at work. But in order to protect their
businesses, they will have to reinforce rules that are generally depicted
as the authorities’ rules, and in doing so they may become an alien
to other prisoners. Two overlapping sets of interests underlie the hier-
archical relationship established between the prisoner-entrepreneur and
the prisoner-employee, straining the inmate’s code. Indeed, traditionally
described inmate code rules, such as those warning against the betrayal
of other prisoners or against the exploitation of other prisoners (Sykes &
Messinger, 1960, 7–8), are at stake when the entrepreneur negotiates
the labour relationship and when he decides to terminate it and has to
inform the prison authorities about the reasons for redundancy.14 Thus,
entrepreneurs navigate through a complex scenario: their business role
and interests may compromise their loyalty towards fellow prisoners, the
entrepreneur and the prisoner are somehow competing and overlapping
positions.
14 If a prisoner-entrepreneur informs the administration that the reason for redundancy is

that he caught his employee selling drugs on the work premises, the prisoner-employee may
be transferred to a traditional prison. The prisoner-entrepreneur is aware that reporting this
violates a rule of the inmate code, and that he might run into the prisoner-employee at a
traditional prison at some point in the future, and his safety would therefore be jeopardized.
Likewise, from the prisoner-employees’ point of view, the labour rela-

tionship has ups and downs just as labour relationships outside the
prison. During the fieldwork, the prisoners shared their complaints about
hardship at work and being underpaid by prison-entrepreneurs and
outside private employers, as well as stories about resigning from their
job and organizing group demonstrations. The following conversation is
an example:
Prisoner: Hey Parodi we are not getting well paid at Gigor [external
company inside the prison].
Warden: Well, what are you waiting for to stand up for your rights, I’ll
back you up.
Prisoner: We are gonna burn tyres, Parodi! (laughing).
Warden: That’s bullshit! Learn to argue!
In some interviews, prisoners and the warden also referred to this point:
Before this, I worked at Gigor, at the bakery, I worked in maintenance

for 8 months, I did welding, things I never imagined I would do. Then
I quit and went to Huerva [another private company inside the prison].
Because they paid more there. (Prison ML. Entrepreneur)
Here you have to go out and look for a job. I left the bakery, I quit
because I wanted to rest a bit, my body was tired, I wasn’t used to working
12 hours a day, it was a lot. You look for a job because you see that in this
prison you have to keep yourself, you go to the shops and all, sometimes
it’s always good to have a little extra money. (Prisoner D)
Warden: I met with the employees and owners [of one of the private
companies inside the prison] three days. [The employees] got
an extra thousand pesos for their salary. I was here [in his
office] in a meeting with the company about the canon they
have to pay, and ten prisoners showed up and told me they
wanted to be at the meeting, they sat down, and they hijacked
the meeting. There were strike threats.
FA: Had there been other strikes?
Warden: Yes, there were several at the sawmill. Then they came to
an agreement about things before going on strike because
they were very anarchic, they went on strike for everything.
Confronting authority is part of growing up, that’s why you
don’t transfer them for doing that.
In other words, the labour relations between prisoners—and with

external private companies—within this atypical prison are marked by
a certain level of conflict. These conflicts usually seem to remain at the
individual level and only in some cases have become collective protests.
Nevertheless, the group protests did not lead the prisoner-employees
to create an organization to protect their rights.15 Interestingly, no
formal prisoner-workers’ union has emerged at Punta de Rieles, even
when the Warden actively encourages claiming for rights and holding
collective discussions, and when prisoners have other examples of peer
solidarity and collective identity such as the prisoner-students’ union
and ASOCIDE (Asociación Civil de Personas Privadas de Libertad del
Uruguay), the NGO of prisoners.16 This could be due to the fact that to
some extent a workers’ union implies a strong level of conflict of inter-
ests with another group of prisoners, the prisoner-entrepreneurs. Such
opposition could have consequences on the relationship among inmates.
In the current situation, instead, the prisoners can come together to
confront the prison authorities and officers, as it happens in the case of
the prisoner-student’s union. Other reasons for the lack of formal union-
ization of prisoner-workers may be, first, the horizontality and direct
access to the authorities to submit complaints about labour relations;
and second, a certain level of individualism in a context characterized by
15 There have been experiences like this in Latin American prisons. In Argentina, the Union
of Workers Deprived of their Liberty (SUTPLA) emerged in the Federal Prison Complex of
the city of Buenos Aires in 2012, and then extended to other federal prison, though with less
strength (Gual, 2017, 113–114).
16 This NGO was legally constituted inside the prison in 2016. They claim to be an organi-
zation whose mission is to promote and develop actions to improve the living conditions of
prisoners. Although it has been permitted by the authorities, it is a small organization that has
not reached a wide audience and therefore has limited representativeness and participation. The
prisoner-students’ union is a more informal group of prisoners engaged in educational activities
inside the prison that submit group requests to the authorities.
almost full-employment, where prisoners who disagree with their current

labour conditions may easily find a new job position or even start a
business of their own.
Prisoner-entrepreneurs at Punta de Rieles prison develop a strong
level of self-governance; thus they seem the most perfect incarnation of
the “imperative of activation” as a governmental strategy, developing a
strong level of self-governance. But they are also agents of governance
of others, the prisoner-employees. Through constantly enforcing their
own business rules, which blend with the prison administration rules, the
prisoner-entrepreneurs definitely contribute to enforcing prison order. As
a result, power expands, multiplies and dilutes in this atypical prison, and
is never statically located (Crewe, 2007, 269).
The successful translation of the values and goals promoted by the
authorities into each prisoner’s own ambitions and conducts creates a
network that enables governance at a distance not only to operate but
also to replicate, as some actors of that network reinforce the normative
commitment upon others. Thus, the possibilities and reach of gover-
nance are increased by the role these prisoner-entrepreneurs play. This
does not imply, of course, that employer-employee relations develop
without transgressions that generate conflict in labour relations, which
are also governmental relationships.
In the next and final section, we will focus on prisoner-state agent rela-
tionships, which are broadly constructed through this general dynamics,
and on how these relations can be both collaborative and conflictive,
as reported in recent scholarship on co-governance and prison order in
Latin America.
Co-governance, Delegation, Collaboration

and Friction
The governmental role we found certain Punta de Rieles prisoners
played is not new in Latin American prisons. In fact, the extraordi-
nary dissemination of the prisoners’ participation in prison governance
is what has led a number of social researchers to describe what they call
“self-governance—or similar expressions—as a general feature of prison
contexts in the region (Birkbeck, 2011, 315–316; Darke & Garces,

2017, 4; Darke & Karam, 2016, 461, 465; Macaulay, 2017, 51–52;
2019, 253–255; Skarbek, 2020, 27–28).17 However, this notion may
not cover the broad range of governmental roles the prisoners play across
the different jurisdictions and prisons in Latin America. One of the
shortcomings of this notion is that it exaggerates the alleged absence
and passivity of state agents (Navarro & Sozzo, 2020, 206–210; this
volume; Sozzo, this volume-b). As has been observed by the same empir-
ical research on the subject that often employs this category in various
national contexts, even in the most extreme situations, the exercise of
power by certain prisoners inside the prison requires the consent of
prison authorities and guards. Moreover, the state agents themselves
sometimes limit the governmental capacities of the prisoners by means
of actions that can generate varying degrees of conflict and even violence.
So that, if the notion of “self-governance” is linked to a vacuum of
state governmental activity, it is actually distorting what happens inside
a prison, even in the most extreme cases.
An alternative notion of “co-governance” has recently emerged in the
specialized literature—whether explicitly taking up the previous critique
or not—to consider the governmental roles of Latin American prisoners
in specific contexts (see among others Bracco Bruce, 2020, 45–50, 95–
128; Darke, 2018, 139–197, 279–321; Manchado, 2018, 102; 2019,
21–22; Weegels, 2019). However, this notion may also miss nuances
if generalized. Indeed, “co-governance” could imply the idea that there
is a relationship of collaboration between custodians and those under
their custody in these governmental schemes. But this idea clashes with
multiple confrontations and conflicts found in many situations and
contexts of confinement in the region, in such a way that rather than
a “shared government”, the image of a “contested government” emerges
(Navarro & Sozzo, 2020, 213–215; this volume). Nevertheless, “co-
governance” seems to be a useful notion to analyze the governmental
role of the ‘prisoner-entrepreneur’ at the Punta de Rieles prison.
17 Several social researchers have used this same notion to reflect upon the participation of
certain prisoners in the exercise of power within specific prisons in countries such as Bolivia,
Brazil, Venezuela and Nicaragua. (Antillano, 2015, 2017; Antillano et al., 2016; Cerbini, 2012,
2017; Darke, 2013, 2014; Macaulay, 2017; Skarbek, 2010, 2020; Weegels, 2017).
This governmental role of prisoner-entrepreneurs is the consequence

of the central place that responsibilization has in the governance style
constructed by the authorities of this peculiar prison. Unlike what
is often argued to understand the governmental activities of certain
prisoners in some Latin American countries, the exercise of power of
prisoner-entrepreneurs over prisoner-employees at Punta de Rieles is not
the result of the absence of state capacity due to the low number of
prison officials resulting from the rapid and strong growth of the incar-
cerated population (Antillano, 2015, 32–34; 2017, 29–30; Antillano
et al., 2016, 209; Darke & Garces, 2017, 3; Darke & Karam, 2016,
465–466; Dias & Darke, 2016, 214–215; Macaulay, 2017, 51; Skarbek,
2020, 27; Sozzo, this volume-a).18 Instead, these power relations are part
of the very design of the logic of production of order by the authorities
of this prison. The governmental role of prisoner-entrepreneurs is clearly
the product of state planning and capacity that enables and promotes it,
and not the reverse.19
Thus, unlike many of the governmental activities carried out by
certain inmates inside prisons in Latin America (Darke & Garces, 2017,
7–9), the role of prisoner-entrepreneurs is formally recognized and regu-
lated by the Punta de Rieles prison administration.20 It is not the result of
18 In fact, the number of prisoners per number of state agents at Punta de Rieles is quite low
compared to national averages in Latin America (Skarbek, 2020, 24). By October 2019, at the
time our fieldwork was completed, 505 prisoners were housed in Punta de Rieles prison and
there were 116 civilian prison officers and 76 police officers. That is to say that, in general
terms, there were 2.6 prisoners per state agent. It is obvious that they only perform their duties
in shifts, which is not usually taken into account when calculating the ratio between the two
groups in a prison system. Taking this into account, the ratio is approximately 1 state agent
to 6 prisoners during 16 hours in the day, while it is reduced to 19 prisoners to 1 state agent
during the night.
19 The same applies to the governmental role that the rest of the prisoners at Punta de Rieles
prison play when they follow the “imperative of activation” in other ways, both in the produc-
tion of goods and services and in relation to educational and cultural activities, governing
themselves in a way that is aligned with the objectives and ways promoted by the authorities.
20 David Skarbek, in his relevant recent book (2020, 8) uses the category “extralegal gover-
nance”, which is associated exclusively with the governmental activities of the prisoners
themselves, as opposed to “official governance” carried out by state agents. We find this associ-
ation problematic for two reasons that become especially evident when thinking about prison
governance in Latin America. First, state agents often govern prison life through actions that
are not legally authorized—for example, through the illegal use of force (Gual, 2015, 43–66).
Secondly, as in Punta de Rieles prison, in some cases the governmental activities of the prisoners
informal dynamics that have been built around the relationships between
custodians and prisoners.21 This formal acceptance of their role is also
reflected in the administrative procedures by which a new entrepreneurial
project is submitted and accepted. The prisoner-entrepreneur candidate
must initially request this authorization by submitting his project to the
prison authorities in a written document, without strict formalities but
with sufficient information to justify the request. And it is only after the
project is approved that the prisoner-entrepreneur signs an agreement
with the Labour Office of the prison administration, in which the rights
and obligations that define the boundaries of the prisoner-entrepreneur’s
activity are detailed. The agreement is then officially put on record and
filed.
A prisoner-entrepreneur exercises power over prisoner-employees in
keeping with the institutional goals set by the prison authorities. A
process of “dislocation” clearly emerges. Not all forms of dislocation
of the exercise of power from state authorities and guards to prisoners
in Latin America should be read as “delegation” or “outsourcing”, as
this makes us lose sight of the fact that these dynamics can be either
the fruit of a “conquest” “from below” by certain prisoners, or even
“from outside” by external agents, ranging from the evangelical churches
to “criminal organizations” (Navarro & Sozzo, 2020, 210–212; this
volume). But the notion of “delegation” is useful to describe what occurs
at Punta de Rieles prison. The governmental role of prisoner-employers is
constructed “from above”. This does not prevent prisoner-entrepreneurs
from playing this role with a high level of autonomy, as pointed out
are officially recognized and this recognition is even expressed in different types of regulatory
texts—see Postema et al. (2017, 59–62). In Skarbek’s work, extralegal governmental institutions
can be “highly formal” (2020, 34). Instead, we associate “formal” with what is legally and
officially established by state authorities.
21 There are several experiences of formalization—in the sense mentioned in the previous note—
that have varying degrees of intensity with respect to different governmental roles of prisoners
in Latin American prisons. They are very significant, and it is essential to further develop their
empirical exploration. These types of experiences can open up diverse sources of inspiration
for prison policy in the region—and also beyond the region itself. For specific explorations
where the utility for thinking about policy alternatives is underlined see Salla (2007), Salla
et al. (2013), Dias et al. (this volume), Macaulay (2013, 376–377; 2017, 55–56), Darke
(2014), Postema et al. (2017, 59–62), Darke and Garces (2017, 7–9), and Bracco Bruce
(2020, 95–128).
above. Hence their frequent perception that their own role is crucial to
the production of order in this atypical prison and that it is exclusively
the consequence of their own decision and will. For example, one of
them pointed out:
You have the police, it’s like a neighborhood, you know that in your
neighborhood you have the police station, but the police are there if you
call them, if you call them, they come, if there is something wrong, they
come, but afterwards it’s like the prison is controlled by the prisoners.
That’s my feeling, that we control the prison. You know that there’s Parodi
[the warden], the police and the operators, but we control the prison.
From the fact that it works so well, I think that no prisoner wants to
break that and the prisoners who more or less want to go out of tune
don’t fit in. (Prisoner DM)
This delegation of a governmental role to the prisoner-entrepreneurs

that is formally authorized by the prison administration, gives rise to
largely collaborative relationships between those prisoners and the prison
authorities and guards. However, everyday “frictions” (Rubin, 2014)22
still exist.
Prison authorities and guards visit the various workplaces and talk
to prisoners regularly. These are informal visits that allow horizontal
dialogues, which do not usually lead to administrative processes that
result in rewards and sanctions. The warden himself is involved in this
process which, according to his own words, consists of walking to get
information in a prison where the words flow with the same intensity
with which people circulate:
I worry that when there is impunity in prison, unrest starts. [A pris-

oner] beats up a guy and we knew who he was, they [threw hot water
on] another one and we knew. And we also knew about the robbery [to a
22 We use the idea of frictions as conceptualized by Rubin (2014). She considers that most
prisoners’ behaviours characterized as “resistance” fall into a misleading binary conceptualiza-
tion, and that they could be more accurately described as “frictions”, understanding secondary
adjustments as a continuum. Indeed, “frictions” describe prisoners’ activities that are normal
human behaviours and respond to prisoners’ social and physical needs and desires rather than
to their understanding of autonomy, rights, or justice, and that are largely apolitical and do
not intentionally challenge the prison regime (2014, 24).
prisoner-owned pizza store]. This information comes to you from a thou-

sand places, I can’t tell you how. I tell the police that we shouldn’t allow
impunity. Each one has his own informants. The police officer [chief of
security] has his own. I don’t manage things like that, I just go out for
a walk and the information comes to you. (…) Once you have the data
you have to see what to do. (Interview with Luis Parodi, warden)
Although these visits are not ostensibly surveillance and control mecha-
nisms, they at least partly fulfil the function of identifying situations or
behaviours that may disturb the prison order, including the relationship
between the prisoner-entrepreneur and the prisoner-employees.23 That
is why prisoner-entrepreneurs can perceive these practices negatively as
intrusive and annoying. For example:
Yes, [guards] come to bust my balls, but I calm them down. They come
to ask why the guys aren’t doing anything… and [I think] ‘what do you
care!’ After drinking mate, after eating… if they want to drink mate 20
times, they drink 20 times… As long as I don’t tell them anything, you
don’t have to interfere! I am the boss; I am the owner. That makes [the
guards] uncomfortable. (Prisoner CC. Entrepreneur)
The guards know that this is one of the few entrepreneurships that they
don’t need to come to. In what sense don´t they need to come here?
23 There are other forms of centralized control over the prisoners’ productive activities by the
prison administration, especially in relation to their financial dimension. Firstly, the entry and
exit of goods necessary for production inside the prison and related to sales outside the prison
is rigorously monitored and accounted for. Secondly, there is no circulation of money inside
Punta de Rieles prison, and purchases and sales are made through a system of credits and
tickets regulated and managed by the prison administration, and that prisoners can convert
into money either to pay a supplier for goods or for family members to receive a share of
the resources produced by the prisoner-employers or prisoner-employees. This implies thorough
control of every economic transaction. In addition, the prison administration automatically
deducts a percentage from each economic transaction to pay the prison fee, the contribution to
the solidarity fund, and the contribution to a national fund to help victims of crime. Thirdly,
and related to the above, the payment of salaries by the prisoner-employers to the prisoner-
employees involves a movement in the accounts carried out by the prison administration itself.
This is very significant in terms of state control of the labour relations between these prisoners.
If an employer does not come to the corresponding office one month to indicate that his
employee’s salary should be paid and generating the movement of money from one account
to another, he is called upon to give explanations as to why this has happened and a state
intervention is triggered in this respect.
Because there are no misdemeanours. You don’t have [prisoners] traf-

ficking, you don’t have [prisoners] messing around (…) those who pass
through here, all they see is people working, I have all the salaries regis-
tered, it’s not that I pay you with drugs or that I’m using you. Do you
understand what I’m saying? (Prisoner R. Entrepreneur)
Similarly, frictions between prisoner-entrepreneurs and the prison

administration emerge regarding the everyday operation of the busi-
nesses. The former need to do paperwork on a regular basis and obtain
permissions from the authorities for several reasons related to the opera-
tion of the business, such as entering certain materials or goods into the
prison:
They always put a stick in the wheel at the Labour Office. I want to
install a new floor on my business, and [the labour office] ask me for a
note [to enter the materials] and to wait. Sometimes there are obstacles.
(Interview with prisoner F. Entrepreneur)
These daily frictions are generally handled smoothly, without

disrupting the general prison order. However, open conflicts may arise on
occasions and lead to more severe consequences. This does not happen
frequently. But two stories with similar dynamics emerged during the
fieldwork: the authorities and guards received information that illegal
drugs were being sold at two prisoner-owned businesses (one store selling
rabbits and one selling patisserie). As noted above, this activity is one of
the few serious infractions to the rules, and as such it triggers transfer to
a traditional prison. In both cases, the suspicions led to formal investi-
gations and searches by the prison staff, which resulted in the discovery
of illegal drugs. As expected, both businesses were shut down and the
prisoner-entrepreneurs were transferred.
These stories show the limits to the prisoner-entrepreneurs’ autonomy
as agents of governance at Punta de Rieles prison, and the reasons why
their relation with prison authorities and guards cannot be described
solely as collaborative, since they include confrontation and friction. In
these cases, the responsibilization strategy gives way to direct official
interventions (Hannah-Moffat, 2001, 176–177) that are more clearly
aligned with the “sovereign” logic and its binary structure in relation to
what is permitted and what is forbidden and to inclusion and exclusion,

even in this atypical prison.
The governmental role of the prisoner-entrepreneur at Punta de Rieles
prison is peculiar in comparison with other forms of governmental activi-
ties developed by prisoners in Latin American prisons. It is embedded in
the development of a market for the production of goods and services
and labour that is encouraged and regulated by the prison admin-
istration.24 This market—and this governmental role—therefore, has
similarities with the outside world and the mercantile dynamics of
contemporary peripheral capitalism, although there are also numerous
differences arising from the various state interventions in this regard. Of
note, the prison authorities’ official discourse stresses the ideal of “nor-
malization” (Carrabine, 2000, 317–318), meaning that they seek to get
the outside inside, to create an environment as “normal” as possible, to
resemble life on the outside inside the prison. In this regard, the warden
frequently repeats that life outside prison has certain “shortfalls” that
cannot be improved inside because the prison is a social institution that
reproduces broader social logics.
The prison can’t be very different from the society that generates it, can
it? (…) society is capitalist (…) and the prison cannot be the revolution
(…) Spending 10 years in jail to be happy would be crazy. (Interview
with Luis Parodi, warden)
The prisoner-entrepreneur and his governmental role presents a whole

series of affinities to the core components of the neo-liberal governmental
ethos, as has often been described in recent decades across the Global
North and South, with its individualizing and individualistic emphasis
that appeals to freedom, choice and responsibility, and its defence of the
market and the enterprise as the model of social order and organization
(Dean, 2009, 175–204; Rose, 1996, 50–61; 1999b, 137–166). In fact,
the emergence of the “entrepreneurial prisoner”, in a broader sense than
24 This is not the only prison in Latin America where such a market for goods, services and
labour exists. For example, the San Pedro prison in La Paz (Bolivia) has similar characteristics
in part, although it does not appear to be the result of detailed state planning and intervention
(Cerbini, 2012, 2017; Skarbek, 2010, 2020, 32–43).
that used in this work, and its strong connection with neoliberalism as
a governmental rationality has already been noted in English-speaking
countries (Crewe, 2007, 258; Garland, 1996, 462; 1997, 191–192, 196–
168; O’Malley, 1999, 177, 183–185). Certainly, this neoliberal side is
crucial when it comes to analyzing the form of governance in this atyp-
ical Latin American prison. Nevertheless, the case under study includes
a neowelfarist element which translates into collectivist and mutual aid
dynamics, creating a truly paradoxical assemblage that, despite its contra-
dictions, functions in a relatively effective manner (Avila & Sozzo, 2020,
19–20).
Acknowledgments This work by Fernando Avila has been supported by the

John Beattie Research Fund of the Center of Criminology and Sociolegal
Studies at University of Toronto and the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship.
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Radical Alternatives to Punitive Detention
Sacha Darke
Most humane settings in corrections happen to be organised democrat-

ically… through participative management and shared decision-making,
so that staff (and inmates, in the case of prison programmes) can develop
a sense of ownership and a feeling of having a stake in the welfare and
survival of the community they have helped to shape. (Toch, 2006, 2)
When I arrived back at the semi-open unit of APAC de Itaúna men’s

prison in Minas Gerais, an argument had just broken out in the work-
shop. Robson, a member of the prison’s Sincerity and Solidarity Council
(the CSS or the Council), had approached Daniel at the end of the
working day to escort him back to his cell as punishment for having only
that morning refused to stand up for Christian prayers. Both prisoners
had to be physically restrained by their peers after Daniel picked up a
S. Darke (B)
University of Westminster, London, UK
e-mail: S.Darke@westminster.ac.uk

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98602-5_11
330 S. Darke
metal rod and Robson refused to back down. The CSS president imme-
diately called for a disciplinary hearing, before heading off to inform
the governor. While they were waiting to start the proceedings, the other
council members gathered to discuss the incident and agreed that Daniel
was the main culprit. On his return, the president informed them the
governor took the view Robson should not have risen to Daniel’s chal-
lenge and that both prisoners needed to return to the closed unit. Most
Council members disagreed, insisting that the governor was partly to
blame, having overridden their decision that morning to confine Daniel
to his cell during the daytime as well as the evening. According to the
prison’s disciplinary code, Daniel should not have lost his right to work
for such a minor offence as disobeying orders. Nonetheless, they argued
that the governor should not have interfered with a CSS decision, and in
any case had not taken into consideration that Daniel, who had been
an enemy of Robson since childhood, was bound to use the fact he
had completed a hard day’s work (and so under any other circumstances
would now deserve to spend his evening in association rather than be sent
to bed early) as an excuse for an argument. Since arriving to commence
my fieldwork two weeks earlier, I had already sensed that the governor’s
authority was compromised by the fact he was the first in APAC de
Itaúna’s by then 17-year history not to have himself previously been a
prisoner. When the hearing commenced, all witnesses to the incident,
including several Council members, claimed they had arrived at the scene
too late to confirm that a weapon had indeed been raised. In his report
to APAC de Itaúna’s disciplinary committee (which was chaired by the
governor) the CSS president recommended Daniel was returned to the
closed unit, but that Robson should spend only two days confined to the
cell block.
The disciplinary committee agreed to the CSS recommendations. To
enforce Robson’s sanction, Council members temporarily converted the
cellblock kitchen into a cantina (canteen), where he could continue his
job selling fast food and confectionaries. A week later, Robson was given
the responsibility to sleep on a sofa in a corridor of the administra-
tive block to attend to the needs of Dr. Mário Ottoboni, the elderly
founder of the APAC movement and governor of the first APAC, who
was staying there for a few days during the movement’s four-day-long
40th-anniversary conference that was being held in the town centre. I

was also accommodated in the administrative block, in an adjacent room
to Mário. The conference was attended by APAC prisoners from across
the state, some of whom had been given permission to stay overnight
at local hotels or in the homes of APAC de Itaúna staff. On the first
morning, Robson sat in the audience with his wife, who was also a pris-
oner. I sat with three men I had met at another APAC prison two weeks
earlier, one of who (the CSS president on its closed unit) joked that his
hotel was miles away and he had not walked so much in years. In his
opening speech Mário warned that APACs were in danger of becoming
prisons: that they were resorting too quickly to disciplinary penalties
and were treating their detainees as criminals in need of reform rather
than people who needed to recover. When I brought up this subject over
breakfast the next morning, Mário told me the story of one of the first
APAC prisoners, a particularly troubled man who later developed the
movement’s methodology and come up with its motto, “nobody escapes
from love”. Mário claimed this prisoner had changed overnight after
the prison responded to a particularly poor incidence of indiscipline by
giving him money and sending him out to buy supplies (From research
journal, July 2012).
These field notes are taken from a three-week pilot ethnographic study
of daily routines and everyday prison governance that I completed in July
2012 while staying as a guest at APAC de Itaúna. The title APAC (Asso-
ciation for the Protection and Assistance of the Convict) was originally
associated with a Catholic Cursillo group that in 1984 opened Brazil’s
first voluntary sector prison, APAC de São José dos Campos, on the site
of a former police holding facility in the state of São Paulo. According to
Ottoboni (2012), Jesus Christ had appeared to them twelve years earlier
from among the detainees held there. In 1985 the group inaugurated a
second prison, APAC de Itaúna, in the state of Minas Gerais, and in 1995
a regulatory body, the Brazilian Fraternity for the Assistance of Convicts
(FBAC), to oversee the two. APAC de São José dos Campos was closed
in 1999 and re-opened as a public sector prison in 2002. The APAC
movement has enjoyed longer-term success in Minas Gerais, where state
authorities have funded APAC prisons since 2001 and granted FBAC
legal status in 2009. Six other Brazilian states have also opened APAC
332 S. Darke
prisons since the 2010s.1 At the time of writing (September 2021),

there are currently 62 APACs in operation (52 men’s prisons, nine
women’s prisons, and one youth detention facility), including 46 in
Minas Gerais.2 The movement has most recently attracted the support
of the federal government, which in late 2020 agreed to fund another
six APACs and 947 APAC prison spaces, at a cost of R$27 million
(£4 million).
Each APAC prison contains a closed and semi-open unit (in Brazil,
prisoners held in semi-open conditions are usually granted the right to
work outside during the daytime and to spend up to 35 days a year
at home). Some APACs also operate an open prison regime (similar to
a British probation hostel but in Brazil usually reserved for prisoners
nearing the end of the custodial element of their sentence), typically in
a residential house close by the main prison complex. Brazil’s 62 APACs
currently hold a total of 5,023 sentenced prisoners (4,530 men and
493 women). Most APAC prisons hold fewer than 100 inmates. The
smallest, APAC de Patrocínio, has an operational capacity of just twelve
inmates. The APAC movement’s stated vision (first published as Otto-
boni, 2001) is of a prison system that is human rights respecting and
operates without police (who are typically stationed at the outer walls
of prison complexes), prison officers (see also Andrade, 2014; Ferreira,
2016), and divisive prison norms such as honour cultures and offence
hierarchies. Some state authorities have reserved the right to appoint
APAC governors and heads of security, but in practice most APACs
directly contract all their staff. Indeed many APAC governors and most
APAC security staff are former APAC prisoners. At a second APAC that
I visited in Minas Gerais in 2012, the governor was still on condi-
tional release, having “left” the same prison he was now in charge of
a year earlier. Some of the more senior FBAC employees are also former
APAC prisoners. This includes the person responsible for drafting its
1 In Brazil most prisons operate at state level. In June 2020 there were only five federal prisons
and 668 federal prisoners (MJSP, 2020). In this chapter I sometimes refer to the APAC system,
irrespective of the fact that APAC prisons are subject to different legal regulations (in addition
to FBAC regulations) in different states.
2 Figures available at https://www.fbac.org.br/infoapac/relatoriogeral.php (last accessed 2
September 2021).
disciplinary code (latest version, FBAC, 2020). FBAC’s (2020) list of

disciplinary offences includes behaviour commonly prohibited by state
prison authorities (e.g. assault and disobeying orders), supplemented by
traditional inmate codes (e.g. not touching personal property belonging
to other prisoners) and other customary practices exclusive to the APAC
system (e.g. betting on games and putting up washing lines in cells). Indi-
vidual APACs also develop their own house rules like the one Daniel was
first disciplined for. Another example of a house rule I encountered in a
women’s APAC was a ban on prisoners leaving wet towels at the end of
their beds. Inmates appoint their own cell representatives. Each closed
and semi-open APAC unit has a formally constituted inmate council,
the CSS, the presidents of which select eight other members (the pres-
idents are chosen by the prison governor). As we saw in my field note
reflections, the prisoners that make up the CSS formally adjudicate and
enforce penalties, although the prison administration retains the right to
veto, and CSS decisions on more serious offences are officially approved
by the prison’s disciplinary committee. When I completed my 2012 pilot
study, membership of APAC de Itaúna’s inmate councils was renewed
every six months. This is impracticable in the smaller APAC units, where
prisoners are more likely to be appointed onto the CSS until they are
released or progress to a lower security unit. Besides monitoring everyday
prison routines and discipline, the CSS also selects prisoners to assist
guards, of which there are usually one or two on duty across the two
units.
I previously published a shorter version of the workshop incident
and the quasi-legal disciplinary proceedings I had witnessed in Darke
(2015). In that paper I introduced the APAC prison system’s under-
lying communitarian ethos and the particular importance it attaches in
its methodology (as originally described in Ottoboni [2001] and most
recently updated in Ferreira [2016]), alongside “human appreciation”,
to “community participation” and “the recoverer assisting the recoverer”:
what I described at the time as “community” and “peer-facilitated reha-
bilitation”. In Darke (2018) I returned to these field notes in order
to contrast the responsibilities for everyday prison order formally dele-
gated to inmate councils in APACs with the de facto reliance on inmate
334 S. Darke
collaboration and organisation I had observed in the country’s common

prisons, which I summarise here in a moment.
In this exploratory chapter,3 I focus on the implications of delegating
disciplinary powers to Brazilian community prison inmates from a penal
abolitionist perspective.4 In addition to APAC de Itaúna, I introduce
three other radically different Brazilian prisons that are partly or fully
governed by voluntary sector organisations and in which aspects of the
power to discipline are also formally delegated to inmates: Celas Lares,
in the state of Rondônia, Centro de Ressocialização de Limeira, in the
state of São Paulo, and Núcleo Ressocializador da Capital, in the state
of Alagoas. However, I base most of my analysis on the APAC prison
system, of which for the time being I have most knowledge. Besides
APAC de Itaúna, I visited six other APACs in Minas Gerais in 2010
and 2012, two of which held women. I am also involved in an educa-
tion project at APAC de São Luis in the state of Maranhão, where I spent
four days in 2019. I refer to all of these penal institutions as community
prisons, for reasons I also return to shortly.
Finally, I draw brief comparisons between the Brazilian community
prison phenomenon with HMP Grendon in Buckinghamshire, England,
to my knowledge one of just a handful of prisons in the Northern
3 I write this chapter in preparation for ethnographic research on the Brazilian community
prison phenomenon introduced in this chapter that I originally intended to complete in late
2020 and early 2021 but had to put on hold during the Covid-19 pandemic. I will complete
the fieldwork at two APAC prisons in the state of Paraná in the first half of 2022.
4 Note my preferred use of the term penal rather than prison abolition. As Ferrari and Pavarini
(2018, 186) emphasise in their 2015 Italian Abolitionist Manifesto, abolitionists are united in
their support for moving beyond, “the notion of punishment [and its commitment] to the
sanguinary culture of intentionally inflicting pain and suffering”. This requires the “abolition of
punitive incarceration [but it] does not mean the end of all types of involuntary confinement”
(Feest & Scheerer, 2018, 39); forms of preventative rather than punitive detention would still
be occasionally necessary, for instance to ensure people do not abscond while awaiting trial
(ibid.), to protect the public from dangerous, predatory offenders (Ryan & Sim, 2007), or as
a refuge “for perpetrators who have extreme and complex needs” (Drake & Scott, 2018, 214).
The means by which offenders’ needs should be deal with is not a subject of major debate in
the Anglophone abolitionist literature besides Scott and Gosling (2015, 2016), whose work I
return to in the conclusion. Nor is the question whether an abolitionist alternative should be
referred to as a prison or as a detention centre, as suggested e.g. by Brown (2013). For recent
Brazilian accounts of penal abolitionism, see e.g. Achutti et al. (2021), Genelhu (2018), and
Karam (2021), who calls for the abolition of penal punishment as part of a wider abolition of
state violence.
world in which inmates also play an official role in disciplinary proceed-

ings. Grendon has attracted the interest of penal abolitionists (e.g. Sim,
2021) and other activist scholars who promote radical prison reform (e.g.
Rhodes, 2010; Toch, 2006; Toch & Adams, 2002). I convene a Convict
Criminology study group at Grendon. The prison-based students are all
studying for undergraduate or postgraduate degrees.5
We will see that delegating disciplinary powers to prisoners contra-
venes the international human rights consensus that prisoners should
never exercise power over each other. I argue that this position is ques-
tionable, at least in the Brazilian context. In this chapter I pose the
question under what circumstances, by what means and to what extent
might disciplinary powers be appropriately devolved to community
prison inmates in Brazil? I also ask, to what extent might the removal
of offence hierarchies and ownership that Brazilian community prison
inmates are afforded over the physical and social environments in which
they are incarcerated be replicated in a Northern country like the United
Kingdom?
Background: (1) Carceral Injustice

Brazil is criticised by civil society and governmental organisations,
both at home and abroad, for its extreme levels of social inequality
and for breaching international human rights norms at every stage of
the criminal justice process, from procedural unfairness, violent and
discriminatory practices in its criminal investigations, pre-trial hearings
and prosecutions (e.g. IDDD, 2019; Ramos, 2021; Subcommittee on
Prevention of Torture, 2016), to disproportionately high resort to pre-
trial detention and long-term prison sentences (e.g. Depen, 2020; UN
General Assembly, 2014), inhumane and degrading treatment of pris-
oners (e.g. IACHR, 2021; MNPCT, 2020; Pastoral Carcerária, 2016).
The poorest 30% of the Brazilian population earn less than 7% of
5 Since 2019 some of the (now former) students from this study group have acted as project
advisors and peer reviewers for my research on Brazilian community prisons. I would like to
thank David Hinde, Niamke Kervani, Moses Mathias and George Milner for their reviews of
an earlier draft of this chapter.
336 S. Darke
national income, while the richest 10% earn half of the national income
(World Bank, 2020). White Brazilians earn on average 74% more than
black or brown Brazilians (IBGE, 2019). These positions are reversed
in the case of criminal justice. Upper-class and middle-class offenders
invariably avoid arrest, prosecution and imprisonment. The targets of the
police and judiciary are disproportionally poor and black (Alves, 2017,
2018). The majority of Brazilian prisoners left school before the statutory
minimum age of 14 and were not in formal employment when they were
arrested (MJSP, 2020). Less than 1% of prisoners have completed higher
education, compared to 17% of the general population (MJSP, 2020).
Even when they do end up in prison, under the country’s 1941 Penal
Code university-educated and other “special prisoners” (e.g. police chiefs,
government and court officials) are held separately to “common prison-
ers” until they have exhausted all legal avenues of appeal. This usually
means avoiding months, sometimes years sharing a six or twelve square
metre cell with up to 60 other people. Important for current purposes,
Brazilian prisoners are acutely aware of these social and carceral injus-
tices. As former Inter-American Court of Human rights and Argentinean
Supreme Court of Justice, Eugenio Raúl Zaffaroni puts it in the broader
South American context, such “penal illegalities” are openly justified in
political and judicial discourses as necessary oppression of the “hostile”
(Zaffaroni, 1989), of the internal “enemies of society” (Zaffaroni, 2006).
It is also important to emphasise the extent to which this systematic
treating of large sections of the Brazilian public as “legally disqualified”
citizens (Batista, 2000) is currently extraordinary by local as well as inter-
national standards. This is particularly notable in the case of sentencing.
Since the country emerged from its last period of military dictator-
ship 35 years ago, its prison population has risen ten-fold, from 69,355
adult prisoners in December 1984 (Pavarini & Giamberardino, 2011) to
755,274 adult prisoners in December 2019 (MJSP, 2020), the last official
figures produced before the onset of the Covid-19 global pandemic. In
the past two decades alone Brazil’s prison population rate has more than
tripled, from 137 per 100,000 national population in December 2000
(Carvalho, 2013) to 359 per 100,000 national population in December
2019 (MJSP, 2020). By comparison, in September 2018 the world prison
population rate was 145, around the same as it was in 2000 (Walm-
sley, 2018). In December 2019 Brazil lay in third position globally in
terms of absolute numbers of prisoners, far ahead of any other country in
Latin America. At the same time, prison populations have risen in South
and Central America more than any other global region, from approx-
imately 650,000 in 2000 to 1.5 million in 2014 (Walmsley, 2018).
Every Latin American country has a prison population rate above the
global average and imprisons more people than they did in 2000. In
contrast, the prison population rate has remained constant in the United
States and has fallen by a fifth in Europe. In this regard Brazil might be
regarded as the principal player in the emergence of a “new mass carceral
zone” (Darke & Garces, 2017). Moreover, this period of Brazilian mass
incarceration is less the result of changing patterns of crime as increas-
ingly punitive sentencing. The total number of recorded homicides rose
steeply in the immediate post-dictatorship period (Caldeira, 2000) but
has fallen in the twenty-first Century, from 45,360 recorded homicides
in 2000 to 39,584 recorded homicides in 2019 (FBSP, 2020). Today,
half of all Brazilian prisoners were sentenced for one of two crimes:
robbery or the supply of illicit drugs. Robbery has attracted a minimum
sentence of four years since Brazil passed its 1940 Criminal Code. Nine
per cent of prisoners were remanded or sentenced for supplying drugs in
2005 (Karam, 2015), before minimum sentences were increased under
Drugs Law 2006 to 20 months for a first offence and five years for a
repeat offence. In the state of São Paulo, which accounts for a third of
the country’s prisoners, the number of people held under Drugs Law
2006 increased 508% between 2005 and 2017, from 13,927 to 138,116
(CESeC, 2021). In a recent analysis of 800 sentences given by judges
in eight states between July 2013 and June 2015 for supplying drugs
Semer (2019) found the average sentence to be four years ten months.
Four in five of those sentenced were first-time offenders (Semer, 2019).
When deciding whether a defendant should be prosecuted for posses-
sion (a non-imprisonable offence) or for “trafficking”, judges are legally
required to take into consideration the social background of the accused
and the locality in which they were arrested. The president of the CSS
on the closed wing of APAC de Itaúna had been sentenced to 5 years
and 6 months’ imprisonment for nine grammes of cannabis (field notes,
338 S. Darke
15 July 2012). Like so many prisoners I have spoken with up and down
the country that were sentenced as drug traffickers, he shrugged when I
told him I knew people in England who had received shorter sentences
for ten times that weight in cocaine.
Finally, although Brazilian prisons were arguably even poorer in the
nineteenth Century (see e.g. Aguirre, 2009; Salvatore & Aguirre, 1996),
they are undoubtedly in as bad a state today as they have been at
any time in collective memory. Historically, Brazilian prisons have been
characterised by inhumanity more than they have been characterised
by rehabilitation (Maia et al., 2009). Like many other parts of South
America, they remained places of “judicial internment” (Birkbeck, 2011)
and “more akin to concentration camps for the dispossessed… than
to judicial institutions serving any identifiable penological function”
(Wacquant, 2003, 200) throughout most of the twentieth into the
twenty-first Century. The example I gave above of up to 60 prisoners
being accommodated in a 12 m2 cell might have been taken from any
of the 49 remand prisons in São Paulo, most of which were built from
the same design. These prisons typically have occupational capacities of
between 800 and 850 but in normal times hold between 2,000 and 2,500
(during Covid-19 times, the state’s average remand prison population
fell below 1,500). Their 12 m2 cells were built with twelve concrete
bunks and a bathroom. Running water is often available for just an
hour or two a day. No more than twelve officers are usually on duty
in the cell block during the daytime, even fewer in the night-time or
when members of prison staff are off sick. Besides the delivery of three
daily meals outsourced to private companies, prison authorities barely
provide any goods or services, including medicines, cleaning products or
bedding. Guards make up 90% of all staff. A qualified doctor is likely
to be available to tend to prisoners’ medical needs just one afternoon a
week.
Background (2): Inmate Governance

Yet, despite these most blatant degradations, Brazilian prisons are no
more disorderly or staff-inmate relations more conflictual than their
counterparts in the Global North. I make this claim based on ten years
of fieldwork that has included extended and often repeated visits to
more than 45 sites of penal detention across twelve Brazilian states, as
well as numerous conversations with former prisoners. Everyday institu-
tional routines, disciplinary order and staff-inmate relations have been
overseen by prisoners as well as officers since Brazil’s first modern peni-
tentiaries were inaugurated in the mid-nineteenth Century and have
been governed by everyday customary practices and staff-inmate accom-
modations as much as official prison rules. With too few staff to run
their institutions, prison managers have always relied on inmates to
organise, collaborate and self-govern to an extent that is difficult to
imagine in the better resourced and more bureaucratically managed
prisons of Northern America or Western Europe. At its most basic,
Brazil’s tradition of “inmate governance” (Darke, 2013) or “staff-inmate
co-governance” (Darke, 2018) requires prisoners to take on domestic,
house staff roles such as cleaning, directing visitors and transporting food
and refuse, and to appoint representatives to coordinate these activities in
the cellblock corridors and dormitories, mediate and facilitate commu-
nications between the prison administration and the massa (mass) or
coletivo (collective) of prisoners under its care (for a first-hand account
of the existence of such positions and informal practices in 1930s Rio
de Janeiro, see Ramos, 1953). In some prisons inmates are recruited to
work in the place of guards in the cell blocks. Customary practices govern
almost every aspect of prison routines, inmate and staff-inmate relations,
including in-cell behaviour, commerce, sexual relations, mutual aid and
protection, reporting and evicting troublesome or vulnerable inmates.
Unlike American (Skarbek, 2014) or British (Crewe, 2009) “convict” or
“inmate codes”, these “rules of procedure” (Ramalho, 1979) or “rules of
conviviality” (Marques, 2010) are negotiated by prison staff as much as
prison inmates. Some rules are common to most prisons; others vary
from one state and one prison to another. More serious rules, e.g. those
concerning the legitimate or obligatory use of violence, are enforced
through quasi-legal systems of dispute resolution, managed by inmate
representatives, usually with the implicit support of prison staff.
Such staff-inmate “informal dynamics of survival” (Darke & Garces,
2017) have intensified in the modern era of “inside-outside gangs”
340 S. Darke
(Dudley & Bargent, 2017). Brazil’s two largest criminal organisations,

Rio de Janeiro’s Red Command (CV) and São Paulo’s First Command
of the Capital (PCC), both started as inmate solidarity groups, with
the stated aims of raising consciousness of injustice and unifying the
country’s system of postcode gangs under the banner of one prison, state,
even nation-wide collective. To an extent, the CV and PCC’s founding
ideals have been corrupted by their involvement in illicit markets as they
have spread beyond prison, especially drugs markets (see e.g. Siqueira
and Paiva’s [2019] analysis of the relationship between the CV, PCC
and Brazil’s third largest criminal organisation, the Northern Family,
which emerged in the Amazonian region in the 2000s as a unifica-
tion of street gangs in the “Eastern cocaine route” between the Andes
mountains and Brazil’s northern ports). However, they continue to
govern with the support of most prison inmates and prison staff. In
Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo gang leadership regularly changes hands
as individuals lose the confidence of other inmates or the prison admin-
istration. Staff continue to have a say in which prisoners they deal with.
Inmates continue to refer to gang leaders as their representatives. Skarbek
(2016) identifies two institutional factors that facilitate good inmate and
staff-inmate relations: that a prison is small and its population homoge-
nous. In Brazil social factors are equally important, especially economic
homogeneity and criminal identity in the country’s urban peripheries
(cf. Alves, 2015). Brazilian prisoners more often refer to themselves as
divided (or increasingly as united) into criminal factions, commands
or collectives rather than gangs, and being enemies of the punitive
state rather than individual police or prison officers, or rivals within
their “anticarceral communities” (Garces & Darke, 2021). As Marcos
Willians Herbas Camacho, aka Marcola, the supposed leader of the
PCC, explained to a 2008 parliamentary inquiry onto arms dealing, the
collectivity that underpins order in Brazil’s large, heterogeneous prisons
is rooted in inmates’ understanding of themselves as socially excluded
groups in conflict with the law but not in conflict with “good” police or
prison officers:
Prisoners support prisoners. The marginal support the marginal. Everyone

believes in the fight for justice of the miserable against established power.
We will always be outlaws […] The guard also has a miserable life,
very similar to that of the prisoner. So, the detainee ends up identifying
with him, or he with the detainee. After all, they come from the same
favela. (Marcos Willians Herbas Camacho, interviewed in Câmara dos
Deputados, 2008, 113 and 130)
That it is the institution of the punitive state, not the servants of the state,
against which the organised inmate body is ultimately opposed is also
reflected in the following officer’s accounts of working at a CV prison in
Rio de Janeiro:
In CV units everything has to be negotiated. They have an inmate council

with legitimacy to create consensus in order to avoid disagreements […]
My objective is to always maintain the respect that exists between the
prisoner and the guard… This respect is not constructed by force but
by the righteousness of my conduct inside. Nobody disturbs me, because
they can see that I’m doing my job in the right way. (Karam & Saraiva,
2017, 1 and 5)
Self-Governing Prison Communities

Brazil’s tradition of co-produced prison governance has been adapted by
dozens of small, radically different “community-run” or “civil society-
state partnership” (Macaulay, 2005) prisons inaugurated since the APAC
movement took control of São José dos Campos in the 1980s. APACs
provide their “recoverers”, as they refer to their prisoners, with full-time
regimes of work, education and therapeutic activities underpinned by
religious duty to take care of oneself and to have unconditional love
for others. However, it is not the religious or rehabilitative elements of
the APAC methodology that draw my academic interest, but the fact
prisoners are put into positions of responsibility and authority. To a
greater or lesser extent, the same may be said of the other three Brazilian
community prison models that I describe in this chapter.
The APAC methodology takes state abandonment of prisoners and
the failure of the common prison system as its starting point. At the
entrance to every APAC prison is written the message, “here enters
342 S. Darke
the man, his offence stays outside”. Under the headings “learning to
live communally” and “learning to serve”, prisoners are required to be
centrally involved in all aspects of institutional life, including as we saw
in the introduction to this chapter, leading and representing their peers.
As such, APACs are relevant to understanding the nature of co-governed
Brazilian prison order and the potential for abolitionist alternatives for
the extent they depart from certain aspects of the common Brazilian
prison system (its abandoning of prisons and prisoners) but comply with
others (its reliance on inmate collaboration, and its reliance on inmates
maintaining their connections with their family and wider community).
In other words, the APAC methodology embraces the collective nature of
everyday Brazilian prison social order and the consequent entanglements
between inmates and staff, prisons and communities, not by default (as
means of getting by with limited human and material resources), but to
purposely reduce the otherwise inevitable harms associated with losing
one’s liberty. To achieve its vision of peer and community-facilitated reha-
bilitation, both prison staff and prison inmates are expected to be from
the local area. Prisoners’ families and former APAC prisoners are encour-
aged to work or volunteer at the prison in which they served, or their
loved ones are serving, a criminal sentence.
In Brazil, the APAC movement has been extensively studied by
research degree students (for publications from doctorate-level studies,
see most recently Grossi [2021] on the APAC system in Minas Gerais,
and Neto [2020] on the APAC system in Paraná). Otherwise, neither the
APAC nor the country’s other community prison models have attracted
much academic interest. Moreover, the relatively few academic studies
published in peer-reviewed journals or by academic book publishers (e.g.
Araújo, 2017; Burnside, 2005; Dembogurski et al., 2021; Faustino &
Pires, 2007; Fernandes, 2021; Leal, 1999; Macaulay 2007, 2015;
Marques & Studart, 2020; Silva et al., 2020; Siqueira et al., 2020;
Souza, 2020; Vargas, 2009; Walker et al., 2013) invariably draw atten-
tion to their relatively good treatment and rehabilitation of prisoners,
in comparison to the country’s common prisons, but not their focus
on communal living and co-produced social order. This includes studies
that take a penal abolitionist stance and question whether a version of
Brazil’s community prison models might be developed that replaces the
country’s common prison system altogether (e.g. Franco et al., 2020;

Mattos, 2009; Menezes & Oliveira, 2010; Garces, 2019 comparative
study of Brazilian and Ecuadorian faith-based prison movements).
I am also concerned by the failure of most Brazilian prisons to operate
regimes of dignified detention. This most fundamental of individual
human rights is at the centre of international prison law (e.g. the United
Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners 2016).
My question is whether the penal abolitionist position should extend to
the demand that prisoners retain a certain level of collective control over
the physical and social environments in which they have been deprived
of their liberty, and whether in this regard the international human rights
community might have something to learn from community prisons in
Brazil (although my own abolitionist position also draws me towards
the conclusion, like Ryan and Sim [2007], that any form of post-trial
involuntary detention should reserved for the most violent and preda-
tory behaviour). In this chapter I use the term community prison as
originally conceptualised by American prison governor Howard B. Gill:
as a closed institution that houses a small, supervised group of prisoners
who live communally and maintain close contact with the outside world
(Hayner & Ash, 1940). Gill (1965) identified three principles underlying
communal living: normalcy, small groups and participation. However, he
excluded social order from the latter. I argue that it is neither theoretically
nor practically necessary to do so, at least in the context of Brazil.
Besides the APAC system, there are three Brazilian community prison
models that purport to be human rights respecting and in which
communal living includes collective participation in social order. The
first was introduced in the state of Rondônia in 2007 by a second
voluntary sector religious organisation led largely by former prisoners,
the Cultural Association for the Development of Prisoners and Former
Prisoners (ACUDA). ACUDA’s methodology is underpinned by three
pillars: Spirituality, Education and Assistance (see https://acudarond
onia.org/nosso-metodo). ACUDA delivers several social welfare projects,
including a daytime centre (the Illuminate Programme) for prisoners
held in closed units in Porto Velho State Prison Complex. In 2015
ACUDA was subject to a prime-time national television exposé that
focused on the Illuminate Programme being attended by one of the state’s
344 S. Darke
most notorious murderers, its therapeutic use of the hallucinogenic drug

ayahuasca, and the fact 13 prisoners from a semi-open unit had been
recruited to work at the centre and slept there overnight (these latter two
activities have since been suspended). I spent two days participating in
the ACUDA day centre regime in May 2017 and another two days in
July 2019. At the time of the latter visit, construction work had begun
on a new residential unit, Celas Lares, which will accommodate up to
200 prisoners in closed conditions. ACUDA aimed to inaugurate Celas
Lares by the end of 2020. This is on hold during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The day centre is operating as usual.
Like FBAC, ACUDA insists its day centre and the future residen-
tial unit operate without police or prison officers and are co-governed
with inmate councils. Even more than the APAC movement, ACUDA
considers itself to be anti-punishment. Reflecting on his experiences of
long-term imprisonment, ACUDA’s general director insisted to me that
Celas Lares “will not be a prison”, adding that “the system teaches us to
hate ourselves… and then we hate others” (field notes, 26 July 2019).
ACUDA provides prisoners with a full-time timetable of education and
“new age” therapies like meditation, yoga, massage, Reiki and Family
Constellations. It also provides skills-based work, although more for the
purpose of raising funds and attracting prisoners to the centre than as a
means of rehabilitation. Similar to APAC de Itaúna, a ten-person inmate
council manages most of the centre’s routines and activities. ACUDA’s
2019 unpublished disciplinary code for its day centre likewise includes
a mixture of official state prison rules and customary practices. Unlike
FBAC (2020), however, it was co-drafted with serving prisoners. The
code is enforced by a separate committee composed of three serving pris-
oners and two former-prisoner ACUDA employees (it is intended that
the inmate council will take on this role at Celas Lares). Prisoners are
appointed to the inmate council and disciplinary committee by lottery,
although in the case of the latter a prisoner must first make it onto a
short-list compiled by ACUDA’s general director. Other prisoners are
given keys and two-way radio transceivers to work with the former-
prisoner ACUDA staff in charge of external security. Like APAC de
Itaúna, most of the other people that work at the centre are volunteers.
Next are the 22 Resocialisation Centres (CRs) of São Paulo, 21 of

which were inaugurated in the early 2000s in an effort by a senior judge,
Nagashi Furukawa, to implement a less community-run, more formal
public-civil society partnership version of the APAC prison system while
he was state Minister for Prisons (Furukawa, 2015). These included the
two existing APAC prisons in São Paulo: APAC de São José dos Campos
and APAC de Bragança Paulista.6 Like the APAC system, most of São
Paulo’s CRs contain semi-open as well as closed prison units. At its peak,
5% of the state’s 137,282 prisoners were held in the CR system (Bueno,
2005). There is no official set of CR prison rules. Still, most CRs were
purpose built to the same design during Furukawa’s term in office and
operate similar daily routines and practices. CRs typically hold 150–
200 prisoners between their two units (the purpose-built CR prisons
all have operating capacities of 210), making them on average larger
than APAC prisons. The smallest, CR de Araquara women’s prison, has
an operational capacity of 96 (and at the time of writing, a popula-
tion of 99). Like APAC prisons and ACUDA’s day centre, CRs promote
non-stigmatising prison cultures and close engagement with prisoners’
families (Macaulay, 2015). CR prisons also provide full-time regimes of
work, education and therapeutic activities aimed at improving inmates’
self-esteem and social skills (Macaulay, 2015), like APAC and ACUDA,
but also their occupational employability.
São Paulo’s CRs were initially inaugurated under partnership arrange-
ments in which voluntary sector NGOs were responsible for everyday
prison management and contracting health, leisure, education and other
social welfare services, but state authorities retained responsibility for
security. Following a week of rebellions in May 2006 that included two-
thirds of the state’s common prisons (but no CR prisons), Furakawa
was demoted and the CR prison system gradually brought under full
public sector management. However, voluntary sector organisations have
continued to provide services to many CR prisons. I have visited two
of these CRs, including an afternoon and a full day at CR de Limeira,
6 In 1994 Furukara had inaugurated his first community prison under the APAC label.
However, the prison was ostracised by the APAC movement for “lacking methodology”
(Macaulay, 2015), among other things its secularism (ibid.), and its prioritising of industrial
over community work (Massola, 2017).
346 S. Darke
where in 2016 I ran a workshop on social order with prisoners held in the
closed unit. Since 2016 CR de Limeira has received education, training,
leisure and other social projects from the city of Limeira Community
Council, established under the legal requirement under Article 80 of
Penal Executive Law 1984 that prisons are monitored and supported by
community organisations in each judicial district (of which there are 382
in São Paulo), with the coordination and support of the voluntary sector
body, Instituto Ação Pela Paz. By the end of 2019, community coun-
cils had been set up to provide welfare projects to another seven CR
prisons (IAP, 2020). Some activities were suspended with the onset of
the Covid-19 pandemic, but most have now recommenced (IAP, 2021).
Like most other Brazilian prisons I have visited, I did not encounter
any guards stationed in CR de Limeira’s cell blocks. Cell doors were
not locked, even on the closed prison unit, and inmates carry keys to
manage access to shared spaces (e.g. workshops and store cupboards) and
movement between individual corridors. In some CRs additional house
rules are co-drafted by inmates and voluntary sector as well as public
sector prison staff (Macaulay, 2007). On my visits to both CR prisons,
I observed codes of conduct hanging inside the entrance to each dormi-
tory. Different to both the APAC and ACUDA models, prisoners are not
formally involved in adjudications. However, prisoners at CR de Limeira
explained to me that although they did not have a unit-wide inmate
council, they formally selected cell representatives to oversee social order
and negotiate with staff. When they could not persuade one of their
peers to stick to the rules to make amends for breaking one, their cell
representative would ask officers to remove them.
The final Brazilian community prison model which officially aims
to be human rights respecting, and in which aspects of the power to
discipline are formally devolved to inmates, is also public and officially
secular. Adapted from an existing Spanish prison model (in English,
see Ballesteros-Pena, 2018), Brazil’s first Social Reinsertion Centre was
opened on a remand prison wing in the state of Goiás in 2009. Like
its Spanish counterparts, the centre is more commonly referred to as a
Respect Module (RM). In 2020 Goiás authorities published a list of RM
rules (DGAP, 2020) and announced their intention to open RM wings
across its prison estate. A stand-alone RM prison, Núcleo de Ressocial-

ização da Capital (NRC), was opened in the state of Alagoas in 2011
with an operational capacity of 157. I visited the RM wing in Goiás in
2016 and was due to visit NRC for a first time in 2020.
Like CR prisons, the Brazilian version of the RM model involves
voluntary sector organisations being contracted to provide in-house
services; and like the APAC and ACUDA prison models, inmate coun-
cils manage most aspects of daily routines and social order. At NRC,
all prisoners are expected to participate in one of five inmate councils,
whose memberships (like the ACUDA day centre) are chosen by lottery
and (similar to the CSS at APAC de Itaúna) rotate every three months
(Araújo, 2017). One of the councils (the Conviviality Commission)
monitors everyday routines and discipline, while the others (the Recep-
tion, Judicial Assistance and Sports and Culture commissions) deal with
more specific matters. The fifth council (the Responsibility Assembly)
is made up of the leaders of the other four councils and is tasked with
communicating with senior staff. RC prisoners are not formally involved
in drafting disciplinary rules. However, all prisoners meet daily as a
General Assembly to discuss and make recommendations for changes
to everyday routines and disciplinary codes. Different to APACs, CRs
and the future Celas Lares, guards are stationed inside as well as outside
RC cell blocks. However, prisoners are formally involved in judging
and administering disciplinary penalties for house rules through another
inmate council, the Commission for Conflict Resolution. This council
is made up exclusively of prisoners but is selected by the governor, again
for three-month terms of office.
Conclusion
We have seen that the APAC, ACUDA, CR and RM prison models
all claim to treat the people in their care with human dignity. At this
early stage of desk research, the extent to which they actually do so is
not among my questions and has not been the subject of this chapter.
For now my focus is ideals and potential. In any case, none of the
Brazilian community prisons I have thus far visited appeared to be fully
348 S. Darke
human rights respecting as defined by the United Nations, let alone

radically different to the extent demanded in the abolitionist literature,
for instance by Scott and Gosling (2016, 172–173), who in an anal-
ysis of residential therapeutic communities for people whose criminal
offending is associated with substance abuse write that, “a radical alter-
native must… compete with, and contradict, current penal ideologies,
discourses, policies and practices… directly replace a punitive sentence
of the criminal courts… adhere to democratically accountable values and
principles requiring unhindered participation, recognition of the validity
of all voices, and facilitate a role in decision-making… safeguard human
dignity and minimise human suffering… rooted in principles of fair-
ness, openness, equality and legal accountability… promote (or at very
least not inhibit) social justice.” This includes the APAC system, which
we have seen regards crime as a problem of idleness and irresponsi-
bility (Massola, 2017), and as Ottoboni hinted in his opening address
at the movement’s 40th-anniversary celebrations often resorts quickly
to disciplinary punishments rather than restorative or therapeutic sanc-
tions. Another area of practice I have found the APACs I have visited
to fall short of being “non-penal real utopias” (Scott & Gosling, 2016,
170) is their restricted approach to therapy. In 2012 I spent much of my
time at APAC de Itaúna in the company of a prisoner in the semi-open
unit convicted for robbery whose addiction to crack cocaine I became
increasingly aware had not been dealt with beyond the occasional visit
from Narcotics Anonymous. When I asked him for his views on the
APAC methodology, he repeated the often-heard mantra that people only
change through love. Yet, he went on to commit further crimes (the first
within hours of his release later the same year) that have left him rotting
in common prisons to this day.
Nor has this chapter dealt with the question often posed by Northern
penal abolitionists whether progressive criminal justice policies and prac-
tices will inevitably be “clawed back” (Carlen, 2002) and their propo-
nents “silently silenced” (Mathiesen, 2004) in the long term. Again, this
is not my immediate research interest. For the time being, I can only
provide some preliminary observations based on anecdotal evidence. In
late 2019 a new head of security was appointed at APAC de São Luis,
who installed bars around the exercise yard in the closed unit, previ-
ously freely accessible to prisoners despite providing a quick and easy
route to escape. Ironically (predictably?), there have been two mass break
outs from the unit since, the first in the prison’s five-year history. Still, I
question whether the culturally heterogeneous nature of Brazilian society
(see e.g. Ribeiro, 1995) and the informal, pragmatic nature of Brazilian
micro-politics (e.g. DaMatta, 1986), including penal policy making
(Batista, 2000; Macaulay, 2021), leave greater space for grass-roots aboli-
tionist praxis (cf. Gay, 1998; Koster & Eiró, 2021): that different to
the more bureaucratic countries of the Global North, prison reformers
have less to fear from engaging with well-meaning criminal justice prac-
titioners, and that each step backwards along the road towards abolition
might plausibly be followed by two steps in front. When ACUDA is
finally able to open Celas Lares, for instance, it has every intention to
recommence its use of ayahuasca and to receive prisoners convicted for
the most violent predatory crimes.
These practical concerns are also matters for future research and
discussion. In this chapter I have focused on the preliminary question
what else besides human dignity might be promoted by those taking a
penal abolitionist position in Brazil, where my reading of prisoner auto-
biographies (e.g. Jozino, 2004; Mendes, 2009; Rap & Zeni, 2002) and
academic ethnographies (e.g. Biondi, 2010, 2018; Feltran, 2018), as well
as my own fieldwork, suggests that many if not the majority of pris-
oners consider themselves to be criminal only in the sense that “their
kind” are the victims of authoritarian oppression and are in conflict
with the state and its weaponised laws. Specifically, I have introduced
the extent and means by which Brazilian community prison inmates
are formally involved in establishing and, more controversially, enforcing
disciplinary rules and practices. In doing so I have also indirectly ques-
tioned the international human rights consensus that prisoners should
not have the collective right to co-govern their institutional environ-
ment, as reflected in Rule 40 of the United Nations Standard Minimum
Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners 2016 (where it is stated that,
“no prisoner shall be employed, in the service of the prison, in any
disciplinary capacity”)—which, it should be noted, were agreed predom-
inantly among Northern experts (Peirce, 2018)—and also Article 96 of
350 S. Darke
the Third Geneva Convention relative to the treatment of Prisoners of

War 1949 (where it is stated, “in no case may disciplinary powers be
delegated to a prisoner of war or be exercised by a prisoner of war”).
This blanket policy is repeated in the Brazilian Minimum Rules for
the Treatment of Prisoners 1994. In the most comprehensive interna-
tional human rights report on Brazilian prisons to date Human Rights
Watch (1998, 7) came to the same conclusion, warning that, “prisoners
should never be assigned internal security responsibilities or be placed
in positions of power over each other, even informally”.7 As far as I am
aware this position is not directly questioned in any academic prison
literature anywhere, including the Anglophone and Lusophone litera-
ture on community prisons that I am best acquainted. I have already
noted the central importance of communal living to Gill’s (1965) defi-
nition of community prisons, and prisoner participation as a defining
characteristic of communal living (alongside normalcy and small group
living). Gill described prisoner participation as a matter of joint staff-
inmate civic responsibility. However, he emphasised that as a prison
governor he had restricted these responsibilities to overseeing activities
and recommending changes to institutional routines. Scott and Gosling
(2016) come closer, in their evaluation of the abolitionist potential of
therapeutic communities, when they refer to democratic and proce-
durally legitimate decision-making processes. However, they make this
point in the specific context of voluntary participation in community
7 The absolute human rights ban on prisoner participation in disciplinary actions and processes
is most notable in UNODC (2015), where the United Nations promotes good staff-inmate
relations as the key to prison order but makes no mention of rules being negotiated or powers
being delegated. The rationale and implications of this international consensus are explained in
Coyle and Fair’s (2018) Human Rights Approach to Prison Management Handbook for Prison
Staff, sponsored by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Coyle and Fair (2018,
72) write, “In a well managed prison all prisoners will be treated equally. Whenever possible
they should be encouraged to become involved in constructive activities during their time in
prison… These may include helping in certain aspects of the daily running of the prison,
such as working in the kitchen or on farms or maintenance. Prisoners who are skilled or well
educated may also be encouraged to help other prisoners in these respects. However, it is never
permissible to employ or to use prisoners to control other prisoners. This sometimes happens
when there is a shortage of staff. Such prisoners are often given special treatment in terms
of accommodation, food, or other facilities, to encourage them to monitor or manage other
prisoners. These arrangements are always open to abuse”.
routines. They do not rule out but neither do they mention the super-
vised community participating in disciplinary processes (see also Scott &
Gosling, 2015).
Yet this lack of trust in people to take—or under the APAC vision
of social reintegration, to be belatedly taught—civic responsibility in
prison, and the consequent rigidity of the boundary drawn between the
institutional powers and functions of inmates and staff, was arguably the
most critical issue identified in the classic mid-twentieth-Century North
American sociological studies on the effects of inhumane detention. In
his introduction to the “pains of imprisonment” Gresham Sykes paid
heed to the anger and frustration caused by the sense of moral rejection
and loss of the status of citizenship experienced by prisoners:
The basic acceptance of the individual as a functioning member of the

society in which he lives… the loss of that more diffuse status which
defines the individual as someone to be trusted or as morally acceptable
is the loss which hurts most… Somehow this rejection or degradation by
the free community must be warded off, turned aside, rendered harmless.
Somehow the imprisoned criminal must find a devise for rejecting his
rejecters, if he is to endure psychologically. (Sykes, 1958, 66)
Similarly, Erving Goffman emphasised that his objective in analysing the

debilitating effects “total institutions” like prisons and closed residen-
tial psychiatric hospitals have on their inmates was, “to help us see the
arrangements that ordinary establishments must guarantee if members
are to preserve their civilian selves” (Goffman, 1961, 14). Like Sykes,
Goffman was most concerned with the consequences of inmates having
to defer to the bureaucratic authority of the institution and the everyday
managerial decisions of its employees.8
Of course Goffman’s (1961) concept of the total institution applies
little to the ordinary Brazilian prison, where officers deal with inmates
mostly through their representatives, micro-political authority is shaped
8 This removing of inmates’ autonomy to make or challenge decisions over how the institution
they have been denied their liberty should operate is often raised by my prison-based students
as a key problem of northern imprisonment as currently defined. One of the peer reviewers of
this chapter (see n.vi.) writes, “walls don’t make a prison; a loss of power over the environment
does” (Moses Mathias, formerly HMP Grendon prison, personal communication, 28 July 2021).
352 S. Darke
by an inmate as much as staff hierarchies, staff-inmate functions are

entangled, governors do not have the resources to manage their insti-
tutions without entrusting inmates, and in a reversal of Sparks et al.’s
(1996) assessment of the illegitimacy of British prison staff-inmate rela-
tions, social order is more negotiated and consensual than imposed and
enforced. Imprisonment is considered inhumane by Brazilian prisoners,
but for different reasons than by people who experience imprisonment
in the United Kingdom. Still, the reciprocal social order that gives
staff-inmate relations de facto legitimacy in Brazil’s common prison
system arises out of necessity and is more “forced” (Darke, 2013) than
democratic.
I am hesitant to make any preliminary normative assessment of
whether disciplinary powers are more appropriately devolved to Brazilian
community prison inmates before I have at least had the opportunity
to explore what legitimate governance means to my participants. I will
commence my fieldwork with a set of generalised research questions
relating to the equity of the social norms community prison inmates
and staff are expected to follow and the procedures by which they are
established and enforced. I am also interested in exploring the impli-
cations of delegating responsibilities for security as well as discipline to
prisoners, and the broader implications of former prisoner and volun-
tary sector involvement in prison governance. My fieldwork needs to
be guided but not restrained by a global understanding of theoretical
concepts like community, hierarchy and legitimate authority, self-help,
self-governance, participatory and representative democracy, substantive
and procedural justice.
Finally, in the longer term I intend to explore the extent to which
the collective ownership that Brazilian community prisoners exercise
over the institutions in which they are incarcerated might be replicated
in a Northern country like the United Kingdom, where prison gover-
nance is on the whole more bureaucratic and prison communities less
cohesive. This will involve comparative research that includes the demo-
cratic therapeutic community (DTC) regime at HMP Grendon prison.
We have seen that Grendon has attracted the attention of British and
American penal abolitionists and radical prison reformers. The DTC
model emphasises collective decision-making as well as the collective
living (Bennett, 2013; Shuker, 2021), in contrast to Gill’s (1965) more

restricted definition of community prisons, and also the concept of thera-
peutic communities (CTCs) studied by Scott and Gosling (2015, 2016),
which are usually reserved for problematic drug users. CTCs are typi-
cally more hierarchical than DTCs and more likely to be staffed by
former residents (Jones, 1979; Rawlings & Yates, 2001; Vandevelde et al.,
2004; for a critique of Brazilian CTCs, see in English McBride et al.,
2018). Besides four smaller individual DTC units situated within main-
stream English prisons, Grendon is currently the only secure DTC in
the Anglophone world to have been implemented in a prison rather
than in a psychiatric hospital.9 , 10 Grendon is divided into six self-
contained communities of between 20 and 40 prisoners, all of whom
convicted for serious predatory violence. Prisoners engage in a full-time
regime of psychodynamic and creative therapies based on the concept of
reality confrontation, in small therapy groups of eight, and with their
wider inmate community. All prisoners are expected to be actively pro-
social and—like the APAC system—to take on positions of responsibility
relating to different aspects of the physical and social environment, e.g. as
cleaners, cooks, treasurers, committee chairman, health and safety, events
and diversity representatives. Each community writes a “constitution”
containing—like the disciplinary codes co-produced by ACUDA and
some CR prisoners—a mixture of official prison rules and customary
practices and appoints an inmate “cabinet” with a six-month term of
9 The DTC concept was originally developed at the Industrial Neurosis Unit in London, opened
in 1947 as a specialist psychiatric institution specialising in psychotherapy and the treatment of
psychopathy and especially post-traumatic stress disorders. It received people with and without
criminal convictions. The Industrial Neurosis Unit was later renamed the Social Rehabilitation
Centre and, later still, Henderson Hospital (see Warren & Norton, 2004). Henderson Hospital
closed in 2008. Grendon opened as Europe’s first and still only fully DTC prison in 1962.
For detailed academic accounts of the psychiatric regime at Grendon and other English DTC
units, see Brown et al. (2014), Genders and Player (1995), and Stevens (2013).
10 Comparable models also operate in other parts of Europe, principle among which are the
social therapeutic facilities of Germany, which operate in more than a dozen prisons or prison
units (see Lösel & Egg 1997; Sauter et al., 2019). Beyond the wider context of psychiatric
treatment, parallels may also be drawn with early to mid-twentieth-Century experiments in
self-governance in children’s institutions in the United Kingdom, most notably at the Little
Commonwealth residential home in Dorset (see Bazeley, 1928) and the Summerhill independent
boarding school in Suffolk (see Neill, 1960). These experiments influenced both the CTC and
DTC movements. For broader discussion, see Kasinski (2003), Raimo (2001), and Shaw (2011).
354 S. Darke
office to liaise with prison staff. Prison inmates and staff are also expected
to be tolerant and to challenge and report any aggressive, anti-social
or disrespectful behaviour to their community. Communities vote on
their members’ suitability for different types of work, education, thera-
peutic activities, and representative positions. Minor disputes are dealt
with informally among the small therapy groups at first instance and if
necessary the wider community. The cabinet is also tasked with guiding
new arrivals, mediating more serious conflicts and convening community
meetings to decide on sanctions if necessary. In contrast to each of the
Brazilian community prison systems I have introduced in this chapter,
inmates are formally allowed to apply restorative and therapeutic as well
as punitive sanctions. Prison managers reserve the right to veto. Still, offi-
cial disciplinary proceedings are rarely resorted to and the prison does not
have a segregation cell.11
Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the support of the Lever-

hulme Trust. I am currently a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow (award RF-
2020-373\8). My research focuses on community self-governance in Brazilian
former prisoner-led voluntary sector NGO prisons, the subject matter of this
chapter.
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Epilogue
Inmate Governance in Latin America:
Comparative and Theoretical Notes
Máximo Sozzo
In this final chapter I am going to present a series of theoretical and

comparative notes in relation to the phenomenon of inmate governance
in Latin American prisons, taking up what has been worked in the
various chapters of this book on several countries of the region—and
in the recent literature on this theme. On the one hand, I am going
to present some reflections on how to insert the question of inmate
governance within the framework of a more wide-ranging considera-
tion about the differences between the prisons of this region—and more
generally, of the Global South—and those of the Global North, crit-
ically discussing an approach that seeks to build an understanding of
these differences through a distinction of types of regimes of confine-
ment, allegedly characteristic of each of these different parts of the world.
M. Sozzo (B)
National University of Litoral, Santa Fe, Argentina
e-mail: msozzo@fcjs.unl.edu.ar

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98602-5_12
368 M. Sozzo
Secondly, as regards the question of inmate governance in Latin America,

I am going to introduce the broader discussion of to what extent the
theoretical tools of prison studies in the Global North can be used—and
how—to make sense of the mechanisms and dynamics in this region,
advocating a position that defends the possibility of “use” but discour-
ages an attitude of “application”. There I will also show how, in relation
to the question of inmate governance, a strong South-South dialogue
has been produced in the last years—of which this book is also a piece of
evidence-, particularly around some key concepts like “self-governance”
and “co-governance”, which also have the potentiality of influencing the
ways of thinking about prison order in the Global North. Finally, I am
going to raise the need to advance in the construction of a comparative
perspective on inmate governance in Latin American prisons, as a funda-
mental exercise in the elaboration of our theoretical tools in this regard,
based on the recognition of the strong degree of variation that this book
evidences. In this sense, I will present a tentative comparative outline,
isolating various crucial dimensions and exemplifying the diverse alter-
natives with the analysis produced throughout this book on the various
schemes of participation of prisoners in the governance of incarcerated
life in the region. I believe that this exercise could be a contribution on
a longer path to more fully theorize the dynamics and effects of inmate
governance, both inside and outside Latin America.
Inmate Governance and Differences Between

Prisons of the Global North and South
A possible reading of this book on inmate governance in Latin American
prisons could emphasize the distinctive character of this phenomenon, in
a more general picture that underlines the existence of a radical, essen-
tial, difference between the prisons in the region—and, more generally,
in the Global South—and those of the Global North. Precisely, this type
of interpretation was presented a decade ago by Christopher Birkbeck
(2011), in an important attempt to draw a comparison between prisons
in the North and South of the Americas, with all the difficulties that
such a task implies, since it involves the elaboration of wide-ranging
Inmate Governance in Latin America ... 369
generalizations.1 He built an opposition between two types of regimes of

confinement: “imprisonment”, which would characterize the dynamics
of the North, and “internment”, which would characterize the dynamics
of the South. He composed both concepts from a series of differences
between the penal institutions of the North and the South around a
series of crucial dimensions: “regimentation”, “surveillance”, “isolation”,
“supervision”, “accountability” and “formalization”. He summarized his
main argument as follows:
Looking at the various institutional dimensions reviewed in this essay,

we find a relatively clear set of differences between the North America
and Latin America. In the North, inmates are more regimented, more
isolated and subject to greater surveillance; they are les involved in the
running of the institution. North American Penal facilities are more open
to external scrutiny and their bureaucracies are more formalized. In Latin
America, inmates are less regimented, less isolated and subject to less
surveillance; they are also more involved in the running of the institu-
tion. Latin American penal facilities are less open to external scrutiny
and their bureaucracies are less formalized. One way to express these
contrasts -quantitatively- is as a difference in the level of control: in North
America, control is assiduous in the sense that is unceasing, persistent
and intrusive: in Latin America, control is perfunctionary in the sense
that it is sporadic, indifferent and cursory. But another way to express
these contrasts -qualitatively- is in terms of the character of confine-
ment: in North America there is imprisonment; in Latin America there
is internment. (Birbeck, 2011, 319–320)
I consider this conceptual distinction to be problematic. And so is

its association with the prisons in each of these regions.2 From my
perspective it entails three main problems.
1 At one point the author recognized that, fundamentally, it is a comparison focused on the
two contexts with which he is most familiar, the United States of America and Venezuela, and
that from there he expands his descriptions at the regional level (Birkbeck, 2011, 308–309).
2 Birkbeck’s differentiation has been recently used by other authors when referring to Latin
American prisons as examples of “internment”, although they have not necessarily made a
detailed analysis of it. See in this regard Darke and Karam (2016, 469); Darke and Garces
(2017, 4); Darke (2018, 73, 303; this volume); Macaulay (2019, 250).
370 M. Sozzo
First, a central issue, although not indicated in the synthesis just

quoted, is the identification of the objectives or goals that Birkbeck asso-
ciates with these two theoretically constructed regimes of confinement.
This ‘telos’ articulates the logic that the actors who build these regimes
of confinement manifestly recognize as the one that guides their actions,
beyond the interests and effects that are latently constructed. When
conceptualizing “internment”—the Latin American regime of confine-
ment—, Birkbeck (2011, 320) states that “detention is the sole objective”
and “penal intervention is limited to spatial policy of confinement”. This
is combined with the fact that he maintains that the discourses around
the “rehabilitation ideal” have had and are widely disseminated in Latin
American contexts, but “these visions were either never realized or only
short lived” (Birkbeck, 2011, 320). In my view this is a simplistic reading
of a much more complex process and dynamic.
As I tried to suggest previously regarding the Argentine case (Sozzo,
2007, 2009), the history and the present of prisons in this national
context are traversed by a “mixed economy”, between the “correctional
model” and the “incapacitating model”. Both ways of structuring incar-
cerated life have had and have different levels of strength through time
and space in Argentina’s prisons. More than ten years ago I emphasized
that hand in hand with the growth of incarceration and overpopulation
from the 1990s onwards, the “incapacitating model”—which I identified
using previous works on the Global North (Garland, 2001; Irwin, 2004;
O’Malley & Meyer, 2005)—seemed to broaden its scope, with a logic
of mere confinement, to prevent prisoners from causing new crimes in
social life, associated with the traditional idea of “social defense”, radi-
cally moving away from the “rehabilitative ideal”. However, I denied at
the time that the “correctional model” could be treated as mere “rhetoric”
without any impact on incarcerated life. And I consider that this is
still the case today. This, of course, does not mean that the correc-
tional model achieves its declared purpose in Argentine prisons, but it
does mean that its logic effectively structures a whole series of prac-
tices in contexts of confinement. The correctional model has had a high
level of incorporation in the legal discourse throughout the twentieth
century in this country. This has been partially modified by recent legal
reforms that have accompanied the punitive turn—especially through
the restriction on the possibilities of flexibilization of the sentence in

its implementation and, particularly, of accessing parole—but they have
not completely disarmed it. Beyond the law—although, in part, related
to its configuration—a whole series of activities in Argentine prisons
are officially justified around the ideal and the language of rehabilita-
tion. For example, the considerable degree of contact of prisoners with
their families, which translates into a high frequency and duration of
visits that involve direct contact—including intimate visits—and, more
recently, the legalization—in some jurisdictions—of the possession of
cell phones by prisoners (Arnaudo, 2021; Ferreccio, 2017; Gual, 2020).
Or the relatively widespread access to educational activities, related to
both the primary and secondary level of education, encouraged by a
recent legal change that formally created an incentive for prisoners to
carry out these activities in prisons—in a kind of sentence redemption
for time of education-, to which is added a growing number of initiatives
for prisoners generated by national universities. In the 2020 census of the
prison population (SNEEP), 42% of the prisoners participated in some
educational activity (Acin et al., 2016; Ghiberto & Sozzo, 2014; Gual
et al., 2018; Gutierrez, 2012; Manchado et al., 2019; Moreira & Rojas,
2018; Routier, 2021; Sozzo, 2012). On the other hand, in that same
2020 census, 36% of the prison population carried out some type of paid
work. However, as it has been revealed by various researchers in different
jurisdictions, most of these work positions are for few hours a week,
earn very low salaries, and frequently consist of maintenance tasks for
the prison itself, their justification and implementation is hampered by
the ideal and language of rehabilitation (Claus et al., 2019; Gual, 2015;
2017; Taboga, 2016a, 2016b). Even the multiplication of evangelical
wings in Argentine provincial prisons, addressed in a chapter of this book
(Navarro & Sozzo, this volume) as well as by a wide literature (referred
to there), can be thought of as connected to this correctional ideal and
language, given the weight that religious discourses and practices have
traditionally had in this model. From my perspective, it is not possible
to ignore this presence, as it would be in the general identification of the
regime of confinement in this national context as “internment”.
I do not pretend to sustain that what is stated here is valid for Latin
America as a whole. Some of the explorations in this book, such as
372 M. Sozzo
the work of Peirce (this volume) on the “new model” prisons in the
Dominican Republic or the work of Darke (this volume) on the Brazilian
“community-run prisons”, provide evidence referring to other coun-
tries—although, clearly in the second case, with very limited scope in
relation to the immense prison universe of that country. In any case, I
think that it is necessary to be cautious and to structure a future debate
on this matter based on new contributions and inquiries.
Now, on the other hand, when defining “imprisonment” as North
America’s regime of confinement, in relation to its objectives, Birkbeck
not only includes the “rehabilitative ideal”, but also the “ideal of punish-
ment”. Although he does not explicitly state it, I consider that, based on
his approving references to the work of Feely and Simon (1992) on the
“new penology” and of Irwin (2004) on the “warehouse prison” (Birk-
beck, 2011, 320), he also includes there the “ideal of incapacitation”,
to which these authors refer in detail. In this sense, Birkbeck points out
that when North American prisons abandon the “ideal of rehabilitation”
and only seek “to reduce disorder, danger and risk”—which is clearly
a reference to incapacitation—they do more than mere “detention” or
“containment”, unlike the “internment”, the regime of confinement in
Latin America. He highlights the greater degree of control of impris-
oned life by state actors in the North. One could clearly think here
of the extreme case of the supermax prisons and their wide diffusion.3
But when the prisons of the North set out to incapacitate—and even
proclaim so in official discourse, as it has happened repeatedly in the
United States since the 1970s—it could hardly be said that they are
structuring a telos different from that observed in vast sectors of Latin
American prisons that are closer to the image evoked by the concept
of “internment”. In my view, the logic is similar even when there are
obvious differences in the mechanisms to achieve it.
3 In recent decades there has even been certain diffusion of the style of confinement that the
American “supermax” embody—although sometimes not identifying them with this name—in
various Latin American countries, such as Brazil and Colombia (de Dardel & Söderström,
2015, 2018; Macaulay, 2013, 378–380; 2017, 54–55). This is another empirical element that,
even when contained in its scope, introduces complications in this conceptual differentiation.
Second, when it comes to drawing the differences between the prisons

of the North and the South of the Americas in the different key dimen-
sions identified, Birkbeck seems to accentuate certain contrasting features
in the penal institutions of both regions, taking them to their maximum
expression, hiding that in both there are cases and developments in
which these differences may be less marked. It is important to under-
line how in the same paragraph quoted above, in which he summarizes
his main argument, the differences between both regions are articulated
with constant references to “more” or “less”, but then it is resolved in
expressing these contrasts “qualitatively” as manifestations of two types
of regimes of confinement. In the particular theme that concerns us
in this book and which is dealt with by Birkbeck in the framework
of the “supervision” dimension, he argues that in North America pris-
oners used to participate in “running the facility” but that this has been
declining markedly in the last 70 years and, although he indicates that
there are “gangs” that “represent an important mode of social organiza-
tion among contemporary inmates”, they are not supported or accepted
by the prison administration, who in any case opposes to or is cautiously
tolerant” of them. On the other hand, in Latin America, in what he
argues to be a “striking contrast”, “the use of some kind of building
tender appears to be widespread and longstanding”, to which “a more
problematic form of prisoner self-government, built on anarchy rather
than authority” is added, “two styles of internal governance” that “ebb
and flow” “throughout Latin America” (Birkbeck, 2011, 315–316).
It is difficult, at this point, to fully agree with the landscape of prisons
in North America depicted by Birkbeck. Although there seems to be
an agreement in the literature on US prisons regarding the decline
of the figure of the “building tender”, the important work of David
Skarbek (2014) on the governmental role of “gangs” in Californian
prisons—which is not precisely a marginal state in the field of the “great
confinement” of the United States, with more than 200,000 prisoners at
present-, around a “system of community responsibility”, fully demon-
strates its relevance in the processes of construction of order in these
penal institutions. It is difficult to argue that there is a radical difference
with the governmental roles played by some organizations of prisoners
in Latin American prisons—and even for this reason, some researchers
374 M. Sozzo
working on these organizations adopt the very notion of “prison gangs”

elaborated around the American case. In Skarbek’s work, the role of
prison authorities and guards in relation to “prison gangs” is not scruti-
nized in detail. But the attitude of opposition or cautious tolerance that
Birkbeck briefly points out does not appear to be radically different from
those observed in some of the different chapters of this book that address
formations that can be considered relatively similar in Latin America
(Alvarez et al., this volume; Antillano, this volume; Weegels, this volume;
Setegemann Dieter, this volume). In turn, Skarbek’s most recent work
on what he defines as “decentralized mechanisms” of “inmate gover-
nance”, using the examples of women’s prisons in California (Skarbek,
2020, 89–105) and a “gay and transgender unit” in Los Angeles County
Jail (Skarbek, 2020, 133–146), provides explorations of other types of
processes in which inmates participate in the structuring of prison gover-
nance, which have obvious similarities to some of the other schemes
discussed throughout this book. These considerations encourage us to
think about the comparison between the prisons of the North and South
of the Americas without elevating differences—which certainly exist—
to the status of a contrast of “types” of incarceration, recognizing the
existence of substantive variations within both regions and cases where
relative similarities between the North and South of the Americas also
emerge.4
Finally, one last—but not less important—reason to avoid this binary
differentiation of “types” of incarceration associated with the Global
North and South, is that a normative orientation can be implicit, as Ariza
and Iturralde (this volume) rightly point out, which places the North as a
point of arrival to which the South should aspire, exoticizing the contexts
of confinement of the South, reproducing an old tradition in the field of
4 Hathazy and Muller (2016, 122–123) have already challenged the association of the notion
of “internment” with prisons in Latin America. They argue that contemporary prisons in
Argentina (especially at the federal level) and Chile have features that approximate the regime
of confinement identified by Birkbeck as “imprisonment”, even when they point out that in
a weak way and as a consequence of recent changes. On the other hand, they recognize that
the prisons of other countries such as Brazil, Venezuela, Peru and Mexico are dominated by
“internment”. In their proposal, however, it is possible to rescue this opposition between these
two types of regimes of confinement, but as “ideal types”, “as two ends of a continuum of
imprisonment practices”, for the purposes of “comparative assessments of empirical cases”.
social studies about prisons—and, more generally, in the criminological

field (Aliverti et al., 2021; Carrington et al., 2016, 2019; Darke, 2018,
20–22; Hathazy & Muller, 2016, 124).
Martin et al. (2014, 4) have accurately raised the need to avoid facing
the study of prisons in the Global South “in the terms of the Western
prison”, assuming “scholarly accounts for the western prison as univer-
sally relevant” and reading these Southern “spaces of confinement” “in
terms of deviance and the perpetual need for reform”. I cannot agree
more with these warnings—and I will get back to them in the next
section. From there, the authors point out the need to generate a “break
from ‘same as / different from’ perspectives, symbolically loaded as they
are with an alterity prone to the fate of exclusion” (Martinet al., 2014,
4). I believe that a difference of “types” of incarceration such as the one
discussed so far generates this perverse analytical effect. But this is not the
only way to face the comparative task and the delimitation of similarities
and differences. It is possible to do so from a deep, dense exploration of
each context on its own terms. From this base it is possible—and neces-
sary—to generate a dialogue across borders, which does not abandon
the possibility of establishing what is similar and what is different, but
considers it to be the result of a long-term laborious task (Nelken, 2010,
2011; Sozzo 2018, 2021).
Theoretical Tools
and North–South/South–South/South–North
Dialogues
Somewhat in relation to the previous point, here I want to criti-
cally analyze the question of whether the theoretical tools generated by
Northern social researchers on prison life can be useful when thinking
about the inmate governance schemes and dynamics in Latin America
worked on throughout this book—as well as on other research prob-
lems related to the penal institutions in this region. Some discussions
have recently emerged in this regard in social studies on prisons in Latin
America, which I consider interesting to dwell on here (Sozzo, 2020).
376 M. Sozzo
Within the framework of an effort to identify some general char-

acteristics of contemporary incarceration in Latin America, Darke and
Karam (2016, 469; see also Darke, 2018, 20–23) have raised the need
to generate a more acute consideration of the extent to which the clas-
sical sociology of prison life “can be applied beyond the North”.5 They
provide examples of arguments from Sykes (1999 [1958]), Goffman
(1961), and Foucault (1977) that do not work well for understanding
certain aspects of contemporary Latin American prisons. For example,
with respect to Sykes, they briefly discuss his idea that there is a neces-
sary relationship between the poor living conditions in prison and the
destabilization of relations between captors and captives, since exactly the
opposite is observed in many Latin American contexts of confinement,
characterized by high doses of state abandonment (Darke & Karam,
2016, 469–470).
In another similar effort, Hathazy and Muller explicitly contrast the
position of Darke and Karam and point out that the “theoretical models
developed by research in the Global North can, indeed, be produc-
tively applied to the analysis of Latin American prison worlds if they are
modified and adapted to Latin American empirical realities” (Hathazy &
Muller, 2016, 123). They argue that it is possible to re-read these theo-
retical frameworks in relation to empirical realities different from those
that gave rise to them to discover their potential and explain what is
observed. They point out:
…instead of discarding concepts and theories because of different ‘places

of origin’, we argue first, that the above-mentioned concepts and theories
should be applied to those cases in the global South that clearly resemble
developments in the global North. In fact, simply assuming that empirical
developments in Latin America are so different from related processes in
the global North that theories and categories applied to the analysis of the
latter are ontologically incapable of ‘travelling South’ not only reproduces
unintentionally and exoticizing perspective that contributes an ‘othering’
of Latin American realities. Moreover, it also fails to account for the
fact that despite existing differences, Latin American prison systems, in
5 In the same sense in relation to Brazilian prisons, Darke (2018, 299–304). With respect to
the Global South Drake et al. (2015, 928) briefly pose the same question.
many ways, followed the developments of prison systems in the global

North…Second, and more important, these concepts and theories can
be adapted and extended to explain the variations and changes in the
region´s prison regimes…to re-read those works from a different empir-
ical vantage point that allows for discovering their potentialities for
explaining prison realities that differ from the empirical reference points
in relation to which these concepts and theories were originally developed
(Hathazy & Muller, 2016, 123–124)
They also provide various examples in this regard. For example, they
briefly explore Sykes’s ideas about the “rebellious” mode of adaptation
to life in prison and about the “inmates’ social system” as a set of power
relations, and point to their coincidence with a series of observations on
the prisons in Brazil and Venezuela contained in the special issue they
edited (Hathazy & Muller, 2016, 125–126).
I think that this divergence between these two positions is less marked
than it seems. What might be at stake in this discrepancy is the meaning
given to the notion of “application” of theories and concepts generated
in the North to the Global South, which appears explicitly in both
texts. From my point of view, this notion should be reserved only for
processes of “adoption” of a theoretical tool generated in the Global
North, in which the researcher who analyzes a problem in the Global
South understands what he observes in his own context as a substanti-
ation of that which has been previously gestated in those other spatial
coordinates. Now, when the “adaptation” of a concept or argument is
at stake, a certain amount of innovation and creativity is introduced by
the researcher who analyzes a problem in the Global South. This raises a
“dialectic of the same and the different” that makes it difficult to discern
the boundaries of one or the other, in a kind of “metamorphosis”, which
in any case goes far beyond the borders of the mere “application” of what
has been previously gestated in other spatial coordinates. Finally, those
concepts and arguments built in the Global North can be the object of a
“rejection” by the researcher who analyzes a problem in the Global South,
whether he uses his empirical observations or his theoretical inventive-
ness to do so. In any case, these last two different intellectual operations
refer to a “use” of the Northern theory in the Global South that goes
378 M. Sozzo
far beyond the idea of “application” or “adoption”(Sozzo, 2006, 2017).6

Most likely, Hathazy and Muller would agree on the need to “reject”
some concepts and arguments contained in Sykes’s work—or another
classic author of the social studies on prisons in the Global North—
when thinking about prisons in Latin America and, in turn, Darke and
Karam would agree on the possibility of “adapting” some of his concepts
and arguments to do so. In any case, I think that all of them would agree
on the productivity of its “use”, in the sense that I am suggesting here, as
an umbrella term that houses various intellectual operations with a more
or less marked creative dimension, depending on the case.
Now, possibly they would also agree on two other points that I
consider crucial and which are interrelated—and connected with the
previously referred warnings posed by Martin et al. (2014, 4). In the
first place, this “use” can occur as long as it is based on a dense, deep
exploration of prisons in Latin America that can be channelled through
various techniques and procedures, but which must involve a strong
“encounter with the empirical moment” in our own settings (Sozzo,
2006, 411, 416–417). Second, this also requires that such a task be devel-
oped from an attitude based on a strong awareness of the need to avoid
the reproduction of the “coloniality of knowledge” (Aliverti et al., 2021;
Bracco, 2020; this volume; Carrington et al., 2019; Lander, 2000). This
implies annulling the traditional consideration of the theory produced
in the Global North as “universal”, as a set of “timeless” and “space-
less” concepts and arguments. It involves proceeding to generate what
Chakrabarty (2000) calls its “provincialization”, relativizing its possi-
bilities in relation to what is observed, a different empirical reality, in
another time and place (Aas, 2012, 5–7; Brown, 2018, 95; Carrington
et al., 2019, 4–5, 184; Martin et al., 2014, 4). The risks of not meeting
these requirements are very marked, since it implies falling into the long
6 In these preceding works I have analytically differentiated these intellectual operations in the
processes of importation, from the Global North to Latin America, of theoretical vocabularies
in the field of criminology, in a broad sense, in the remote and recent past—from positivist
criminology to critical criminology-, recognizing that very frequently they are complexly inter-
twined in a particular local text. I consider that it constitutes an analytical scheme to think
about the travels of ideas on the criminal question between the centre and the global peripheries
beyond those specific examples (see also, Aliverti et al., 2021; Carringtn et al., 2019; Melossi
et al., 2011).
tradition of uncritical and light “application”/“adoption” exercises, so

widespread in the past and present of the field of criminology in Latin
America—and more generally, in the Global South (Alivertiet al., 2021;
Carringtonet al., 2019; Sozzo, 2006, 2017). The authors of the different
chapters of this book have taken important steps in this double sense,
in relation specifically to the question of inmate governance in Latin
American prisons.
Within the framework of this recent counterpoint in the literature on
Latin American prisons, I have rescued the references to Sykes, among
the classics of social studies about institutions of confinement of the
Global North, because I precisely consider that the “use” of—in the sense
just defined—his concepts and arguments, is especially productive for the
purposes of thinking about inmate governance in Latin American prisons
(Navarro & Sozzo, 2020; Sozzo, 2020).
In the late 1950s, in relation to American prisons, Sykes argued that
the idea of “total control” by the authorities and guards over prisoners,
although promoted by the same official rhetoric, is an illusion. Custo-
dians do not have an “infinite power”, they “are not total despots” (Sykes,
1999 [1958], 42), their “dominant position” “is more fiction than real-
ity” (Sykes, 1999 [1958], 45).7 The wide dissemination of violations
to the rules by prisoners in the daily life of the prison is a constant
indicator of how difficult it is to maintain order for those state actors
in charge and how it is, to a certain extent, an always unfinished task
(Sykes, 1999 [1958], 45–46). For this author, the use of force to generate
order in the prison is, in fact, as inefficient as it is dangerous, since
the prisoners are always more than the guards, violence usually gener-
ates violence and, in this way, the guards can absolutely lose control of
the situation (Sykes, 1999 [1958], 49–50). This is something that custo-
dians commonly recognize and from which they operate, so brutality
is, according to Sykes, rare or contained (Sykes, 1999 [1958], 32, 64).
7 This does not prevent Sykes from recognizing the “authoritarian” character of this institution
of legal punishment—recalling de Beaumont and Tocqueville-: “the prison is an authoritarian
community and it will remain an authoritarian community, no matter how much the fact of the
custodian’s power may be eased by a greater concern for the inmates’ betterment”. But then he
adds controversially: “There are, however, many possible authoritarian communities and some
are preferable to others” (1999 [1958]: 133). In another text he refers to “a totalitarian system
rooted in the democratic matrix” (Sykes, 1956a: 97).
380 M. Sozzo
Guards and prisoners, in turn, develop a closeness and intimacy based

not only on a shared social background, but also on the prolonged
periods they spend together in a closed space (Sykes, 1956a, 102–103;
1956b, 259–260; 1999 [1958], 33, 54).
Sykes (1999 [1958], 56) states that, to a great extent, the guards
depend on the prisoners for the construction of prison order. In this
way, part of guards’ tasks is transferred to the hands of the prisoners
whom they trust, especially the “cellblock runner”, who takes care of
many more things than those that are recognized as his duties and “may
wield power and influence far beyond nominal definition of their role”
(Sykes, 1956a, 104–106; 1956b, 260–261; 1999 [1958], 57, 127).
In turn, within the framework of a scheme of “reciprocity”, the guards
constantly “look the other way”, tolerating certain infractions of offi-
cial rules, in exchange for obedience to other rules—“where it really
counts”—. In other words, “compromise” and “negotiation” between
prisoners and guards is a constant and habitual component of prison
life. (Sykes, 1956a, 100; 1956b, 260; 1999 [1958], 52–58, 127).8 Here
those who are recognized as the leaders of the prisoners play a key role.
Sykes, following prisoner argot, distinguishes different roles in the world
of prisoners who are given specific names (1999 [1958], 84–86). The
leader is the “real man”, a person who complies with the “inmate’s code”,
a set of values and maxims to which prisoners publicly adhere as a guide
for their behaviour.9 As such, he becomes a model, recognized both
8 Sykes stated: “In this limited sense, the control of the prison officials is partly concurred in
by the inmates as well as imposed on them from above” (1999 [1958]: 74).
9 This “normative system” had already been partially described by Clemmer (1940), but Sykes’s
innovation is to define its origin and function within the prison. In a 1960 article with Sheldon
Messenger (Sykes-Messenger, 1960) he argues that this type of code is widespread and that it
can be found in very different prisons, beyond the case studied in his book. For these authors,
this is something that is rooted in the structural properties of incarceration. These properties
are the “pains of incarceration”: the deprivations that go beyond the deprivation of liberty
and that define the experience of incarceration. These deprivations affect the prisoner’s “self-
image”. (Sykes, 1956a, 106–110; 1999 [1958], 63–84) The “inmates’ code” is viewed as a
way to alleviate these sufferings, to bear the weight of moral condemnation and its impact
on self-image, by allowing prisoners to build relationships that mitigate the psychological and
practical problems of incarceration. For Sykes the code is an ideal, which does not mean that
the prisoners actually behave according to it. The code is “anti-institutional” in terms of its
content, but it proposes order should not be broken except when it is essential and it promotes
that there should be no hostilities among prisoners and between prisoners and guards. In this
by authorities and guards and by prisoners, marked by his dignity and

strength in the face of the adversities of incarceration. These “real men”
are the “natural” intermediaries between the authorities and guards and
the group of prisoners, actively participating in the negotiation of prison
order. They constantly receive “informal” benefits10 and act as distrib-
utors of them among prisoners, structuring clientelistic schemes. It is
important to note that, in Sykes’s perspective, these leaders are not seen
by the other prisoners as “collaborators” with the authorities and guards,
but rather as weavers of a delicate balance between “cooperation” and
“rejection” (Sykes, 1956c, 136; 1999 [1958], 101–102, 107, 124–126;
Sykes & Messinger, 1960, 10–11, 17). In fact, prison argot reserves other
names for those who fulfil “collaborationist” roles. On the one hand, the
“Center men”—referring to the site in the prison that is identified as the
seat of the official control—who are the ones who adopt the perspec-
tive of the authorities and do not hide this alignment from the other
prisoners. And there are also the “rats”, who inform the guards about
the activities of other prisoners, betraying the loyalty of the group, in
order to achieve personal benefits (Sykes, 1956a, 110; 1956c, 134; 1999
[1958], 87–90). All this leads Sykes to point out that in the prison he
analyzes there is a “’semi-official self-government’ exercised by the inmate
population” (1999 [1958], 122), that “the inmates have established their
own unofficial version of control” (1999 [1958], 127) or the “illicit form
of inmate self-government” (1999 [1958], 128).
It is evident that, compared to the images of “total” or “complete”
state control offered by other classic texts of social studies on prisons
in the Global North (Foucault, 1977; Goffman, 1961), Sykes offers us
several keys to think about different forms of participation by prisoners
in the governance schemes and dynamics of incarcerated life (Navarro
& Sozzo, 2020; Sozzo, 2020). Proceeding synthetically, I consider that
sense, it is central to stabilizing the prison. The inmate’s code, in Sykes’s view, has a double
function: it is a collective mechanism that allows prisoners to survive in prison and it is a
source of institutional order (Crewe, 2016, 79–79).‘
10 For Sykes (1999 [1958], 48–52), in the prison that he analyzed the “formal” rewards that
were available to custodians, in the same way as punishments of the same type, do not have
the necessary entity to motivate the prisoners to comply with the rules, since they imply little
differences with respect to the living conditions that are imposed on them from the beginning
of their confinement.
382 M. Sozzo
there are at least four fundamental elements with which to dialogue in

the study of inmate governance in contemporary Latin American prisons:
(a) the frequent fictitious nature of total control by state agents—
even when officially declared—and the actual dislocation of a part of
the exercise of power from captors to captives; (b) consequently, the
important and inevitable role of negotiation and compromise between
captors and captives in the production of prison order; (c) the affirma-
tion of the existence of multiple roles that prisoners can play in the
governance of incarcerated life; and (d) the need to think about these
roles in a continuum that implies different degrees of collaboration and
contestation with respect to the prison authorities and guards.
Arguing that it is useful to dialogue with Sykes’s work when thinking
about inmate governance in Latin America does not mean it is indis-
pensable, or that it should be the starting point of our inquiries—again,
recalling the general warning of Martin (2014, 4). In numerous chapters
of this book the authors make reference to Sykes, in some cases more
incidentally, in other cases in a more substantive way, in some cases to
point out similarities with what was observed in their research, in other
cases to point out differences (Antillano, this volume; Ariza & Itrurralde,
this volume; Avila & Sozzo, this volume; Darke, this volume; Diaset al.,
this volume; Navarro & Sozzo, this volume; Stegemann Dieter, this
volume; Weegels, this volume). It is a resource among others possible
to thinking about what is observed in certain contexts of confinement of
our region.
In the literature of recent years about inmate governance in Latin
America it is possible to observe something similar regarding Sykes.11
It is interesting to note that a crucial concept in part of this literature,
used to defining certain forms of participation of prisoners in the govern-
mental relations of incarcerated life, has been that of “self-governance”, a
11 For example, recently, Sacha Darke has argued that there is an important difference between
Sykes’s perspective and his own observations on inmate governance in Brazilian prisons. For
Darke, the American author thinks of these governmental roles of the prisoners from the idea
of ‘corruption of authority’ and as a ‘defect of bureaucratic power’ and not as the result of
‘institutionalizations of ordinary practices’ and’ as a way of sharing authority (Darke, 2018, 230,
287, 299, 303). Or, also recently, Weegels (2019, 62–63) has raised the usefulness of Sykes’s
ideas about the impact of “prison riots” on the reconstruction of the balance of power between
prisoners and authorities and guards in the contemporary context of Nicaraguan prisons.
term—as we have just seen—employed by Sykes, although in his work it

was not the object of a detailed reflection on its implications. This notion
in this recent literature on Latin American prisons has not been predom-
inantly constructed in dialogue with the American author. It is possible
to argue that the theoretical elaboration in this regard has rather been the
autonomous product of a dialogue between the various social researchers
working on this issue in different countries of the region, in a kind
of South-South exchange—although with a strong presence of authors
based at universities in the Global North and dedicated to studying this
region of the Global South. Its use can be observed in numerous very
significant texts (Antillano, 2015, 2017, this volume; Antillano et al.
2016; Birkbeck, 2011; Cerbini, 2012, 2017; Darke, 2013, 2014, 2018,
this volume; Darke & Días, 2016; Dake & Garces, 2017; Darke &
Karam, 2016; Macaulay, 2017, 2019; Skarbek, 2010; Weegels, 2017,
this volume). A potential problem with this notion is evoking the image
of a generalized ‘withdrawal’ of the State, which would translate into
its simple ‘absence’, and which would make the prisoners autonomously
govern incarcerated life, while the State actors would dedicate them-
selves exclusively to guarding the boundaries between the inside and the
outside of prisons. This is not a convincing image, from my point of
view. Even in the most extreme cases, in which prisoner organizations
have developed with a high capacity and scope to govern what happens
in a prison—as illustrated in the chapters of this book on Brazil and
Venezuela (see Dias, this volume, Stegemann Dieter, this volume; Darke,
this volume; Antillano, this volume)—, they must negotiate and agree
on a series of relevant issues with state actors. For example, the entry of
illegal drugs, firearms or other prohibited or even permitted goods (food,
refrigerators, televisions, etc.), garbage collection or the access of family
and friends and their prolonged stay in the contexts of confinement. In
all these cases, the cooperation of the authorities and guards in charge
of guarding the prison borders is required. In certain cases, this cooper-
ation is built on the basis of a corrupt exchange, but in others it is not.
Furthermore, in some of these contexts there are also some interventions
by state agents that routinely go beyond the prison walls because they are
positively valued by the higher echelons of the prisoner hierarchy, such as
educational and cultural or health care activities. But also, decisions and
384 M. Sozzo
actions of state agents have been recorded in these same contexts, which
imply going beyond the prison walls in a logic of confrontation, often
using force, in order to alter the balance of power between the prisoners
or even regain control of the penal institution. Finally, as it is evident,
though its importance should not be overlooked, it is always these state
agents who keep the prisoners incarcerated.12
Partly in relation to the misunderstandings that this image of with-
drawal and absence of the State can generate and partly in relation to
the realization of observations in contexts of confinement where the
presence of state actors is more visible and evident, various researchers
working on these schemes of participation of prisoners in the gover-
nance of imprisoned life in Latin America, have advanced the alternative
notion of “co-governance”—again within the framework of a South-
South theoretical conversation—(Avila & Sozzo, this volume; Bracco,
2020, 45–50, 95–128; this volume; Darke, 2018, 139–197, 279–321;
Peirce, this volume; Stegemann Dieter, this volume; Navarro & Sozzo,
this volume; Weegels, 2019, this volume; ). Clearly this notion remedies
the problem of imagining that state actors simply do not intervene in
the governance of incarcerated life when some prisoners become govern-
mental agents, illuminating the importance of revealing the weight of
state decisions and actions. Now this notion raises another potential
problem. It can easily evoke an image of these governance schemes in
which there would only be a collaborative relationship between captors
and captives, which makes one lose sight of confrontations and conflicts
that often emerge between these actors in these contexts. It is essential to
avoid this effect, placing such confrontations and conflicts in the centre
of our attention, since the dynamics can be of “shared governance” but
also of “contested governance” (Avila & Sozzo, this volume; Navarro&
Sozzo, 2020, 213–215; this volume).
Recently, David Skarbek (2020, 9–10, 16–17)—as I briefly pointed
out in the Introduction to this volume—has very interestingly used
12 Antillano, one of the authors who has used the notion of “self-governance”, has been
concerned in avoiding this image of mere “absence”, highlighting the roles of state agents
in the governance of these contexts of confinement. He points out in this regard: “prison self-
governance can only exist thanks to the support and tolerance of state actors” (2015, 31). See
also Antillano (2015, 29–32; this volume) and Antillano et al. (2016, 208).
these same notions to differentiate two types of “inmate governance” in

contemporary prisons at a global level that, precisely, would differ in rela-
tion to the roles of state actors. In “self-governance” there would be an
absence of “official governance”, that is, of governance by state actors,
while in “co-governance” there would be governmental interventions by
state actors but they would be characterized by their weakness. While
the former evokes an idea of “replacement” of state actors by prisoners
in the construction of prison order, the latter evokes an idea of “comple-
mentation” of state actors and prisoners in the development of this task.
I think that Skarbek’s uses of these two notions clearly continue to have
the aforementioned problems. But what I am interested in highlighting
here is how these notions that have emerged in the fundamentally South-
South theoretical conversation, about prison order in Latin America—in
which Skarbek (2010, 2016) has actively participated-, generate these
categories that ‘travel’ to the Global North in his recent book, enabling
potential uses to observe power relations in contexts of confinement in
the United States and the United Kingdom (Skarbek, 2020, 89–146).
This South-North exchange exercise shows the potential for a more egal-
itarian conversation in social studies about prisons between researchers
focused on different regions of the world, beyond the traditional patterns
of hierarchy and subordination that cross this as other fields of studies in
social sciences (Aliverti 2021; Carrington et al., 2019).
Towards a Comparative Perspective

Throughout this book, the authors have explored particular schemes
of inmate governance in Latin American prisons in different national
contexts. As a whole, this book shows us a high level of variation in these
practices of governance in the region (Ariza & Iturralde, this volume;
Darke, 2018, 18–19; Hathazy & Muller, 2016, 123; Macaulay, 2019,
243; Peirce, this volume). As Skarbek (2020, 150) has well stated, at a
more general level, with respect to the different forms of construction of
order in prisons globally, there are few comparative analyses, being the
“focus overwhelmingly on single-site studies”. The same happens more
386 M. Sozzo
specifically with respect to the various forms of prisoner participation in

the governance relations of imprisoned life in Latin America.
In this last section, based on the social research in this regard that
has been developed in recent years, and especially on the contents of
this book, I will seek to present a set of dimensions—with their respec-
tive different valences—for the exercise of comparison, making special
reference to the various examples worked by the different authors of
this collective volume. This is not the final outcome of a comparative
study, but rather a preliminary proposal launched to boost discussion
in this field of studies, as an initial contribution to carry out this task
adequately.13 I consider that it can be useful to think comparatively not
only within Latin America, but across other regions of both the Global
South and North. In this sense, I identify seven crucial dimensions,
which are relatively interrelated—in some cases more clearly than in
others—and in which there are gradations between extreme points. This
initial proposal for the exercise of comparison does not seek to explain
the variations of inmate governance schemes but rather to describe their
most relevant characteristics, which obviously constitutes a precedent
task in order to develop a more ambitious one.
The first dimension to consider is the degree of autonomy inmates
have with respect to prison authorities and guards in regard to the devel-
opment of the practices of governing incarcerated life, which allows
them to generate their own decisions and actions, between a maximum
and a minimum of state involvement in the construction of prison
order.14 Thus, in prisoners’ organizations with a strong and complex
structure, such as the Primeiro Comando da Capital in the prisons of
the state of Sao Paulo and in other states of Brazil, it is possible to
find the maximum degree of autonomy (Dias et al., this volume, Stege-
mann Dieter, this volume). This maximum degree of autonomy could
13 In this exercise I dialogue with some points raised previously by Macaulay (2017, 51; 2019,
253–254) and Skarbek (2020, 12–18).
14 As I stated in the previous section, it is necessary to avoid assuming that there is something
like mere absence and lack of intervention of state actors. Examples of governance schemes
that embody the extreme degrees of this continuum, in relation to the autonomy of prisoners
as governance agents, have been frequently thought of in the literature on prisons in Latin
America through the notions, respectively, of “self-governance” and “co-governance”, which we
also analyzed in the previous section.
also be embodied by the figure of the Narco in Colombian prisons,

(Ariza & Iturralde, this volume), the Carro in some Venezuelan prisons
(Antillano, this volume) or the Tigres of the prisons in the Dominican
Republic before the reform of the early 2000s (Peirce, this volume).15
In turn, this autonomy has lesser but relatively strong degrees—and
similar to each other- in other mechanisms of inmate governance in the
region, as in the case of the Gallada in Nicaraguan prisons (Weegels, this
volume) or the evangelical wings of the provincial prisons in Argentina
(Navarro & Sozzo, this volume). In comparison, surely this degree of
autonomy is lower in the Delegadas of the Santa Mónica prison in Peru
(Bracco, this volume), the Consejos de Internos of the Nicaraguan prisons
(Weegels, this volume), the Representantes of the “old model” prisons in
the Dominican Republic (Peirce, this volume), the Comites de Solidari-
dade of the São Paulo prisons in the 1980s (Dias et al., this volume)
or the “prisoner entrepreneur” of the Punta de Rieles prison in Uruguay
(Avila & Sozzo, this volume).
Second, we can identify the degree of symmetry between prisoners and
prison authorities and guards. The relationships between captors and
captives in modern prisons have always been marked by an asymmetry,
an imbalance, which can be considered structural and constitutive of the
exercise of power in this type of contexts. However, inmate governance
schemes may imply a certain reduction in this asymmetry, which may be
more or less substantive, depending on the case. Thus, in prison organi-
zations with a strong and complex structure such as the PCC in prisons
of Brazil (Dias et al., this volume, Stegemann Dieter, this volume) or the
Narco in the case of Colombian prisons (Ariza & Iturralde, this volume),
the asymmetry, the imbalance is severely reduced, which means that state
actors must be very careful when defining when and how to intervene in
prison life, in order to avoid adverse effects on prison order. At the other
extreme, always within the examples discussed in this book, we can find
the “prisoner entrepreneur” from the Punta de Rieles prison in Uruguay
15 It is difficult to place the cases of the “community-run” prisons in Brazil analyzed by Darke
(this volume) in this dimension. It would seem that state intervention in APAC prisons is really
minimal—although it is always the state that authorizes their operation and sends prisoners
there—while it is somewhat greater in the CRs—since state agents are in charge of security. In
any case, they seem closer to the extreme of the maximum degree of autonomy.
388 M. Sozzo
(Avia & Sozzo, this volume) or the members of the Consejo de Internos of
Nicaraguan prisons (Weegels, this volume) whose governmental roles are
clearly the product of a delegation by prison authorities and are subject
to their control, which may not be insidious but permanent. In these
cases, the subordination of this type of prisoners to state actors is more
frequent and evident.
Third, the degree of confrontation between prisoners and prison
authorities and guards around the construction of order. Prisoners’
participation in the governance mechanisms of incarcerated life may
be framed in a relationship predominantly marked by collaboration
with prison authorities and guards. This does not necessarily imply a
zero degree of confrontation—and hence the ambivalence that often
surrounds these actors in the world of prisoners. The examples of the
Delegadas of the Santa Monica prison in Peru (Bracco, this volume) or of
the Consejo de Internos in the prisons of Nicaragua (Weegels, this volume)
seem to be located around this extreme point. On the contrary, the case
of the Carro in certain prisons in Venezuela (Antillano, this volume) or of
the PCC in prisons in Brazil (Dias et al., this volume, Stegemann Dieter,
this volume) seem to be in the opposite extreme of the continuum, maxi-
mizing the levels of confrontation—although this does not imply neither
a zero degree of collaboration.
Fourth, the degree of the scope of prisoner governance practices. In
certain cases, the scope is defined by the facets of imprisoned life pris-
oners can effectively govern. In this way, the “prisoner entrepreneur”
of the Punta de Rieles prison in Uruguay can govern his employees
while they are working, but this capacity does not extend beyond this
activity—and the place in which it is developed (Avila & Sozzo, this
volume). This scope is broader in the case of the hierarchy of the evan-
gelical wing in Argentine provincial prisons, since their practices of
governance extend to different facets of the lives of those who live in
it—from the religious activities to the music that it is listened to and
the way to do it- but it also has its limits of a spatial nature since they
only do it within this specific area of the prison (Navarro & Sozzo, this
volume). It is much broader in the case of the Carro in certain prisons in
Venezuela (Antillano, this volume), where their practices of governance
cover almost the entire prison and all facets of incarcerated life. And it is
even broader in the case of the PCC in Brazil, which not only exceeds the
limits of a singular prison, encompassing many penal institutions in one
state, but increasingly other states (Dias et al., this volume, Stegemann
Dieter, this volume).
Fifth, the degrees of complexity of inmates’ organizational structures
for the development of the practices of governance of incarcerated life.
There are inmate governance schemes structured around organizations
that include a large group of prisoners who are assigned different roles
within the framework of a hierarchy with different levels. This hierarchy
is based on their own rules—even written, in some cases- and produces
a strong identity among the participants, which persists over time. A
paroxysmal example in this regard discussed in this book would be the
PCC in the prisons of Brazil (Dias this volume, Stegemann Dieter, this
volume). But these characteristics can also be found in the scheme of
the Carro of certain prisons in Venezuela (Antillano, this volume), in
the scheme of the evangelical wings of provincial prisons in Argentina
(Navarro & Sozzo, this volume) or in the “community-run” prisons in
Brazil (Darke, this volume). In the antipodes, simpler inmate governance
schemes could be identified, which even anchor the exercise of gover-
nance practices in some singular, isolated prisoners, as in the case of the
“prisoner entrepreneur” of the Punta de Rieles prison in Uruguay (Avila
& Sozzo, this volume) or in the Representantes of the prisons of the “old
model” of the Dominican Republic (Peirce, this volume).16
16 In relation to the organizational structures of the inmate governance practices, it would be

possible to include other characteristics as relevant to differentiate schemes, consistent or not
with the reference made here to their complexity -related, in turn, to the differentiation between
centralization / decentralization raised by Skarbek (2020, 12). A possible axis—pointed out by
Macaulay (2017, 51)—would be the distinction—less in terms of gradation than in a binary
key—between the organizational structures that only operate inside the prison—most of the
schemes analyzed throughout this book- and those that also do so outside the prison walls -such
as the case of the PCC in Brazil (Dias et al., this volume, Stegemann Dieter, this volume)
and, to some extent, the case of the evangelical pavilions, considering their relationship with
the external churches, in the provincial prisons in Argentina (Navarro & Sozzo, this volume).
Another possible axis—also pointed out by Macaulay (2017, 51)—that would also imply a
binary key, would be to differentiate those organizational structures that within the same
prison acquire a monopolistic status—as frequently happens with the presence of the PCC
in Brazil (Dias et al., this volume, Stegemann Dieter, this volume)—and those that in the
same confinement context compete between each other in some way—as, for example, in the
provincial prisons of Argentina those that are structured in the evangelical and common wings
390 M. Sozzo
Sixth, the degree of use by the prisoners themselves of violence as

a tool to govern incarcerated life. This is a very significant dimension
since, especially in the public sphere, certain mechanisms of inmate
governance—and even the very idea that prisoners participate as actors
in the governance of incarcerated life—is strongly associated with the
frequent and intense exercise of physical violence. In several of the
studies contained in this book, violence appears as a very frequent and
intensely used tool at certain moments in the past of these governance
schemes, as in the case of the PCC in Brazilian prisons (Dias et al., this
volume, Stegemann Dieter, this volume) or the Carro of certain prisons
in Venezuela (Antillano, this volume). This does not mean that it is
not used today, but it seems to be much more dosed and focused. A
panorama of greater use is the one that emerges around the ley de la
Gallada in the prisons of Nicaragua (Weegels, this volume). Certainly,
the levels of use appear as closer to the minimum point in other cases
addressed in this book, such as in the evangelical wings of the provincial
prisons of Argentina (Navarro & Sozzo, this volume), in the system of
Delegadas in the Santa Mónica prisons in Peru (Bracco, this volume),
in the “prisoner entrepreneur” in the Punta de Rieles prison in Uruguay
(Avila & Sozzo, this volume) and the “community-run” prisons of Brazil
(Darke, this volume).17
Finally, the degree of formalization of prisoners’ participationin the
relations of governance of incarcerated life. For the most part, these
inmate governance schemes in Latin America have been conceived and
developed outside the legal and administrative rules of prisons, in daily
(Navarro & Sozzo, this volume). Finally, a third characteristic that could be outlined would be
related to the degrees of stability over time of the organizational structure, differentiating those
schemes that present high levels, such as the PCC in Brazil (Dias, this volume, Stegemann
Dieter, this volume), of those that are more ephemeral, linked to specific circumstances that
have a certain degree of volatility, such as the solidarity committees of the São Paulo prisons
in the 1980s (Dias et al., this volume).
17 Recently, Gual (2021) has proposed another differentiation with respect to violence as an
instrument of inmate governance that may be interesting to explore, in its articulation with the
distinction about its greater or lesser use raised here. In some inmate governance schemes in
the region, their regulations only allow the use of physical force to certain actors within the
organizational structure and prohibit—and severely sanction—it beyond them. In other cases,
this does not happen, so violence could be used by many actors in the world of prisoners.
Then, he proposes to identify various levels of concentration of the use of violence by prisoners.
practices and as part of the broader informality as a trait that characterizes

this type of penal institution in the region—which we already referred to
briefly in the Introduction. In some cases, the prison authorities partic-
ipate in some way in activating the actors who play governmental roles
in the world of prisoners, but nevertheless it continues to be an informal
position, as in the Delgadas of the Santa Monica prison in Peru (Bracco,
this volume) or the Representantes of the “old model” prisons in the
Dominican Republic (Peirce, this volume). However, there are also cases
in which there is a formalization—of diverse intensity and form- of these
governmental roles, such as in the Comites de Solidaridade of the São
Paulo prisons in the 1980s (Dias, this volume), in the Consejo de Internos
of the Nicaraguan prisons (Weegels, this volume) and in the various
schemes of the “community-run” prisons of Brazil (Darke, this volume).
The positions of the various inmate governance schemes in the
continuums of these different dimensions may have a relatively strong
correlation in certain cases. Thus, for example, it would seem that greater
autonomy usually corresponds to greater symmetry. However, it is neces-
sary to be cautious and avoid building these links as necessary, always and
in all cases. Schemes in which the levels of autonomy and symmetry are
high can acquire a fundamentally collaborative characteristic—such as
the evangelical wings in the provincial prisons of Argentina (Navarro &
Sozzo, this volume)—or fundamentally confrontational—as in the Carro
of certain prisons in Venezuela(Antillano, this volume). On the other
hand, some of these dimensions, such as violence and formalization, do
not tend to have, by contrast, a clear correlation with the variations on
other dimensions.
As Skarbek has raised, I consider that a comparative approach allows
dialogue between single-site research of different scholars in this regard,
which has been growing significantly recently—and of which this book
is an example-, generating within the framework of a collective and
collaborative effort a greater capacity to construct generalizations. Clearly
“a more intentional and systematic effort by researchers could greatly
accelerate our learning by making more studies relevant to a compara-
tive project” (Skarbek, 2020, 155). In this sense, this initial proposal is
conceived as a further step in this direction, which awaits to be taken
392 M. Sozzo
up and critically discussed by those who address the problem of inmate

governance, both within and outside Latin America.
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Index
A 238, 240, 242, 279, 317,

Abolitionism 334 374, 382–384, 387–391
abolitionists 335, 348, 352 Arbitrariness/arbitrary 46, 49
Admission 271, 281, 284 Argentina 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 16, 22,
Adorno, S. 44, 45, 58 370, 374, 387, 389–391
Agamben, G. 159, 178 Buenos Aires province 261–263,
Agentes (Agents) 18 267
Agentes (Officers) 95, 110 federal prisons 264, 265
Algranti, J. 260, 262–265, 267, 269, provincial prisons 279, 287
270, 274, 279, 281, Santa Fe 22
283–285 Santa Fe province 261–263,
Aliverti, A. 375, 378, 379, 385 266–268
Alternatives to detention 24, 343 Ariza, L. 6, 8, 13, 17, 65, 66, 86,
Alvarez, M.C. 8, 10, 14, 16, 42, 148, 374, 382, 385, 387
47–49, 51, 53, 137, 280, Association for the Protection and
374 Assistance of the Convict
Andersen, J. 260, 264, 265, 279, (APAC)
283, 285 APAC de Bragança Paulista 345
Antillano, A. 5, 10, 12, 19, 131, APAC de Itaúna 329–331, 333,
136, 146, 149, 158, 216, 334, 337, 344, 347, 348
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 399
license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98602-5
400 Index
APAC de Patrocínio 332 Minas Gerais 329, 331, 332, 334,

APAC de São José dos Campos 342
331, 345 Rio de Janeiro 339–341
APAC de São Luis 334, 348 São Paulo 8, 51, 331, 334, 337,
Autonomy 386, 387, 391 338, 340, 345, 346
Avila, F. 11, 12, 15, 23, 142, 188, Brazilian Fraternity for the
213, 285, 299, 301, 323, Assistance of Convicts
382, 384, 387–390 (FBAC) 331, 332, 344
Building tender 373
Business 305–307, 310–312, 315,
321
B business rules 311, 315
Baile de la botella (dance of the
bottle) 167, 168
Ballesteros, A. 300 C
Bandyopadhyay, M. 2, 191, 214, Carceral injustice 335, 336
220, 237, 240, 244–247, Carceral institution/system 182
251, 252 Carlen, P. 235, 236, 239
Batista, N. 336, 349 Carrington, K. 188, 191, 237, 251,
Bergman, M. 6, 8, 10, 11, 13 375, 378, 379, 385
Biondi, K. 45, 49, 217, 349 Carro, El 140, 141, 387–391
Birkbeck, C. 9–12, 80, 209, 210, Castro e Silva, A.M.de 190,
316, 368–370, 372–374, 216–218, 220
383 Catedral, la (The Cathedral) 17, 18,
Blundo, G. 158 67, 68, 71–73, 75, 78, 79,
Bosworth, M. 238, 239, 245 81–83, 86, 89
Bottoms, A.E. 40, 53 Centralization 99, 100
Bottom-up dynamics 283 Cerbini, F. 137, 188, 192, 212, 220,
Bowden, M. 67, 73, 75, 82, 83 244, 245, 316, 322
Bracco, L. 21, 285, 316, 318, 378, Chakrabarty, D. 378
384, 387, 388, 390, 391 Chamberlain, A. 375
Brardinelli, R 260, 262–265, 267, Chantraine, G. 42, 43
269, 274, 285 City police jail (CPJ) 157
Brazil 2–4, 7–10, 14–16, 21, 24, 38, Coelho, E.C. 43, 44, 190, 209, 218
43–46, 53, 54, 57, 58, 187, Coercion 188, 193, 194, 207, 208,
190, 194, 210, 211, 214, 210, 214, 222
216, 372, 374, 377, 383, Co-governance 2, 14, 15, 20, 21,
386–391 23, 25, 156, 157, 159, 160,
Maranhão 334 165, 176–178, 181, 188,
Index 401
189, 191, 192, 207, philosophy/culture of

216–218, 220–223, 234, containment 198, 200
238, 240, 242, 243, 261, policy of containment 189
285, 286, 300, 315, 316, Control 7, 10, 14, 18, 19, 99, 101,
339, 368, 384, 385 104, 106, 107, 113, 117,
Collaboration 299, 316, 334, 342, 120, 121, 130–132, 134,
382, 388 135, 137, 139, 140, 144,
Collaborator 269, 270, 273, 274, 146–148, 161, 165, 182,
279 188, 190, 199, 200, 202,
Collective 338–340, 342, 343, 349, 204, 205, 209, 210, 216,
352 220–222, 240, 242, 245
Collective (colectivo) 161–163 Convict criminology 335, 354
Collectivism 12 Conviviality 240, 241, 244, 247,
collective 13, 16 248
Collectivist 304, 323 Cooperation 263, 280, 285, 286
Collusion 20, 156, 160, 180 Correction 371
Colombia 5, 7, 9, 16, 68, 69, 74, correctional model 370
82, 83, 85, 88, 372 Corruption 95, 97, 102, 104, 111,
Colonialism 238 121
Comando Vermelho (CV) 10, 44 Crewe, B. 188, 190–192, 194, 210,
Comites de Solidaridade (Solidarity 211, 213, 219, 300, 308,
committes) 387, 391 315, 323
Community development bank 307 Crisis 189, 190, 201, 206, 215, 219,
Comparison 2, 5, 11, 368, 374, 221, 222
386, 387 Cultural Association for the
comparative perspective 368, 385 Development of Prisoners
Complexity 389 and Former Prisoners
Confinement 174, 182 (ACUDA) 343–347, 349,
Confrontation 39, 51, 56, 280, 281, 353
285, 286, 316, 321, 384, Cunha, M. 191, 194
388
Conquest 284, 285
Consejo de Internos (inmate D
council)/Consejos (members Darke, S. 2, 6, 8–12, 14, 15, 24, 45,
of the inmate council) 156, 50, 55, 64–66, 69, 100,
160, 163, 166, 388, 391 101, 137, 158, 167, 188,
Consent 188, 193, 194, 207, 208, 190–192, 194, 212, 213,
212–222 216, 217, 220, 235, 237,
Containment 21 238, 240, 279, 285, 297,
402 Index
316–318, 333, 337, 339, disciplinary proceedings 333,

340, 352, 369, 372, 375, 335, 354
376, 378, 382–385, 387, disciplinary rules 24, 82
389–391 disciplinary sanctions 200
Decentralization 117 disciplinary technology 77
Decolonial approach 21, 233 Discretion 275, 276
Delegadas (Delegates) 387, 388, 390 Dislocation 261, 282, 283, 285
Delegates 241–243, 247–249, 251, Domination 188, 192, 207, 208,
252 212, 219, 222, 224
Delegation 318, 319 Dominican republic 5, 7, 16, 18,
Denyer Willis, G. 179 93–96, 100, 102, 120, 372,
Depatriarchal approach 21, 234 387, 389, 391
de Souza Santos, B. 21, 234, 240,
244, 247, 248
Dialogue 12, 15, 19, 21, 25, 101, E
117–119, 188, 189, 193, Economy 19, 107, 114, 132, 139,
204–208, 213, 217–223 146, 148
Dias, C.N. 8, 10, 14, 16, 45, Entrepreneurism 300
49–51, 53, 55, 57, 58, 66, Escobar, J.P. 63, 67–69, 71–76, 79,
137, 191, 207, 218, 280, 80, 83
382, 383, 386–391 Ethnographic research 156
Difference 367–369, 372, 373, 375, Ethnography 21, 188, 191, 194,
376, 382 217, 234
DiIulio, J.J.J. 41, 190, 216, 219, Evangelical wing 13, 22, 23, 371,
220, 223 387–391
Disciplinary tools/function 181 evangelism 13, 22, 266
Discipline/disciplinary 24, 39, 107, multiplication of evangelical
109, 110, 113, 114, 117, wings 260, 264
131, 135, 140, 143, 144, conditions 261
189, 191, 192, 197, 205, processes 261
210–212, 217, 218, 223, Exception, state of 159, 178, 180,
276 182
disciplinary code/rules 330, 333, Exclusion 19, 26, 132–134, 138,
344, 347, 353 143, 144, 148, 149
disciplinary committee 330, 333, Exploitation/overexploitation
344 131–133, 137, 144, 145,
disciplinary institutions 81 147, 149
disciplinary powers 24, 77, 334, Ex-prisoners 24
335, 350, 352 Expulsion 272, 277, 281, 284
Index 403
External private companies 314 Global South 1, 21, 22, 24, 188,
191, 192, 194, 210, 211,
213, 214, 218, 220,
F 222–224, 233, 234, 237,
Feminist approach 234 238, 251, 252, 297, 367,
First Commend of the Capital 368, 374–377, 379, 383,
(PCC) 340 386
Focus group 195, 205 Goffman, E. 39, 79, 161, 166, 188,
Fondevilla, G. 6, 8, 10, 11, 13, 99 190, 210, 219, 351, 376,
Formalization 318, 369, 390, 391 381
Foucault, M. 2, 39, 42, 77, 80, 133, Goodman, P. 300
145, 188, 190, 192, 210, Gosling, H. 334, 348, 350, 351, 353
223, 376, 381 Governance 1, 2, 10–20, 22, 23, 25,
Fragmentation 50, 58 132, 146, 148, 188, 190,
Friction 299, 315, 319, 321 233, 234, 237–239, 252,
280, 282, 283, 352
centralized governance 101
G co-governance 94, 100, 103, 111,
Gago, V. 133, 145, 148 118, 119
Galería 161 contested governance 384
Galindo, M. 238, 239 decentralized governance 117
Gallada, La 387, 390 extralegal governance 317
Gang 340 extra-official governance 100,
Garces, C. 6, 9, 10, 12, 64, 65, 69, 101, 117
188, 190, 235, 237, 238, governance mechanisms 38, 39,
316, 317, 337, 339, 340, 41, 52, 58
343 informal governance 220
Garland, D. 300, 308, 323 official governance 117, 118, 190,
Gender 317, 385
gender-aware epistemology 238 prison governance 36–38, 40, 41,
gendered context 252 45, 48, 57, 59, 94, 99, 100,
gender roles 236 116, 117, 188–190, 192,
Global North 9, 11, 25, 188, 191, 194, 199, 207, 213, 216,
210, 211, 213, 214, 219, 219, 222
220, 222–224, 233, shared governance 55, 384
237–239, 252, 300, 301, Government 66, 67, 72, 73, 82, 83,
303, 322, 367, 368, 370, 85, 89
374, 376–379, 381, 383, self-government 66
385 Governor Montoro, F. 46
404 Index
Gramsci, A. 188, 192, 193, 207, I

213, 218, 220, 222 Ideology 19, 136, 195, 203
Grendon prison 351, 352, 354 Illegal markets/activities 40, 65, 66,
Griffiths, A. 244 78
Growth of incarcerated Illicit economy 175, 177
population/prison Imperative of activation 301, 302,
population 135, 139, 148 311, 315
Gual, R. 314, 317, 371 Imprisonment 369, 372
Guards 156, 161–165, 167, 170, Incapacitation 372
172, 179 incapacitating model 370
Incarceration 36, 40, 42, 54
expansion/intensification of
Incarceration 36
H incarceration growth/growth of
Hannah-Moffat, K. 234, 239, 300 incarceration 4–6, 8, 10
Harvey, D. 132, 145 incarceration rate 2–6, 263, 264
Hathazy, P. 9, 10, 135, 136, 264, mass incarceration 54, 56
265, 374–378, 385 Incarceration rate 64, 65, 135, 137
Hegemony 20, 237 Incompleteness 79, 80
hegemonic apparatus 207, 213, Informal arrangement 206
221 Informal authority 101
hegemonic project/project of Informal dynamics 339
hegemony 193, 208, 209, Informal governance/mechanisms 58
212, 218, 221, 222 Informality 297, 304
Hierarchy 259, 260, 265–267, 269, informal authority 24
270, 273–275, 280–282, informal codes 145
285 informal governance 21
Higa, G. 47, 48 informal negotiation 8
Hogg, R. 188, 191, 237 informal order 135
Horizontal 304, 319 informal rules 142, 143
Humanization plan 97, 121 Informal negotiation 189, 190, 216
Human rights 332, 335, 336, 343, Informal order/dynamics 239, 240
346, 348–350 Inmate 314, 317
Hybrid carceral system 156, 157, inmate code 312, 380
159 inmate collective/group 192, 217
Hybridity 68, 81, 87 inmate organization 389
Hybrid legal system 234, 240, 244, organization of inmates 204, 215
247, 250
Hybrid system/regime 12
Index 405
Inmate governance 338, 339, 367, K

368, 379, 382, 385, 387, Karam, M.L. 6, 9, 10, 12, 297, 316,
390, 392 317, 334, 337, 341, 369,
arrangements/schemes 2, 9, 14, 376, 378, 383
15, 23 Krmpotic, C.S. 262, 284
conditions of possibility 13, 15
expansion 2, 9, 10
inmate governance
schemes/mechanisms/arrangements
L
368, 374, 375, 385–387, Latin America 2, 3, 6, 8–11, 15, 18,
389–391 21, 23–25, 64, 65, 68, 69,
multiplication 2, 9, 10, 15 76, 80, 131, 134, 136, 141,
Insecurity 181 142, 145, 235, 237–240,
Inside-out 284 242, 279, 280, 285,
Institutional presence 316–318, 337, 368, 369,
abdicated institutional presence 371, 373–376, 378, 379,
118 382, 384–386, 390, 392
authoritarian institutional Lay 304
presence 101, 119 Leaders 263, 269, 270, 273–276,
Interface brokers 234, 242 279, 281, 286
Interlegality 12, 21, 234, 244, 250, Legal pluralism 252
251 Legitimacy 40, 42, 51–53, 59
Internment 369–372 Le Meur, P. 158
Interview 97, 98, 104, 106, 108, Lessing, B. 99, 101
109, 113, 119, 121, 189, Ley de la gallada 171, 172
195, 196, 202 Liebling, A. 97, 99, 190, 219
Irwin, J. 234, 235 Long, N. 234, 240, 242
Iturralde, M. 8, 13, 17, 64, 65, 73,
85, 86, 134, 137, 148, 158,
236, 374, 385, 387
M
Macaulay, F. 64–66, 69, 280, 341,
342, 345, 346, 349, 372,
J 383, 385, 386, 389
Jacobs, J.B. 40, 41, 190, 219 Manchado, M. 260, 262–265, 268,
Jefferson, A. 2, 237, 240, 251, 252 269, 275, 279, 280,
Jefferson, A.M. 188, 191, 194, 210, 284–286
214, 220 Maras 13
Jodadera 171–175 Market 13, 68, 70, 79, 81, 86, 87
406 Index
Martin, T.M. 12, 190, 191, 214, Neowelfarist 323

220, 237, 238, 240, 251, Nicaragua 4, 5, 7, 16, 20, 156–160,
375, 378, 382 166, 179–182, 388, 390
Mass incarceration 188, 192, 209 North-South dialogue 375
Mathiesen, T. 190, 191, 210, 211, Nuevo modelo de gestion penitenicaria
213, 219 (New prison management
Matthews, R. 190, 192 model) 93, 95
Mediation 264, 273 Nuñovero, L. 19, 101, 117–119,
Method 97, 99 240
Miller, P. 301
Monopoly/monopolization 58
Muller, M.M. 6, 9, 10, 375–378,
O
385
Officers
Mutual aid 304, 323
military officers 95, 97, 103, 117
police officers 107
VTP officers 97, 102, 110,
N
113–115, 119
Narco 13, 17, 18, 64, 65, 67–71,
Official governance 14
73–76, 78–82, 84, 387
O’ Malley, P. 301, 323
Narco culture 74
Ottoboni, M. 330–333, 348
Navarro, L. 9–11, 13, 22, 141, 143,
Outside-in 283, 284
240, 282, 316, 318, 371,
Outsourcing 22, 283, 318
379, 381, 382, 384,
Overcrowding 7, 12, 20, 36, 41, 54,
387–391
65, 76, 85, 96, 155, 166,
Negotiation 39, 43, 48, 51, 238,
191, 199–201, 203, 209,
241, 242, 244, 252, 261,
235, 264
264, 280, 281, 284–286
Neoliberal 323
Neoliberalism 19, 77
neoliberal creed 19, 131, 133, P
144 Paixão, L.A. 44
neoliberal government 132, 137 Participant observation 97, 189, 195
neoliberal hegemony 134 Pastor
neoliberal logic 145, 149 external pastor 266–269, 275,
neoliberal order 19, 133, 144, 278, 281, 283–286
150 internal pastor 266–279, 281,
neoliberal project 134 282, 285, 286
neoliberal rationality 143, 145 Patriarchalism 234, 235, 238, 239,
neoliberal state 136, 145 245
Index 407
Peirce, J. 11, 18, 94, 96, 97, 99, power relations 1, 18, 36, 40, 52,
135, 159, 349, 372, 384, 53, 58, 65, 67, 68, 78, 181,
385, 387, 389, 391 188, 191, 192, 194, 207,
Penal re-education 157, 180 208, 213, 216, 219, 222,
penal re-education 261, 279, 317, 377, 385
ideology/discourse 155 prisoner power 159, 182
Penal treatment 189, 196, 197, 199, soft power 21, 211, 213, 214,
214, 215, 219, 221 222
Penglase, B. 156, 158, 159, 172, state power 159, 182
179 Practice of forgiveness 272
Penitentiary project 77, 80, 88 Precariousness of prison/precarious
Peonía 129, 131, 133, 134, 139, prison conditions 54, 55
142, 143, 145, 146 Primeiro Comando da Capital (First
Pérez Guadalupe, J. 9, 16, 101, Commend of the Capital,
117–119, 238, 240, 242 PCC ) 8, 16, 17, 21, 37,
Permeability 79, 81 195, 386
Peru 7, 9, 16, 244, 252, 387, 388, Prison
390, 391 community-run prisons 15, 341,
Pojomovsky, I. 134, 143 372
Police officer 156, 165 new model prisons 102, 104, 120
Political economy 68, 89 old model prisons 94, 97, 103,
Porosity 68, 87 107, 109
Positions 260, 265, 266, 268, 269, prison administration 306,
273 308–310, 315, 318, 319,
Post-neoliberalism 321, 322, 333, 339, 340
post-neoliberal government 134 prison apparatus 213–215, 220,
Power 67–71, 73–75, 77, 79, 82, 221
88, 89, 99, 103, 105, 108, prison authorities 15, 22, 23, 97,
117, 119, 120, 122, 131, 104, 105, 135, 136, 140,
133, 140, 142, 146–148, 178, 203, 214, 217, 261,
242, 245, 252, 261, 269, 263, 264, 267, 268, 271,
279, 280, 282, 283, 285, 275, 279–284, 286, 299,
307, 315, 316, 318, 334, 301–304, 307, 309, 311,
335, 340, 346, 351, 382, 312, 314, 316, 318, 319,
384, 387 321, 322, 333, 338, 374,
hard power 21, 213 382, 386–388, 391
power brokers 105 prison conditions 44, 46, 53, 56
power dynamics 233, 238, 252 prison culture 18, 67, 85, 188,
192
408 Index
prison dynamics 36, 39, 42, 53, 194, 209, 210, 217,
68 336–338
prison/facility management 99 prison reform 18, 93, 96, 120,
prison/facility staff 98 335, 352
prison gangs 9, 41, 44, 45, 58, prison research 18, 98, 300
66, 68, 69, 119, 135–137, prison social order 66, 79, 86
139, 146–148, 203, 374 prison space 67, 73, 75, 86, 89
prison governance 158, 159, 176, prison staff 18, 21, 22, 188–190,
179, 181, 260, 261, 280, 194, 196, 198, 199, 201,
286, 315, 331, 341, 352 204, 205, 209, 215, 223,
prison governor 188, 189, 196, 233, 236, 239–241,
197, 199, 203, 205, 214, 244–247, 250, 251, 286,
215 338–340, 342, 346, 354
prison groups 67, 69 prison studies 234, 238
prison guards/officers 22, 23, 38, prison warden 303
73, 177, 196, 203, 209, Punta de Rieles prison 299–301,
212, 215–217, 219, 221, 303, 308, 315–318, 321,
259–262, 264, 268–271, 322, 387–390
275, 277, 279–282, 286, Santa Monica prison 388, 391
311, 316, 318, 319, 321, Self-governing prison
332, 340, 344, 374, 380, communities 341
381, 383, 386–388 warehouse prison 234, 235
prison hegemony 216, 219, 220 Prisoner 65, 66, 69, 70, 76–78, 81,
prison humanization 17, 46, 48 82, 86, 234–243, 245–252
prison life 2, 6, 38, 41, 43, 54, former prisoner 156, 157, 161,
55, 77, 85, 98 167
deterioration 2, 6 group of prisoners 16, 160, 175,
precarization 6 314
prison management 19, 41, 51, organisation of prisoners/inner
131, 136, 345 organisation 21, 233, 238,
prison market 18, 20, 65, 66, 322 250
prison order 191, 192, 194, 207, political prisoner 158
216–219, 222–224, 333, prisoner education 314, 371, 383
342 prisoner-employee 23, 299, 300,
prison policy 14, 47, 49, 57, 58, 309–315, 317, 318, 320
120, 192, 199, 318 prisoner-entrepreneurs 23, 299,
prison population 36–39, 41, 300, 305, 307, 309–312,
43–45, 47–51, 54–58, 187, 314–322, 387–390
Index 409
prisoner group/groups of Rehabilitation center 129–131, 140,

prisoners 66 141
prisoner hierarchy 173, 176 Representante (Representative) 18,
prisoner population 161, 162, 105–109, 111, 113, 117,
165, 172, 175, 176 118, 120, 387, 389, 391
prisoner rights 179 Representatives 265, 267
prisoner’s autonomy 299, 321 Resocialisation centres (CRs)
prisoner’s initiative 299, 301, 345–347
302, 308 Responsibilization 23, 299–304,
prisoner’s unionization 314 307, 317, 321
prisoner work 304, 377, 383 Reward 274, 275, 319
Prisoner/inmate group 100 Rhodes, L.A. 190, 191, 194, 210,
Prison governance 9, 14, 16–21, 24 211, 213, 219
Privatization 19, 131, 135, 137, Roles 260, 266, 269, 280, 283
144, 147, 149 Rose, N. 301, 308, 322
Privileges 160, 161, 164, 165, 176, Rubin, A. 319
177 Rules 259, 261, 266, 268–271, 275,
Productive activities 300, 304, 305 276, 278, 282
Punitiveness 3
Punitive sanction/detention 354
Punitive turn 2, 5, 17, 64, 65, 67, S
88 Salazar, A. 71–74, 83
Punta de Rieles prison 23 Salla, F. 3, 8, 10, 16, 44, 45, 48–51,
54, 137, 191, 222, 238,
280
R Sanction 301, 311, 319
Ramalho, J.R. 43, 190, 192, 209, Santa Monica Prison 236, 245
216, 218 Sapo 162, 163, 165
Ratio of prisoners to prison officers Scandal 245–247, 251
11 Schrag, C. 39
Real man 380 Scope 370, 372, 383, 388
Red command (CV) 340, 341 Scott, D. 334, 348, 350, 351, 353
Regimes of confinement 367, 369, Secrecy 155, 156, 158, 166, 176,
370, 373 178, 181, 182
objective/goal of 370 Segregation 19
Regional penitentiary system (SPR) Self-governance 2, 14, 22, 23, 25,
157, 161, 164, 169, 171, 279, 280, 285, 299, 300,
177 302, 308, 309, 315, 316,
Rehabilitation. See Correction 352, 354, 368, 382, 385
410 Index
Self-governing practices 160, 165 state authorities 8, 14, 15, 17, 22,
Self-government 41, 43 23, 70, 85, 211, 331, 332,
Self-rule/self-regulation 144 345
Sepulveda, Ch. 143 state capacity 159, 317
Sin 245–247 state control 381
Skarbek, D. 6, 8, 9, 11, 14, 15, 19, state law 245–247, 249, 251
25, 41, 99–101, 117–120, state neglect 211
316–318, 322, 339, 340, state power 182
373, 374, 383–385, 391 withdrawal of the 383, 384
Solidarity committees 14, 16, 17, Stegemann Dieter, V. 20, 137, 285,
37, 38, 45–48, 51, 53, 382–384, 386–390
56–58 Strategies to mantain order 282, 284
Solitary confinement 275–277, 281, proactive strategies 271
284, 286 reactive strategies 275, 282, 284
Southern 191, 223 Street gang 105, 170
southern criminology 191, 224 Struggles 264
southern prisons 192, 220, 223 Subalternity 213, 218, 221, 222
Southern criminology 20 sublatern groups 193, 207, 208,
Southern prisons 20 218
South-North dialogue 375 Supervision 369, 373
South-South dialogue 375 Surveillance 272, 273
Sozzo, M. 3, 8–13, 15, 22, 23, 101, Survey 97, 98, 107–110, 113–115
141–143, 188, 191, 213, Survival 329
235, 237, 240, 264, 269, Sykes, G.M. 39, 41, 44, 53, 159,
280, 285, 297, 299, 301, 181, 189, 190, 214, 216,
316–318, 323, 370, 371, 219, 222, 223, 282, 351
375, 378, 379, 381, 382, Symmetry 387, 391
384, 387–391
Sparks, R. 40, 52–54
State 66–72, 78, 81–83, 85, 86, 89, T
101, 114, 118, 120, 121, Tamayo, A. 6, 8, 66
129, 131, 133, 135, 136, Theory
138, 139, 142, 145–149, adaptation of 377
193, 197, 199, 201, 203, adoption of 377, 378
204, 209, 239, 240, 243, application of 377–379
244, 252, 331, 333, 334, metamorphosis of 377
337–341, 343, 345, 346, theoretical innovation 377
349 theoretical tools 368, 375
state absence 316, 317 use of 377, 379
Index 411
Therapeutic community 352 180, 181, 245, 249, 297,

therapeutic activities 341, 345, 303, 316, 379, 390, 391
354 negotiated violence 217
Thomas, P.D. 193, 207 prisoner violence 176
Tigres (Tigers) 18, 103, 387 slow violence 211, 222
Top-down dynamics 283 violence against prisoners 7
Transfer 301, 302, 307, 321 violence among prisoners 7, 268
violence by authorities/authority
violence/violence against
U prisoners 178–180
Understaffing 191, 197, 222 Visits to prisoners 371
United States of America 369
California 374
Uruguay 5, 7, 11, 16, 23, 298, 299,
W
304, 387–390
Wacquant, L. 19, 132, 134, 136,
139, 143, 145, 188, 190,
V 210, 212, 214, 222
Vallejos, A. 260, 262, 284 Warning 275, 276
Venezuela 3, 5–7, 9, 16, 19, 131, War on drugs 64, 65, 67, 88
132, 135, 137, 138, 145, Weegels, J. 14, 19, 100, 156, 166,
369, 374, 377, 383, 180, 208, 218, 238, 242,
388–391 280, 285, 316, 374,
Violence 3, 7, 8, 12, 20, 38, 39, 41, 382–384, 387, 388, 390,
46–49, 52, 66, 69, 70, 391
81–83, 86, 88, 89, 99–102, Women prison 22, 234, 235, 239,
104, 108–110, 114–116, 241, 243, 245, 252
118, 119, 122, 130, 136,
137, 139, 142, 143, 146,
148, 149, 156, 158, 159, Z
166, 170, 171, 174–178, Zaffaroni, E.R. 336

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN

PRISONS AND PENOLOGY

More information about this series at

ISSN 2753-0604 ISSN 2753-0612 (electronic)

Cover credit: Sutad Watthanakul/EyeEm

Introduction: Inmate Governance in Latin America.

Emergence and Transformations

Dynamics and variations

Marcos César Alvarez University of Sao Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

Fernando Salla University of Sao Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

Introduction: Inmate Governance in Latin America.

This collection addresses the specific issue of inmate governance in Latin

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

emerging through time and space—such as the differentiation between

of the Scandinavian countries. For example, the incarceration rate in

Fig. 1 Evolution of incarceration rates per 100,000 inhabitants—Latin

Fig. 2 Percentage of growth of incarceration rates—Latin America—1990/2020

than 500%, Nicaragua greater than 400%, Argentina, Uruguay and

Paroxysmal Deterioration and Precarization

case, these features have been repeatedly evidenced by critical voices in

confinement contexts over time (Skarbek, 2020, 25). In some juris-

10 Recently, using responses to surveys by inmates in different Latin American countries

Multiplication and Expansion of Inmate

extraordinary power, not only within a sector of a prison or a prison

The formal rules—legal and administrative—are applied in an extremely

These various examples of conditions that operate “from outside”

by tensions and conflicts, which give rise to transactions and compro-

Contents of the Book

verticality—that is, the relationship between custodians and prisoners—

relationship to state authority to a different level. Also, the Narco has

frameworks of prison governance. Specifically, the Dominican case illus-

have a highly ambiguous relationship with both violence against crim-

gang organizations, resulting in forms of “shared prison governance”,

interpenetrate in the subjects’ actions and minds. Consequently, social

conceptual alternative of “co-governance” may run the risk of empha-

“prisoner-entrepreneur” in terms of his governmental role and his links

the Global North, critically discussing an approach that seeks to build

C. Barreira (Eds.), Paradoxos da segurança cidadã. Editorial Tomo, pp. 123–

Iturralde, M. (2019). Neoliberalism and its impact in crime control fields in

(Perú, Chile, Argentina, Brasil y Bolivia). Pontificia Universidad Católica del

Sozzo, M. (2013). Transición a la democracia, política y castigo legal en

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 35

subject of academic reflection, especially in the North American liter-

of opposition to the State. In both cases, what is at play is prison gover-

representation of the prison population that were effectively “legit-

ignored their demands, especially those designed to restrain arbitrary

The Problem of Prison Governance

administrators to exercise control over this process, encouraging certain

In France, reflections on prison also accompanied the emergencies

concessions, and restrictions. According to him, the collaboration of

Reflections on Prison Governance in Brazil

second period, which covers the 1980s, is characterized by rupture in the

From Solidarity Committees to PCC: The

The proposal of creating Solidarity Committees situated these groups

According to the analysis by Góes (2009), the ways in which dissat-

In addition to allegations of mistreatment, violence, and arbitrariness

system are disputed, appropriated, or rejected (cf. Neves, 1993). The

Legitimacy and Recognition: Of Whom,

Paradoxically, the accelerating growth of the incarcerated population

we see is a huge gap in the capacity of state actors to govern prisons,

of governance are organized around different narratives: in the first case,

which is how it presents itself today. A representative body that was a

Neves, D. P. (1993). Políticas públicas: intenções previstas e desdobramentos