Beyond the State and Without Police: How Brazilian APAC Prisoners Manage Conflict

Brazilian APAC prisons operate at a distance from the state and without correctional officers. They are governed largely by their inmates. APAC prisoners not only manage daily routines, but also disciplinary and internal security procedures. Of particular interest from a global criminological perspective, they are also tasked with managing conflict. Disciplinary powers are formally delegated by prison managers or informally appropriated by prisoner councils as part of a wider focus on dignity, harmony and civic responsibility. This monograph is based on fieldwork at two APAC prisons in the southern state of Paraná. Central to the research findings was the importance attached to prisoner councils managing conflict without gossip (without resort to formal disciplinary procedures) and through dialogue (without resort to punitive sanctions). Underlying the order that I observed at the prisons was a shared belief among staff as well as prisoners in the values of equality, respect and mutual aid. These findings question the universal applicability of established (Northern) theories on prison order, which predict strained prison inmate and staff-inmate relations and view authority as imposed and enforced. They also question the international human rights consensus that prisoners should not exercise disciplinary power over each other except in the limited context of small-group therapeutic activities.

Dr Sacha Darke is a Reader in Criminology at the University of Westminster and the course leader for the MA in Global Criminology. He is a Visiting Lecturer in Law at the University of São Paulo and a Visiting Lecturer in Anthropology at the State University of Maranhão. He has one special journal edition (Informal dynamics of survival in Latin American prisons, Prison Service Journal, 2017) and an edited book on Latin American prison ethnographies (Carceral Communities in Latin America: Troubling 21st Century Prison Regimes, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). He is author of Conviviality and Survival: Co-Producing Brazilian Prison Order (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). His second monograph on Brazilian prisons (Beyond the State and Without Police: How Brazilian APAC Prisoners Manage Conflict) is due to be published by Routledge later in the year.