Imprisonment and (Un)Relatedness in Northeast Brazil

Hollis Moore

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Anthropology University of Toronto

Abstract

This dissertation – based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in and around a men’s and a women’s prison – explores imprisonment and (un)relatedness in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. From the vantage point of a prison compound and the heavily penalized neighbourhoods surrounding it, I describe and analyze inextricable connectivities which bind this compound to its social milieu, prison cells to houses, and prisoners to non-prisoners. I focus in particular on the gendered experiences and life projects of male and female “subjects of incarceration” – social actors whose entanglements with the prison are relatively intense, namely: (ex-)prisoners, visitors, and non-visitors (people with an imprisoned relation who do not visit the prison). In short, what is at stake in this dissertation is the question of how social reproduction occurs in a context in which imprisonment has come to be a regular, predictable part of life for poor and racialized groups.

To grasp material and symbolic continuities, ruptures, and interconnections constitutive of prison-society relations I have developed the concept of “carceral forms.” This concept offers an approach to delineating objects of inquiry and a set of questions that will enrich multidisciplinary conversations about imprisonment as well as punishment and society. Anthropological insights regarding (un)relatedness have informed my theoretical-methodological approach to practices of imprisonment. This means that I approach penality and penal effects through the ethnographic investigation of gendered social relations forged, maintained, strained, and severed within and across prison boundaries. I also use the ethnographic fact of relatedness theoretically. I draw on anthropological theorizations of (un)relatedness to trouble taken-for-granted carceral boundaries and devise an innovative object of inquiry which I call carceral forms. In conceptualizing imprisonment in this way, I take inspiration from Strathern (1989) and her emphasis on immanent sociality. That is, I take “the relation” (1995) as a starting point to rethink the prison as a social institution. Rather than presume the boundaries, and the boundedness, of this institution, I attend to the statements and practices of people who negotiate imprisonment in a manner that at once (re)produces differences between carceral and non-carceral domains and establishes connections between these emergently distinct domains. iii Table of Contents

Table of Contents ...... iii

Introduction: Imprisonment and (Un)Relatedness in Northeast Brazil ...... 1

The Mata Escura Penal Compound: A Prison-Neighbourhood Nexus ...... 18

Insecure Boundaries ...... 23

The Historical Emergence of a Prison-Neighbourhood Nexus ...... 26

Flows and Stoppages Constitutive of the (Once-)Carceral ...... 35

The Gender of Carceral Forms ...... 40

The Gender of the Prison System ...... 44

Chapter Summaries ...... 50

Chapter 1 The Carceral Safety Net ...... 54

Introduction: Ambivalence in Kinship and the Prison ...... 54

A Polymorphous Carceral Form: The Carceral Safety Net ...... 61

Crack é Cadeia ou Caixão (Crack is Jail or a Coffin): Imprisonment as an Alternative to Death ...... 66

Visiting and Earning: Livelihood and Practices of Imprisonment ...... 68

Gender, Insecurity, and Tactics ...... 75

Gendered Violence and Containment ...... 76

Precarious Work ...... 81

Relational Intervention (1): A spatial-relational fix ...... 82

Abusive Intimacy and Appropriative Endurance ...... 83

Responding to Police Violence ...... 87

“The Police Killed my Son” ...... 87

Police Violence and Impunity in Salvador ...... 88

Classed Tactics: To have or not to have conditions ...... 90

“They Killed My Son… And I Did Nothing” ...... 91

Criminal Kin: Dangerous and Endangered Intimates ...... 96 iv

Cadeia as technology of care ...... 98

Relational Intervention (2): Carceral Habilitation ...... 100

Conclusion: Ambivalent Outcomes of Social Reproduction ...... 104

Chapter 2 The Commission and its Present Absence: Gendered Regimes of Imprisonment/Visitation in the Mata Escura Compound ...... 108

Introduction ...... 108

Gendered Regimes of Visitation ...... 115

Bio-Sexual Needs, Commissions, and the Quantity of Visitation ...... 115

The Comissão, the Protection of Visitors, and the Search for Respect ...... 122

Preso Solidarity and the Gendered Quality of Visitation at PLB ...... 128

The Texture of Visitation at Feminina ...... 134

Feminina’s Gendered Regime of Imprisonment ...... 140

Conclusion: Feminina’s Triple Deviants ...... 159

Chapter 3 The penal-welfare complex and the production of expendability ...... 162

Introduction ...... 162

Expendability: Creating space between lumpenization and social death ...... 163

Public Abandonment ...... 168

Feminina: As a Site of Problematization and Mediated Relatedness ...... 174

A Life History of Emergent Expendability ...... 180

Ivete’s Only Visitor ...... 180

Ivete’s Motherhood ...... 188

Ivete’s Childhood ...... 193

Ivete’s Institutional Encounters and Experiences of Social Development ...... 196

Ivete’s Struggles to secure the necessities of life ...... 203

Epilogue: “The smell of pizza” and the extra-legal production of lost kin ...... 209

Chapter 4 Carceral Conjugality ...... 220

Introduction ...... 220

The Puzzling Case of Carceral Courtship and Conjugality ...... 220

The Socio-Cultural Context of Carceral Conjugality ...... 222

Casa, Casamento, and Dona-de-Casa (House, Marriage, and ‘Housewife’) ...... 226

The Pains and Contradictions of Conjugal Visitation ...... 230

Companheiras and Courtesy Stigma ...... 230

Contested Meanings of House, Street, and Prison ...... 236

Carly’s Wifely Conduct ...... 238

Carceral Houses and Configurations of Houses ...... 241

Claudia and Rogerio’s Configuration of Houses ...... 241

Ju’s Carceral House ...... 246

The Jardims’ Carceral Configuration of Houses ...... 248

Prelude to a conjugal visit and, possibly, a casa própria ...... 254

Conditions of Carceral Courtship and Conjugality ...... 262

A Seductive Carceral Encounter ...... 262

Carceral incitement to settle down ...... 267

Carcerality and the making and management of successful marriages ...... 270

Penal Constraint and Procreative Agency ...... 270

Disciplining Husbands ...... 272

Conclusion ...... 279

Chapter 5 The Televised Arrest ...... 282

Introduction ...... 282

The Televised Arrest as a Carceral Form ...... 282

Talk of crime and talking criminals ...... 286

The equivocity and utility of televised arrests ...... 290

The Puzzling Popularity of Policialescos ...... 292

The Policialesco Genre ...... 298

From popularesco to policialesco ...... 300

Policialesco Programs in Bahia ...... 302

Se Liga Bocão ...... 303

Televised Pagode ...... 307

Listening to Pagode with the Jardims ...... 312

The Televised Arrest ...... 314

The Familiar Scene of the Criminal: “Live from the police station – Prisoners exchange barbs! Woman attacks reporter!” ...... 317

Scene One ...... 317

Scene Two ...... 320

Scene Three ...... 327

The Aftermath of the Arrest ...... 332

A Warning ...... 332

The Jardims’ Responses ...... 341

Conclusion ...... 346

The stakes of status negotiations ...... 350

Introduction: Imprisonment and (Un)Relatedness in Northeast Brazil

Barbara is pregnant with Sandro’s baby.1 This will be Sandro’s first child and Barbara’s second (her first-born son is almost an adolescent). I’m hanging out at Barbara’s house which, actually, belongs to her parents. Barbara – a 28-year-old Afro-descendant woman (fig. 1) – is living here, with her parents and son, while Sandro, her husband, is imprisoned in a nearby penal compound (located just a 15-minute walk away). The single-story house is small, containing two bedrooms, a kitchen, a fenced-in front patio, a bathroom, and a living room.

Figure 1. The author (Hollis Moore), Barbara (pregnant with her imprisoned husband’s baby), and Barbara’s father posing in their family’s prison-infused home.

Barbara and I are sitting in the living room watching the pricy 3D ultrasound DVD that Sandro paid for. He’s very excited to become a father. Barbara and Sandro already watched the DVD together, during one of her regular prison visits, while he massaged her swollen feet and they talked about their future. As Barbara and I watch the images of her unborn son, a loud commotion erupts from her bedroom. I’m startled by the sound of indecipherable shouts. I thought we were alone. Barbara, looking mildly concerned, heads into her bedroom. I hear her muffled voice over the ruckus before the house goes quiet. Barbara returns to the living room and says, “something’s happening there [at the prison]… I turned down the volume.”

Barbara and Sandro stay perpetually connected through a live audio feed streamed through their cell phones. While she’s at home, their phones are on. Sandro hears the familiar sounds of

1 This dissertation is based, primarily, on research conducted in 2010 and 2011. I use the ethnographic present when I am able to draw directly from field notes written during this period.

2 domesticity and the steady clamour of the prison becomes the soundtrack of Barbara’s life. Husband and wife like to chat casually while she irons or he prepares lunch with his cellmates.2

This scene is suggestive of the innumerable inextricable connectivities that bind the penal compound to its surrounding social milieu, prisons to houses, and prisoners to non-prisoners. This dissertation probes carceral continuities, breaks, and interconnections that shape sociality (the creating and maintaining of relationships) in Northeast Brazil. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in and around a penal compound in Salvador, Bahia,3 the dissertation focuses in particular on “subjects of incarceration” – actors whose entanglements with the prison are relatively intense, namely: (ex-)prisoners, visitors, and non-visitors (people with an imprisoned relation who, nonetheless, do not visit the prison). In short, what is at stake in this dissertation is the question of how social reproduction occurs in contexts heavily inflected by the carceral.

Brazil has the fourth largest prison population in the world, preceded only by the USA, China, and Russia. Between 1997 and 2007, Brazil’s prison population grew faster than that of any other country in the Americas (Walmsley 2010). In a single decade, it more than doubled. Today, over half a million people are incarcerated.4 This is equivalent to an incarceration rate of 270 per

100,000 members of the population (Murray et al. 2013).5 In 1994, Brazil’s incarceration rate was 88 per 100,000 members of the population (Carvalho 2013, 3).

2 This vignette anticipates forthcoming discussions of gendered prison regimes (chapter 2), carceral conjugality, and carceral houses (chapter 4). The married couple featured in this vignette – Barbara and Sandro – also appear in chapter 5. 3 Salvador had a population of approximately 2.7 million (IBGE 2010) at the time of my fieldwork. Salvador is the capital of the northeastern state of Bahia. 4 According to the Ministry of Justice, Brazil’s total prison population was 514,582 by the end of 2011 and 548,003 in January 2013 (Ministry of Justice 2011; Walmsley 2013). Approximately 37% of these are provisional detainees (who have not been definitively sentenced) (Dias and Salla 2013, 398) and 11% are confined in police lockups (Almeida and Paes-Machado 2014, 21). Total prison population figures do not include incarcerated youth. In 2010, the number of adolescents confined in prison-like institutions was 17,703 (Carvalho 2013, 8). In recent decades Brazil has created a number of diversion programs to replace custodial sentences. However, these have not reduced incarceration levels (Carvalho 2013, 6-8). As many as 1 million people are under the non-custodial supervision of the criminal justice system (Alves 2014, 233). 5 To put this number in perspective, the United States has the highest prison population rate in the world (756/100,000); Canada’s rate is 116/100,000; the median rate for South American countries is 154/100,000; and almost three fifths of countries (59%) have rates below 150/100,000 (Walmsley 2009). Brazil has the fourth highest incarceration rate in South America, after Chile (313), French Guiana (316), and Suriname (356); the only other

The dramatic growth of Brazil’s prison population, throughout the 1990s and first decade of the 21st century, is part of an international trend of carceral expansion6 which has challenged scholars to formulate explanatory schemes. Most agree this trend is connected to the global expansion of neoliberalism (e.g. Alves 2014; Carvalho 2013; Garces 2010, 2014a; Garland 2001b; Müller 2011; Wacquant 2008a, 2009, 2010b).7 Incarceration – especially in the form of mass incarceration (Garland 2001a) or hyperincarceration (Wacquant 2010a)8 – is widely understood as a core government technique for managing the effects of neoliberal policies, namely, deepening urban marginality. Theoretical work in this vein forges connections – i.e. between ‘punitive containment’ and neoliberalism; U.S. statecraft and the ‘penalization of poverty’ in Latin America; and prison and ‘society’9 – creating new epistemic wholes and theoretical frames detachable from the world they describe. Adopting these constructions poses at least two problems for the generation of ethnographically grounded epistemological work.

countries with ratios close to this are Uruguay (261) and Guyana (289) (Carvalho 2013, 4; Walmsley 2012). Brazil’s rate is also high compared to other leading emerging economies (BRICs): Russia (609); India (31); and China (123) (Walmsley 2012). 6 Between 1999 and 2013, the estimated world prison population rate has risen by about 6 percent (from 136 to 144); prison populations are growing in all five continents (Walmsley 2013). Also see Sudbury 2005. 7 More specifically, scholars of Latin America have pointed to factors connected to neoliberalization and especially the “urbanization of neoliberalism” (Brenner and Theodore 2002, 375-77; Müller 2012; Portes and Roberts 2005) that have fueled carceral expansion. These interrelated factors include, rising levels of crime and insecurity (Davis and Pereira 2000; Murray et al. 2013; Portes and Hoffmann 2003; Rotker 2002); fear of crime (see chapter 5); penal populism (Chevigny 2003), “correctional Keynsianism” (Alves 2014, 5, Gilmore 1999); the transnationalization of the war on drugs (Corva 2008; Boiteux 2011); and new discourses on punishment (the New Penology) (Carvalho 2013; Feeley and Simon 2006; Garland 1995). 8 Garland (2001a) coined the term “mass imprisonment” to describe the carceral expansion that occurred in the United States between 1975 and the late 1990s. Mass imprisonment, according to Garland, constituted a new regime of penality that differed from its predecessor in terms of its magnitude and its relationship to individuals/groups. In terms of magnitude, mass imprisonment is distinguished by a scale and rate of incarceration that reach levels markedly above those found throughout the 20th century or in societies of a similar type (2001b, 5). Additionally, “[i]mprisonment becomes mass imprisonment when it ceases to be the incarceration of individual offenders [based on crime and criminal history] and becomes the systematic imprisonment of whole groups of the population” (2001b, 6). Wacquant (2010a) has proposed analysts substitute the term “hyperincarceration” because the inflation of the prison population over the past quarter-century has disproportionately affected particular social groups and it is precisely because precipitous carceral expansion “does not reach the masses” (2010a, 78) that this public policy persists. 9 Society is a heuristic and a political construction rather than a pre-given entity (Harcourt 2010, 2013; Strathern 1988; Mitchell 2006). Certainly, society is not an external context or force that exists in relation to the prison, that is ordered by it. Imprisonment scholars must reflect on the extent to which Euro-American conceptualizations of the social are deeply informed by penal technique (Moore 2015b).

First, the multiplying prisons of the “global South” remain understudied and poorly understood (Martin et al. 2014, 4).10 Due to the paucity of close empirical carceral investigations outside of Europe, North America, and Australasia, “[a] great deal of the scholarly debate on prisons and worldwide shifts in penality depend, to an unacceptable degree, on material gleaned from Western contexts” (Martin et al. 2014, 4; Peck 2003). This dilemma has led scholars to call “for closer attention to the path-dependent unfolding of local variations of penal statecraft” (Müller 2012, 63). According to this formulation, anthropologists appear well-positioned to reveal the cultural diversity of responses to an always already known historical process. But ethnographic encounters can yield so much more than representations of familiar categories (Street and Copeman 2014). Inspired by feminist scholars’ rejection of an “add-women-and-stir” approach,11 I immerse myself in the relationships and concerns of Brazilian subjects of incarceration, avoiding an externalist ‘bird’s eye view’ and hesitating to make connections prematurely so that anything can be observed (Holbraad and Pedersen 2009, 387; Street and Copeman 2014, 25).

A second problem related to this issue of empirical gaps bridged by pre-determined concepts is the politics of knowledge. I am concerned that theorizations of the penal state traffic in reified categories (e.g. “the dangerous classes”)12 and modes of thinking so deeply connected to the carceral that they reinforce, instead of disrupt, penality’s own account of itself and its objects. These theorizations posit the prison as an instrument of ‘society,’ a tool for the management of surplus populations and the reproduction of capitalist social order. There is an emphasis on net carceral effects that, at the national (or supranational) level, further social control and depoliticization. Analagous to the prisons they describe, theorists of neoliberal penality circumscribe unruly differentiations and excesses of sociality “by positing meta-contexts” that

10 A number of recent publications have begun to address this gap in the literature (e.g. Alves 2014; Drybread 2014; Garces 2010; Jefferson 2010, 2012; Bandyopadhyay 2010). Also see special journal issues edited by Martin et al. (2014) and Cheliotis (2014). 11 To make a gender lens central to social scientific inquiry poses a fundamental challenge to the explanatory power of accepted theories (Daly and Chesney-Lind 1988, 505; Naffine 2003, 11). 12 Elsewhere (Moore 2015b) I build on Munck’s (2013) critique of Standing’s (2011) notion of ‘the precariat.’ I show how ostensibly critical analyses of Brazil’s criminal justice system resuscitate the spectre of a ‘dangerous class’ and thereby contribute to “a politics of social pathology… incompatible with a progressive social transformation politics” (Munck 2013, 759).

5 serve “as abstract containers for ethnographic complexity” (Street and Copeman 2014, 11). In contrast, my approach is more analogous to the carceral cacophony that unexpectedly erupted from Barbara’s bedroom. This meaningful happening – a fleeting outcome of intersecting and ongoing relational and carceral practices – has a significance beyond social control. I proceed with extreme caution in respect of what I make visible. Rather than try to identify carceral effects that, in the final analysis, perpetuate oppression, I trace carceral echoes – enactments, utterances, and affects that repeat, transform, and bifurcate as they reverberate through life worlds in the making. These echoes, like sociality itself, are never entirely containable by theory. They are worthy of our attention precisely because politics reside in those instants when the concepts we have at hand are inadequate. Although I seek out complications and distinctions that destabilize conventions of (inter-)disciplinary thinking about the carceral, I do not ignore the real historical relations that underpin them.

Certainly, Brazil’s incarceration boom corresponds with the consolidation of neoliberal policies at the federal and state levels.13 Through the 1990s, policies increasingly conformed to the

Washington Consensus.14 Accordingly, import tariffs decreased; the vast majority of non-tariff barriers were abolished; the ratio of imported goods to GDP rose; a process of privatisation was initiated (starting with steel and petrochemical industries) and expanded (into such fields as public utilities and transportation infrastructure); and a program of investment liberalisation was implemented. Additionally, hyperinflation was tamed through tight monetary policy (including a curtailment of expenditures in most but not all sectors) (Amann and Baer 2002; Gledhill 2005). Under the administration of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2003), generally seen as epitomising the shift to neoliberalism, the federal government privatized over one hundred public enterprises and services, cut social programs, and invested in police and prisons (Alves 2014, 4).

13 For description and analysis of the unfolding of neoliberal policies in Salvador, Bahia, see Collins 2008 and Gledhill and Hita 2009a, 2009b. 14 This consensus revolved around the following measures: drastic fiscal adjustment (to address inflation); privatisation of state owned enterprises, both in the industrial and public utility sectors; trade liberalisation (through pronounced declines in tariff, and especially non-tariff protectionism); setting market interest rates; opening most sectors to foreign investment and substantially decreasing controls over the actions of foreign capital.

These policies have not resolved the issue of highly unequal income distribution; Brazil continues to have one of the world’s most uneven distributions of income.15 The 1990s were marked by a major decline in industrial employment opportunities in Brazil. Declining industrial jobs were not matched by increasing opportunities in the poorly paid and insecure service sector. This had serious implications for the dependence of many of Brazilians on casual and informal work (including illegal activities) (Jackson 2011). Between 1995 and 2005, which includes the first years of Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva’s two terms (2003-2011), federal spending on prisons increased by 63.3 percent (Cerqueira et al. 2007).16 Legislative activity regarding criminal matters was also intense in the wake of the democratic transition, fostering an expansion of incarceration by increasing the number of people entering the prison system and making it more difficult for prisoners to secure release. In particular, the Heinous Crimes Law of 1990 (Act 8.072/90), “increased punishment, withdrew progressive sentencing, increased the term [before] parole and obstructed the commutation and pardon for crimes known as heinous crimes” (Carvalho 2013, 1; Boiteux 2011, 32).

In the specific case of Bahia, the state began to significantly expand its prison system in the 1990s (Lourenço and Almeida 2013, 41). Predictably, Bahia’s incarceration rate also began to climb, rising from a rate of 31.8 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2000 to 98.9 in 2011. In 2011, Bahia’s prison system confined 11,783 people in 23 institutions. An additional 4,412 people were imprisoned in police lockups (Almeida and Paes-Machado 2015, 5). Although the scale and rate of incarceration in Bahia are both relatively low, experiences of incarceration are disproportionately concentrated among certain groups. The profile of the typical Brazilian prisoner has remained quite stable over time.17 Prisoners are overwhelmingly young (53.6 percent are 18 to 29 years old); male (93.6 percent); non-white (57.6 percent are either negro [black] or pardo [brown]); and have low education levels (45.7 percent have not completed

15 Income inequality declined in Brazil between 1976 and 1996 (with the Gini coefficient falling from 0.62 to 0.60) (World Bank 2000), and has continued to fall (Brazil’s Gini coefficient reached 0.50 in 2014). 16 In Brazil, there is a single country-wide criminal and penal legislation. However, states of the federation are responsible for the organization and maintenance of their respective prison systems. That said, some states rely heavily on federal resources to, for example, build or renovate unites. In 2006, a federal prison system was established to help states better manage their prison populations (Dias and Salla 2013, 398; Macaulay 2007, 2013). 17 See historical studies of Brazilian imprisonment by Chazkel (2009); Brown (2000); Huggins (1985); Maia et al. (2009); Salvatore and Aguirre (2010); and Trindade (2008, 2011).

7 elementary school) (Lourenço and Almeida 2013, 40; Murray et al. 2013; Wacquant 2008b, 63). Two additional characteristics, which are not measured by official statistics, are easily verifiable by prison researchers, namely, these are economically dispossessed young men from low-income households and heavily penalized urban neighbourhoods. Although incarceration is highly selective – according to class, sex/gender, space, and ethno-racial identity – experiences of incarceration are not limited to prisoners. For this reason, I focus on subjects of incarceration, people like Barbara and her family (including Sandro), whose lives have been meaningfully inflected with the carceral.

My research examines how increasing rates of imprisonment, and the concentration of carceral experiences, shape social relations and imaginaries in Northeast Brazil, constraining and enabling subjects of incarceration. Uneven rates and patterns of incarceration mean that for some groups, imprisonment becomes ‘normalized’ (a predictable part of life) and the prison functions as one of the primary institutions that structures experience (Garland 2001a, 6). Yet, prison studies scholars have traditionally sought to understand the social realities of imprisonment through theoretical and methodological frameworks that construct the prison as a “world apart” (Cunha 2008). The ethnographic study of imprisonment has primarily been dominated by four models: the “prisonization” model (Clemmer 1940); the “functional-adaptive” or “total institution” model (Sykes 1958; Sykes and Messinger 1960; Goffman 1961); the “importation” model (Irwin and Cressey 1962; Giallombardo 1966; Kruttschnitt et al. 2000); and the “prison in wider society” model (Jacobs 1977). These paradigms have informed numerous studies (e.g. Comfort 2008; Crewe 2005; Reed 1999) and set the terms of intellectual debates regarding experiences of imprisonment and carcerality itself. Simon (2000) suggests that contemporary scholars of the prison ought to be mindful, not only of where early studies diverge, but also of what they have in common. Namely, conventional attempts to synthesize or update classic models often leave the category of ‘prison culture’ largely intact. Accordingly, ethnographies of imprisonment continue to rely on objects of inquiry and to delineate field sites that correspond to materially ‘obvious,’ bricks-and-mortar parameters of prisons. The prison emerges as a site in which: a) sociality and quotidian practices appear to be relatively contained and self-referential and b) incarceration is understood to sever prisoners from external relationships and to interrupt ‘normal’ routines (Reed 1999, 2003; Owen 1998; Crewe 2005; Rhodes 2001, 2004). Such analytic tendencies can obfuscate deep and unapparent continuities and interconnections between

8 the prison and its social milieu. This obfuscation may prevent us from identifying and understanding “the ramifying social effects of concentrated incarceration upon both the prison and heavily penalized lower-class neighbourhoods” (Cunha 2008, 325). Although we know considerably more about what intensive incarceration means for the societies in which it develops, and the groups most directly affected by it, than we did a decade ago,18 there remain gaps in the literature. More importantly, perhaps, ethnographers of imprisonment must overcome methodological-theoretical limitations to knowledge production.19

While prisons, with their stark and unmistakable perimeters, remain spatially distinct features of the contemporary landscape, the “edges of imprisonment” may be less clear-cut for prisoners, visitors, and other subjects of incarceration, a fact that has serious theoretical implications. At the level of experience, most prisoners endure carceral trajectories, in which they ‘progress’ through a series of different statuses, institutions, regimes, units, and cells (Marchetti 2002), as well as various “coercive mobilities.” Coercive mobilities (Rose & Clear 2003: 2) include the duel processes of incarceration and “re-entry” (or release) as well as major institutional transfers and routine excursions, accompanied by armed escorts, to court, hospital, other prisons, etc. Although the inside/outside threshold of a specific institution is unquestionably significant and materially traversed, a prisoner’s status (qua inmate) often supersedes their location. Prisoners shackled in the back of a van en route to a medical appointment know their confinement does not neatly correspond with the razor-wire perimeters of a given prison. The masses of ex-prisoners who remain unemployed months or years after their release know that the status of prisoner is all too hard to shake.20 These embodied practical understandings of incarceration alert us to important analytic questions regarding the edges of imprisonment. By ethnographically tracing echoes of imprisonment that exceed the parameters of institutional blueprints and policies I decenter prisons and their logics, shedding new light on the limits of the carceral.21 In this

18 Compare literature reviews and commentaries on the state of prison studies published in the early 2000s (e.g. Simon 2000, Garland 2001a, Rhodes 2001, and Wacquant 2002) with Cunha’s (2014) more recent assessment. 19 On the topic of methodological challenges faced by prison ethnographers, see especially: Crewe 2014; Drybread 2006; Owen 1998; Rhodes 2009; and Waldram 1998, 2009. 20 In the U.S., more than 650,000 people are released from prison every year. Up to 60% of these individuals remain unemployed 1 year after release (Barkan and Bryjak 2014, 303). 21 For a cinematic documentation of hyperincarceration in the U.S. with a similar premise, see The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, a 2016 documentary by director Brett Story.

9 dissertation I outline a novel approach that encourages scholars to suspend preconceptions about the existence, nature, and location of carceral thresholds and, instead, to interrogate how these are surfaced, made meaningful, and co-produced by creative agents who contend, on a daily basis, with penal constraint. I argue that a conflation of the study of “experiences of imprisonment” with the study of prison interiors is to neglect how imprisonment is actually – not only analytically – a spatially and socially diffuse practice and state of being.

In recent years “the ‘prison-society’ relation and the articulation between intramural and extramural worlds” (Cunha 2014, 217) has garnered increasing scholarly attention. A growing number of researchers have begun to document and analyse the inter-dependence of the prison and the world in which it remains embedded. Too often, however, this relation is conceived in terms of “collateral damage.”22 In this formulation, the prison appears as an isolated institution external to the social space it harmfully intrudes (Wacquant 2002, 388).23 Such a perspective, which I critically revisit in chapter 1, neglects the extent to which carceral institutions are imbricated with other organizations; harms and hardships endured by those most affected by incarceration stem from sources other than the prison; and practices of imprisonment may not have wholly disintegrative and damaging results. I thus demonstrate both the insufficiency of studying the prison as a world unto itself and the inadequacy of a damage assessment approach. For example, I document the historical co-development of a penal compound and an adjacent

22 At the turn of the century Hagen and Dinovitzer 1999 as well as Hagen and Coleman 2001 introduced a research agenda for the study of social re-entry issues (post-imprisonment) and the “collateral consequences” of imprisonment on prisoners, their families, and communities. These scholars employ the concept of social capital, hypothesizing that imprisonment causes significant decreases in social capital and, thus, undermines the stability of families that include (ex-) prisoner members. See Comfort (2008, 11) for a review of this literature. This conceptualization of imprisonment—in terms of its long-term and widespread negative implications—is also central to five edited volumes published in rapid succession (Mauer and Chesney-Lind 2002; Harris and Miller 2003; Travis and Waul 2003; Pattillo et al. 2004; Mele and Miller 2005). Interdisciplinary contributors to these volumes consider the socioeconomic and cultural outcomes of mass imprisonment through investigations of its intersection with employment, housing, citizenship (the franchise), health, welfare, and neighbourhood “social control”. While many of their essays are quite revealing, their “collateral damage” orientation may be inadequate to grasp the full range of imprisonment’s effects (Wacquant 2002, 388). 23 Although Wacquant has articulated a salient critique of the collateral consequences approach, he sometimes employs a similar overdetermined rhetoric. For example, in an essay where he equates the Brazilian carceral system with a new dictatorship over the poor, he proclaims that this system, in its current state, “only serves to aggravate the instability and poverty of the families whose members it confines, and to feed criminality by its manifest contempt for the law and the culture of mistrust of others and defiance of authority it fosters” (2003: 201). Moving beyond a collateral consequences approach means suspending assumptions that (intensive) incarceration necessarily fuels disruption or causes the breakdown of kinship ties.

10 neighborhood, material and symbolic continuities underlying the emergence and unity of this carceral-residential assemblage, as well as the accomplishments of creative subjects of incarceration who have managed to shape prison regimes and derive some benefit from their engagements with the prison. In addition to delineating an analytic object that encompasses prisons and their contexts without reducing this relation to an accounting of collateral, community-based consequences of imprisonment, I offer an anthropological conceptualization of imprisonment open to carceral interfaces and inflections including, but not limited to, the threshold between intra- and extra-mural sites. My approach to practices of imprisonment in Northeast Brazil, through the optics of (un)relatedness and “carceral forms,”24 acknowledges the common life world shared by prisoners and non-prisoners, especially those non-prisoners inhabiting disproportionately penalized urban spaces.

Anthropological insights regarding (un)relatedness have informed my theoretical-methodological approach to the prison. On one level, this means that I approach questions of penality and penal echoes through the ethnographic investigation of social relations forged, maintained, strained, and severed within and across prison boundaries. I ask, how do intensive carceral encounters shape the ways in which people imagine themselves as being connected and disconnected from one another? On another level, I use the ethnographic fact of relatedness theoretically. I draw on anthropological theorizations of (un)relatedness to trouble taken-for-granted carceral boundaries and devise an innovative object of inquiry which I call carceral forms. In conceptualizing imprisonment in this way, I take inspiration from Strathern and her emphasis on immanent sociality. That is, I take “the relation” (1995) as a starting point to rethink the prison. Rather than presume the boundaries, and the boundedness, of this institution, I attend to the statements and practices of people who negotiate imprisonment in a manner that at once (re)produces differences between carceral and non-carceral domains and establishes connections between them.

24 Carceral from the Latin Carcer (“a prison”) + -al (“of, pertaining to”). I take inspiration from Foucault (1977) who concludes the fourth and final part of Discipline and Punish, on “Prison”, with a chapter on “The Carceral.” Here he writes of a “carceral archipelago” that transports “the penitentiary technique” from the penal institution throughout the social body.

From the moment of this study’s inception, through its design, I have embraced a degree of uncertainty where my main object of inquiry is concerned. I set out to investigate intersecting relational and carceral practices but did not presume to know in advance what shapes these would take or that existing concepts would describe them adequately. There is thus an elective affinity between my grounded approach and “the Strathernian technique.” An explicit commitment to surprise is a distinguishing feature of Strathern’s methodological-theoretical toolkit (Street and Copeman 2014, 30). Likewise, I have actively sought unpredictable echoes. This orientation generates potential for the discernment of more and less fleeting ‘noises’ – ethnographic eruptions that “capture” (Strathern 2006, 203) my analytic imagination and compel pause at the moment when familiar theoretical containers (e.g. the neoliberal penal state etc. – see above) might otherwise come into play. Strathern’s toolkit equips scholars to marshal “analytic noise” (Biehl et al. 2007) and its resistance to representation as the grounds of new knowledge and a critical engagement with the present.25

To apprehend our own and others’ world-making, Strathern borrows the perspectives of the subjects of her research; in The Gender of the Gift (1988), for example, she reflects back on the Euro-American concept of society with the help of Melanesian realities (Viveiros de Castro and Goldman 2009, 37-8). I extend this series of borrowings as I develop and articulate the concept of carceral forms. First, I borrow Strathern’s representations of Melanesian sociality to surface the essential role of relationality in the workings of the carceral and, thereby, critique preconceptions that have driven (and limited) other analyses of imprisonment. By operationalizing Melanesian ontology in this way, I am also borrowing Strathern’s method of “analogic comparison” (Hirsch 2014).26 This method facilitates a move “away from the comparison of tangible objects and intangible analytic constructs” (Street and Copeman 2014, 25).

25 According to Strathern, “[c]riticism bifurcates,” it makes single accounts multiple again (2006, 199). 26 As Hirsch (2014) describes, Strathern’s analogical approach takes two interconnected forms. She draws analogies between Melanesian societies (e.g. Strathern 1988) and also between Melanesia and the West (e.g. Strathern 1999). Analogic comparison of, for example, new reproductive technologies with Melanesian social forms highlights the limits of such comparisons at the same time as it expands “the range of concepts and language used to understand Western… innovations that potentially affect the world at large, so that debate is not simply circumscribed by western preoccupations and concerns” (Hirsch 2014, 39).

Strathern contrives a separation between Western and Melanesian socialities “to glance at another way of conveying similarity and difference” (1989, 56) and “exemplify certain dual but non-binary ways of imagining...” (57). I draw on her insights to push our thinking on similarities and differences between carceral and non-carceral phenomena. Within the Melanesian worldview, “[t]hings—persons—are all versions of one another: it is merely the forms that are different... a Melanesian trying to make one thing yield something different from it produces an analogue or transformation of the original—yet another manifestation of something already present” (65—emphasis my own). It is in this sense that I employ the notion of carceral forms. This notion permits a dual but non-binary way of grasping prison interiors and exteriors, or the carceral and non-carceral, without re-inscribing the prison as either a primarily pathological “world apart,” in which captives construct their own society, or as a functional tool wielded by elites to construct society in their vision. When the carceral, like its forms, are approached as permutations of something already present, new lines of investigation open up concerning the ongoing processes of differentiation and (de)entification that Strathern alerts us to.

For Strathern’s Melanesians, things, or persons, are entities that exist within a particular space or time but are also equivalents “to social life, to both genders, to all culture, to language as such” (65). An excerpt of Strathern's account of Makeo bodies and procreation is illustrative: …the child is the repository of the actions of multiple others; [these actions] constitute the social relations of which [the child] is composed. [The child’s] subsequent effort to create ‘new’ ties will require altering what is already there: social activity is the dissolution and partition of completed entities…if one relation can only appear by another disappearing, it is so to speak prefigured or anticipated in that prior (different) form. And in that sense society is already completed” (62 – emphasis my own).

Strathern deploys Melanesian concepts of personhood and relatedness to “upturn the familiar Western notion that society is ‘constructed.’” Instead, she focuses on activities which take pre- existing relations apart or surface their hidden layers (Strathern 1989, 55-56). This type of social activity, according to Strathern, yields forms – composites of relations that are versions of society or “versions of themselves that are different from themselves” (65). By approaching imprisonment in this way, starting with a presumption of its immanent sociality, the prison cannot be understood as separate from ‘society’ – opposed to it, distorting it, or undergirding it. The carceral is always already a form – or version – of sociality, its presence premised upon an alteration of relations that are already there. Following Strathern, I conceptualize prisons and

13 practices of imprisonment as entities – analogous to Melanesian “dividuals”27 – that carry “multiple references to past and future relations, and thus always to relations other than those activated in the present...Everything is present yet nothing is simply ‘present’” (63). My borrowing of the Strathernian technique of analogic comparison does not end here. The very notion of carceral forms juxtaposes the carceral and non-carceral, illuminating the limit of their analogousness and thus providing a window onto that which exceeds (or escapes) the carceral.

Carceral forms are not simply heuristics; nor are they exclusively authored by state actors. They grow out of routinized practice and different assemblages of actors/actants. They are composed, revealed, and made meaningful by those who have a stake in their reality, particularly those people I refer to as subjects of incarceration. The concept itself arises out of and remains embedded in acts, objects, and relationships that I studied in/around prisons. It describes a fusion of elements that may be distinguished as carceral with other sociocultural phenomena that are relatively ‘non-carceral’ in comparison. That is, carceral forms are ethnographically emergent unities joining together components which have come to be understood as heterogeneous (but might also be regarded as versions of one another). For example, the carceral form of the prison visit is quintessentially an encounter between prisoner and non-prisoner. However, the visitor is particularly susceptible to becoming imprisoned (Moore 2016). And, in the particular penal compound under study, female prisoners are permitted to visit relations imprisoned elsewhere in the compound as prisoner-visitors. Furthermore, non-prisoner visitors’ identities are formed through prison-entry rites of passage.28 Finally, visitors tend to extend metaphors (and draw analogies) from the domain of incarceration to the domestic domain, a symbolic act that extends meaning and not simply language.

A carceral form is, thus, a sedimented expression of carceral/non-carceral distinction that is, in fact, constituted and reproduced by forces that cut across, move through, and undermine that

27 Since Strathern (and Dumont 1980), it has become “current anthropological wisdom” that “all persons are both dividuals and individuals” (Englund and Leach 2000, 229). Though, scholarship on Brazil suggests that a dividual conceptualization of personhood may be particularly pronounced in this context (Hess and da Matta 1995; Pina- Cabral 2013). 28 All ordinary visitors to the prisons where I conducted fieldwork are required to submit to revista íntima (strip and body cavity searches) as a condition of entry. Prison staff, religious volunteers, and lawyers are not required to undergo this procedure.

14 distinction. Carceral forms reveal carceral and non-carceral phenomena to be inflected with one another without collapsing the boundary between them. These interrelated and overlapping disjunctive “assemblages” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987)29 exist at different scales and levels of abstraction. Some correspond with emic categories (e.g. the prison visit), while others are heuristic conceits that bring otherwise submerged relations into view (e.g. carceral houses). This conceptualization helps to suspend assumptions about the location and nature of carceral boundaries, rendering carceral closure/sprawl/encompassment and non-carceral relations/spaces/ideas as processual possibilities to be investigated not methodological- theoretical starting points of research.

The elusive non-carceral is, of course, not merely an academic concern. Suspension of assumptions, with the help of carceral forms, is a deliberate means of dwelling in the uncertainty of ethnographic encounters, in which differences are opened up that have the ongoing potential to destabilize carcerally-inflected conventions of thinking. Above, I described this mode of hesitation as a technique of scholarly knowledge production. But, crucially, this possibility is contingent upon the proliferation of new practical understandings (politics) among research participants themselves, as conditions of the thinkable shift over time. I have already outlined how the disjunctive comparison between carceral and non-carceral at the core of carceral forms can throw the extra-carceral into analytic relief. But what exactly does the non-carceral consist of here, in Bahia? What kind – and density – of carceral encounters underlie political aspirations for, and enactments of, post-carcerality? I borrow, once again, from Strathern to illuminate how carceral forms provoke politics and, possibly, their own elimination. Specifically, I draw a final analogic comparison using Strathern’s reflections on knowledge, power, and the persuasiveness of form among Melanesians to complicate and complement Foucauldian theories of disciplinary power and subjectification (Foucault 1977, 1982).

29 I use the term “form” to describe assemblages featuring a carceral/non-carceral opposition that expresses specific relations. The term is apt because of the attention it draws to the ongoing process of making extant phenomena recognizable: “From its development in Latin, which was repeated in English, it acquired to major senses: a visible or outward shape, and in inherent shaping impulse” (Williams 1977, 186). I thank Christopher Krupa for reminding me of the important place this term has in Marxist literary criticism (e.g. Jameson 1971; Williams 1977, 1983 [1976]). Although I do not explicitly engage this body of work here, my analysis of Brazilians’ social practices, in terms of form, could generate an illuminating comparison with Marxist literary critics’ conceptualization of form. Such a Strathernian analogical approach would be a means to freshen and expand knowledge through the rigorous juxtaposition of both parties’ existing conceptual tools.

The Gender of the Gift (1988) offers a glimpse of a Melanesian theory of power-knowledge that hinges on a form-that-intervenes.30 In short, power is conceived as a capacity to ‘elicit’ actions from others. To accomplish elicitation, people must be manifested “in a particular or concrete way.” The correct form (often objectified in gifts) “becomes the elicitory trigger” (Strathern 1988, 181). Knowledge is conceived as an effect of this mode of social action. When others respond to (proper) forms, their actions “evince” the “power or capability” (181) of the formulator.

In the case of carceral forms, what actions/responses do they elicit? What knowledge is generated as a growing number of people participate in the activity of formulation and are compelled to respond to these expressions? Encounters with the carceral are often, if not always, mediated by carceral forms-that-intervene. As the scale and concentration of penalization rise, what new forms are yielded through the relational acts of subjects of incarceration? How might these situated formulations, elicitations, and revelations of knowledge alter subjects and imaginaries of the possible? In domains where the prison and concomitant carceral forms are increasingly normalized, we find echoey distortions and “bifurcations” (Strathern 2006, 199) of hegemonic conceptualizations – e.g. of criminalization and the criminal threat – which tend to be more stable elsewhere.

Beginning my study of incarceration with relations permits openness to logics other than those quintessentially of the prison. Much scholarship on prisons is deeply implicated in the practice (and effects) of imprisonment (Rhodes 2001; Simon 2000; Foucault 1977). Although scholars from a range of disciplines have assumed a critical stance vis-à-vis practices of imprisonment, as has been the case historically with philanthropic penal reformers (Foucault 1977; Garland 1987; Ignatieff 1978, 1981), their studies and proposals for change often (re)produce the assemblage of knowledges and practices that underlie the political technology of imprisonment. I resist this feed-back loop and contribute to the interdisciplinary literature on punishment and society (Hannah-Moffat and Lynch 2012) by allowing my object of inquiry – carceral forms – to become apparent through grounded ethnographic research (Glaser and Strauss 1967; Strauss and Corbin 1994) and analogic comparison (Hirsch 2014; Strathern 1988). I challenge “the terms of the

30 I am indebted to Street and Copeman (2014) for drawing my attention to this facet of “form” in Strathern’s work.

16 discourse that frames and supports prisons” (Rhodes 2001, 75) without allowing my commitment, to “interrupt” the terms of the debate” (Rhodes 2001, 75), to act as a brake on systematic field investigation inside and around penal facilities – a situation Wacquant has warned us against in his diagnosis of the eclipse of prison ethnography in the era of ‘hyperincarceration’ (2002, 387).

Indeed, the concept of carceral forms promises to enrich a relatively disparate and nascent body of scholarship that has only recently been given the label of “interface studies” (Cunha 2014). Ethnographers working in this vein have taken up the challenge to focus on the interfaces shared by prison and ‘non-penal spaces’ (Cunha 2004, 2008; Gilmore 2007; Combessie 2002; Comfort 2008; Gowan 2002), interrogating the extent to which life inside and outside the prison is inextricably intertwined and emphasizing the curiously symbiotic relation between practices of imprisonment and other social institutions. Although this trend is highly significant insofar as it represents a break from conventional prison studies debates and approaches (i.e. world-apart and damage-assessment approaches), this dissertation argues that the notion of “interface” and its emphasis on and assumption of the “sensitive perimeter of the prison” (Combessie 2002) may conceal more than it reveals. In addition to interfaces, we must acknowledge instances in which the coextensiveness of the prison and its milieu is of primary importance. Instead of presuming the presence of prison perimeters, ethnographers ought to be sensitive to other political possibilities, including contestation of closure or efforts to reimagine “once-carceral space” (Schept 2015, 252). A carceral-forms orientation acknowledges the significance of interfaces as well as indeterminacy, drawing attention to processes of disconnection and differentiation which prefigure the ‘separateness’ of carceral and non-carceral phenomena. For example, as I show in the following chapter, subjects of incarceration who engage the prison as a technology of care must engage in laborious meaning-making efforts to distinguish the prison from the spatio- symbolic domain of the street as part of urgent familial securitization tactics and social reproductive projects. Alternatively, as elaborated in chapter 4’s discussion of carceral conjugality, married couples like Barbara and Sandra collapse distinctions between conjugal house and prison cell in the course of high-stakes performances of gender and generation.

Figure 2. The Mata Escura penal compound: A) Centro Nova Semente (the Center) – a shelter for children of prisoners where I lived while conducting fieldwork; B) The Entrance to the Penal Compound; C) Feminina – the women's prison where I conducted fieldwork; D) Module II of PLB – the unit of the men’s prison where I conducted fieldwork.

Crucially, my theoretical-methodological approach to the study of prison-society continuities and interconnections does not deny the bricks-and-mortar materiality of prisons. I work both inside and outside these structures with prisoners and non-prisoners. However, rather than privilege a particular, pre-determined inside/outside prison interface I ethnographically trace indigenous statements and practices in order to map an array of meaningful carceral forms and thresholds. As these are drawn out, perceived, traversed, negotiated, and, in some cases, receded, imprisonment is made meaningful and its echoes manifest.

I now turn to a discussion of my field site. This discussion serves the dual purpose of describing the setting of my ethnographic research and illustrating the concept of carceral forms. In what follows, I trace the contours of a particular carceral form – the prison-neighbourhood nexus – as it manifests within my field site. In this case, the specific nexus under investigation encompasses the penal compound and the neighbourhood of Mata Escura.31 Arguably, the emergence, qualities, and dynamics of the Mata Escura prison-neighbourhood nexus make it a prototypical

31 This poverty-stricken bairro (neighborhood), which some consider a favela (slum), is located on the outskirts of Salvador da Bahia. Mata Escura “is clearly urban but has the unfinished, run-down feel of the poor towns in the interior of Bahia” (Selka 2005: 83-4). According to official statistics (from 2000), the neighbourhood's total population is approximately 48,000, occupying an area of 4.5 km ² (Caldas et al. 2007, 16).

18 example of a more widespread version of this form.32 To grasp this form, I focus on peri-carceral space of the Mata Escura compound and examine the material and symbolic flows and stoppages that connect it with its proximate sociospatial environment.33 When conducting fieldwork, I lived directly next door to the compound at Centro Nova Semente (the Center), a shelter for children of prisoners founded and run by an Italian nun (fig. 2A). It took me approximately five minutes to walk from the Center to the entrance to the penal compound (fig. 3).

The Mata Escura Penal Compound: A Prison- Neighbourhood Nexus

Figure 3. Entrance to the Mata Escura Penal Compound. One of the compound’s prisons is located on the opposite side of the road and accessed through its own private entrance.

At the entrance to the penal compound is a guards’ base. Its bulletproof windows exhibit the scars of a shootout. In front of the entrance runs a line of dirt-filled barrels serving as crude anti- ram bollards. These artifacts are constitutive components of the compound’s boundary, a boundary that embodies and anticipates its own breach. People who spend time in and around this compound know it exceeds this tenuous shell in significant ways. Just beyond the

32 Arguably a more diffuse version of the prison-neighbourhood nexus is an emergent feature of Brazil’s urban landscape, generally linking low-income heavily-penalized neighbourhoods with the nations expanding prison system. Between 2006 and 2011 Brazil´s prison population increased by 18%. Since the turn of the century the number of male prisoners has doubled and the number of imprisoned women has more than tripled. However, Gledhill and Hita (2009a) warn against representations of Brazilian slums and squatter settlements that obscure differences between peripheral urban situations. 33 My analysis takes inspiration from Wacquant’s provocative account of how the U.S. “Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh” (2000, 2001).

19 compound’s imposing entrance, its edges are strikingly indeterminate. The compound’s limits are neither obvious nor absolute. This quality is distilled in a number of figures and practices characteristic of the entrance.

Figure 4. Visitors distribute chits to organize queues (Photo by Arisson Marinho).

The main entrance to Bahia’s largest prison compound is usually a hub of activity. The night before visitation days, women34 begin to gather. Some erect tents. More people arrive with the dawn including peer-appointed representatives that distribute numbered fichas (slips) to organize the order of visitor entry (fig. 4). The ficha system permits visitors to mill about more freely (without the added anxiety of losing their early-arrival advantage) as they wait for processing to begin. Pastries and sweet black coffee served in thimble-sized plastic cups are available for purchase. At the designated time, visitors migrate towards the bollards and the guards’ base where they are admitted, one-by-one, into the compound. Once inside, visitors head off in the direction of their individual prison destinations where they will form a new set of institutionally- administered lines. Meanwhile, outside the complex, a steady trickle of visitors continues to arrive throughout the morning.

Those who arrive at the compound’s entrance anytime during the day are greeted by a dozen or so vendors.35 Vendors set up shop under bus shelters on either side of the thoroughfare that runs past the entrance, bisecting the compound. Some vendors have barracas (stands), others hawk their wares out of wheelbarrows. Most live in Mata Escura, the low-income neighbourhood that abuts the compound. Though these vendors are not officially sanctioned by compound

34 The vast majority (approx. 90%) of prison visitors are female. 35 The majority of these vendors are women. The ratio of female to male vendors is roughly 4:1. This ratio would shift if I were to include more transient ride purveyors (e.g. moto-taxi boys and male car owners who shuttle folks to Brasil Gás – a spot where visitors from out of town catch inter-city busses).

20 authorities, they nonetheless participate in its day-to-day operations. Consider the experiences and contributions of Rita and Ana.

Rita, explains how she ended up working here. I used to sell my merchandise door-to-door. It was very tiring. Up and down the ladeiras (sloping streets). Then, when my husband caiu preso [was imprisoned], I started selling to other visitors lá embaixo [down below – in the compound]. I just stayed in front [of the prison she was supposed to be visiting] and only worked a few days a week [designated visitation days]. This was way easier and I earned more…

When Rita’s husband was transferred to a prison located elsewhere in the city, her status as a visitor authorized to enter the compound was revoked. But, this temporary setback was ultimately a boon to her business. She relocated her point of sale to the compound entrance where she expanded her customer base and hours of operation. Now she encounters visitors destined for all of the compound’s seven prisons. Gradually her business grew and, today, she monopolizes an entire bench and sells a would-be catalogue of women’s clothing and accessories (e.g. tight jeans, embellished jersey tops, shoes, purses, sexy underwear, hair scrunches, etc.). Rita is the only vendor who sells fashion items, a more capital-intensive venture than snacks and drinks. Her array of pretty and pleasing indulgences offers a welcome distraction to bored and belittled female visitors, too drained after the labour of visitation to trek to Salvador’s central commercial district.

Like most other vendors, in addition to selling goods, Rita also provides services for a fee. For example, she stores possessions that visitors are not permitted to bring with them into the prisons. The list of prohibited objects is long but the main items that visitors pay to store are purses, cell phones, make-up, and luggage (brought by out-of-town visitors arriving at the compound directly from the long-distance bus terminal). These are things that most visitors feel they cannot leave home without. Yet, inside the compound, most of the prison units do not offer visitors access to secure storage options.36 Thus, vendors like Rita step up to meet demand,

36 In chapter 2, I describe a project mounted by the male prisoners of one cellblock. Following a prison-wide ban on purses, prisoners accumulated funds, coordinated with prison administrators, and had a visitor waiting area – complete with a bank of lockers – constructed at the cellblock entrance.

21 charging roughly R$ 2 per item per day (bulk-item discounts and other deals are offered to preferred and loyal clients).

Some vendors offer a delivery service. For a fee, they haul (relatively affluent) visitors’ heavy packages of food, hygiene products, and other goods to the prisons. Ana, for example, uses her wheelbarrow to transport loads part-way into the compound. She has worked here for many years and is well-known to prison staff. Although it is against prison rules for anyone without formal authorization to access the compound, Ana has negotiated an informal agreement with guards stationed at the entrance. She can travel roughly 300 meters into the compound until she reaches “the tunnel”. The tunnel is a dilapidated structure on the side of a dirt road, situated halfway between the main entrance and the compound’s largest prison – Penitenciária Lemos Brito (PLB), the maximum-security prison for men where I conducted fieldwork (fig. 2D). The tunnel consists of a covered bench and a very run-down bathroom no longer maintained by the state. I was enlisted on several occasions to stand guard at its permanently-ajar door while desperate visitors used the toilet.

The tunnel happens to demarcate an invisible boundary. It is here where Ana stops and transfers her cargo to a fardo azul (blue-uniformed PLB prisoner on work detail) (fig. 5). Fardos azuis may only venture as far from PLB (and as close to the compound entrance) as the tunnel, though no one is actually monitoring them very closely. On the mornings of visitation days, a small group of these men sit in the shade of the tunnel waiting to be hired to transport visitors’ purchases the remaining distance to PLB’s four scattered cellblocks.

Figure 5. Ana and her wheelbarrow (left); Dolphino, a fardo azul, waits for customers near the tunnel with his newly acquired cart (middle); a fardo azul leaves PLB Módulo II after making a delivery (right).

How do the edges of imprisonment manifest in my field site? The figure of the vendor (like the practices of prison visitors)37 is suggestive of the complexity and richness of these edges. As a visible example of the way locals traverse carceral spaces and engage imprisonment to make ends meet, vendors reveal how the compound is woven into the fabric of poor urban neighborhoods. Rita reminds us that the compound exerts a certain pull, drawing outsiders into this simultaneously stigmatizing and stabilizing social milieu. And, as Ana’s routine illustrates, the boundaries dividing the insides and outsides of carceral spaces – carceral “interfaces” (Cunha 2014) – are less singular, apparent, and well-defined than we might expect. What does it mean to take the indeterminate, co-constituted, and situationally-revealed thresholds between the interior world(s) of the prison and the ecology of its social, economic, and urban exterior more seriously? I attend carefully to such thresholds, approaching them as a window onto the prison- neighbourhood nexus, a carceral form of great importance in the current era of carceral expansion/concentration.

The penal compound introduced above, in combination with the surrounding neighbourhood of Mata Escura, is helpfully understood as an emblematic instantiation of an increasingly common carceral form: the prison-neighbourhood nexus. The Penitentiary Complex of the State of Bahia (O Complexo Penitenciário do Estado da Bahia) is a sprawling penal compound housing the state’s largest concentration of prisons and prisoners. In lieu of its proper name, the media and various publics refer to the compound as “O Complexo da Mata Escura” (The Mata Escura Complex). On one level, this label simply denotes the compound’s location. But, talk of the compound that elides “the State” and inserts “Mata Escura” is also symbolically productive. Mata Escura is discursively sutured to the prison as “the State” is backgrounded or rendered not- fully present. Indeed, Brazilian prisons—a fundamental institution of the state apparatus—often appear in popular consciousness as frontier zones just beyond the control of government officials (see French 2013). The naming of the compound alerts us to a way in which it resembles Mata Escura: the state is present but ultimately unable to enforce its legality in both of these conjoined spaces. Rather than operate as an aspirational “blue zone” showcasing a high degree of state presence, effective bureaucracy, and a properly functioning legal system (O’Donnell 1993,

37 The labour of visitation begins outside of the compound. For example, as briefly described above, visitors have innovated their own technologies of (self-)government to improve official procedures.

1359), the penal compound has become a monument to failure of good governance that seems to index the limits of state capacity. These limits are thrown into relief as the integrity of the compound and its workers is revealed to be thoroughly illusory.

Insecure Boundaries

Extending from the compound entrance and running all the way to The Center lies a relatively low concrete wall. A beach umbrella lashed to a vendor’s stall extends higher than this wall (fig. 6B). The compound’s strikingly low (and incomplete) perimeter barrier is bemoaned by guards as a shameful symbol of problematic permeability.

Figure 6. Residents of Mata Escura, regular fixtures at the compound entrance, provide goods and services to visitors. Note the different wall heights in the background of photographs A (left) and B (right).

On one side of the wall runs the thoroughfare. On the other side, there is thickly forested state- owned land, the compound’s verdant margin. Children of the Center fear this forest; three boys once told me they had heard screams emanating from it – the last cries of a murder victim. Generally speaking, residents of Salvador da Bahia (Soterpolitanos) are wary of this terrain – the kind that gives Mata Escura (Dark Forest) its very name – because it is widely assumed to harbour bandits. Note, the bandits said to inhabit this forest are not presumed to be escaped- convicts but local criminals taking advantage of the coverage and isolation this margin offers. The penal compound’s low wall demarcates, without effectively securing, its territory. The wall is successful in one important respect though. As an announcement of the state’s usage (or intent to use) this land, it has largely prevented further encroachment of invasions by poor people looking to build homes in the region. In fact, the wall was built, primarily, to protect state property from appropriation. The problem of carceral permeability, in this case, derives more from the need to protect state property from common appropriation – keeping the public out and the possibility of future prison construction here alive – than from “public security” or keeping prisoners in.

Across the road from the compound entrance is a significantly higher wall which surrounds the compound’s “open regime”38 prison (fig. 6A). Guards bitterly point out the irony that an open- regime prison – which requires all prisoners to leave for work on a daily basis (Monday to Friday) – is “effectively secured.” Years ago, funds were allegedly allocated to construct a similarly high and complete wall around the main part of the compound. However, guards tell me this secure perimeter never materialized because “someone ate the funds.”39 The state of the penal compound’s enclosure presents a symbolically-charged, counter-intuitive image of the prison to Soteropolitano observers. Guards, for instance, claim that it is actually illegal to wall-in an open-regime prison. In this sense, Bahian prison construction and allocation of funds is both illogical and illegal.

Figure 7. The view of two of the compound’s prisons from Avenida Gal Costa. Note how the compound as a whole is not surrounded by a secure perimeter.

On the far side of the penal compound, another major thoroughfare—Avenida Gal Costa—hems in the carceral form. Travelers along this road have a good view of the compound’s prisons perched up on a forested hill (fig. 7). One of these prisons – the Special Disciplinary Unit (UED) – is a maximum-security prison reserved for men identified as the state’s most dangerous prisoners, namely members of state- and national-level prison-based drug trafficking organizations.40

38 In Brazil, convicted prisoners are sentenced to serve time in closed, open, or semi-open regimes. Ideally, prisoners are meant to progress through these regimes in preparation for release. 39 “Alguem comeu as verbas”– a popular expression to indicate corruption or misspending. 40 I discuss these groups in chapter 2. The following scholars describe and analyze these groups: Leeds 1996, Lourenço and Almeida 2013, Penglase 2008.

In April 2013, in the early hours of the morning, UED prisoners broke locks, exited their cells, and detonated an explosive to fell the door of their cellblock. Meanwhile, a small band of armed accomplices, some disguised as police officers, crept through the forest and managed to subdue military police stationed in a guard tower. Ultimately, the escape attempt was stymied because the cellblock door withstood the explosion. The armed band of invaders, having already neutralized the exterior patrol, retreated back through to the forest. But they did not leave the penal compound empty-handed. They left with weapons commandeered from their temporary captives.

In media coverage of this escape attempt, a city councillor is quoted remonstrating that UED, like the compound more generally, is not surrounded by a wall: “There are fences. Any person knows that beyond UED there is a forest that ends at the edge of [the road], and this is exactly the route the bandits took to arrive and escape” (Bocão News 2013). After the incident, police found two stolen cars abandoned on Avenida Gal Costa. One of the cars contained a discarded police uniform.

This was not an isolated incident; escapes and attempted escapes from the compound are relatively regular occurrences. However, this particular case draws attention to a defining characteristic shared by prisons, police/prison guards, and low-income peripheral neighbourhoods like Mata Escura: their vulnerability vis-à-vis crime. Understaffed and infrastructurally-inadequate prisons do not reliably contain prisoners or guarantee public safety against the threat of social problems rooted in and seeping from prisons (i.e. Brazil’s notorious prison-based ‘gangs’).41 Likewise, police/guards are incapable of preventing incursions by well- armed bandits. And, just as funds allocated for a secure perimeter wall were “eaten,” so too may police be consumed by corruption. In Brazil, the boundary dividing police and bandits is in fact so problematic that an intermediary figure has emerged—the policial-bandido (police-bandit) (Goldstein 2013, 188; Caldeira 2002, 249). The police uniform found inside one of the

41 The term “prison gang” is not commonly used by Brazilian policy makers or academics (or ‘gang’ members themselves). However, in Brazil, there is substantial interest in an arguably parallel social formation: the facção (faction), comando (command), or comissão (commission). Lourenço and Almeida argue that it is valid and productive to import and employ the conceptual term “prison gang” when describing and analyzing the Brazilian situation (2013, 2-3). For the purposes of this dissertation, beyond this introduction (viz. in chapter 2), I employ the term “commission” in an attempt to avoid replicating and reinforcing dominant discourses of problematization that contribute to the criminalization, marginalization, and punitive containment of so many people.

26 abandoned vehicles invites suspicion about its origins. The status of the guards taken captive by the invaders also raises questions of complicity and corruption; while the hostages claim to have been beaten it seems they did not in fact sustain serious injuries (Bocão News 2013).

Agentes Penitenciários (guards) assigned to particular prison units regularly accuse the military police charged with patrolling the compound’s perimeter of incompetence and corruption. At a public meeting organized by the agentes’ union there was much talk of how exactly contraband flows so readily into the prisons. Shifting attention from their own possible roles in such violations, agentes drew attention to visitors’ vaginas and a dearth of modern security technology (e.g. x-ray machines and working metal detectors). When the presence of large machetes inside prisons was raised as proof that visitors are not solely responsible for the entry of contraband, agentes shifted the blame again, explaining how cellblocks’ open-air structure permits large items to be thrown inside by prisoners’ allies hidden in the forest. This possibility hinges on inadequate securitization of the compound. Guards allege that some military police tasked with this duty are paid or extorted to look the other way as bandits approach and breach the units.42

The problematic nature of public authorities and institutions within the prison-neighborhood nexus gives rise to multiple insecurities, including the insecure boundaries of the penal compound. But insecurity, unequally distributed throughout the population, is also a condition of this carceral form’s emergence. In the following section I consider this emergence, charting the historical co-development of the penal compound and Mata Escura. I show that, within this prison-neighbourhood nexus, prison interiors and exteriors are co-constitutive, having grown together, simultaneously.

The Historical Emergence of a Prison-Neighbourhood Nexus

In 1549, Portuguese settler colonists founded Salvador da Bahia and the northeastern coastal city became the commercial and administrative hub of an Atlantic-orientated economy based on the enslavement of Africans and the export of sugar and other plantation products (Gledhill and Hita 2009a, 6). Slavery, as well as colonial land distribution patterns, has shaped social relations (Brown 2000) and the emergence of a prison-neighbourhood nexus in contemporary Brazil.

42 Garces has written about similar dynamics in Ecuador’s prisons (2014a, 2014b).

In the 19th century, Imperial Brazil (1822-1889) resembled a patchwork of small villages, parishes, and large plantations. These plantations were the legacy of colonial land grants. During this period, the forested area where Mata Escura is currently located supplied water to the surrounding region. It was also the site of quilombos – settlements established by runaway slaves (Amado 2007) – as well as terreiros de Candomblé – houses or temples where Afro-Brazilian religious rites are performed. In 1880, a private company purchased part of this land from plantation owners and constructed two dams which supplied water to the growing city of Salvador until 1987.

In 1950 construction began on PLB. This prison, the first public institution in the area, was erected amid a vast expanse of uncultivated land. Around it, through a process of land invasion, emerged a shantytown that, over time, developed into Mata Escura. The original plans for PLB included the construction of four circular buildings of confinement for sentenced prisoners. However, by 1955, only one pavilion had been completed: Corpo IV. Corpo IV was built in the circular style of Bentham's panopticon: a round building with tiers of cells lining the inner circumference and facing a central inspection tower (see fig. 8).

Figure 8. Corpo IV Exterior (left) and Interior (right) (E. J. Carvalho 2013, 64).

Until the early 1960s there was no road access to Mata Escura from the city center. At least part of the 10km journey had to be made by foot. The distance and isolation of this area from the city center were principle factors motivating officials to acquire the land for prison construction. Major infrastructure improvements, including the extension of power lines and roads to the area, did not occur until the early 1970s. These improvements were not, of course, primarily intended to benefit residents of Mata Escura (Oliveira 2012, 73). New roads, for example, did not bring public transportation with them; PLB staff relied on an employee shuttle service to/from the city.

By 1972 PLB’s panoptic pavilion (Corpo IV) had been supplemented by a second pavilion: Corpo III which operated as a kind of factory rather than simply as a space for housing prisoners. Prisoners performed various jobs such as shoemaking, pottery, woodwork, and tailoring in this pavilion. Goods produced throughout the month were then sold. After being charged a fee of 10% of total sales – which contributed to the cost of tools, electricity fees, and maintaining the physical plant – prisoners were able to save the remainder of their profits. These funds could only be withdrawn upon release. Reportedly, it was not uncommon to hear prisoners complain that they were actually being ‘taxed’ at higher rates (Oliveira 2012, 68). However, this was occurring during the time of the military dictatorship (1964-1985). Until the period of democratization (beginning in 1985), public inquiries in response to such rumors were not truly “thinkable” (Oliveira 2012, 69).43

By the early 1970s PLB had entered a phase of bureaucratic rationalization (Oliveira 2012: 75). The 4th United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders held in Kyoto, Japan in 1970 alerted nations of the need to implement, in all countries, a body of principles to guide the limits of tguihe State’s power and duty to punish (BRASIL 1995, 11 quoted by Aguiar 2001, 35).44 During this pivotal period, sociologist Célia Maria Leal Braga visited PLB and wrote a report: Crime e Sociedade: O diagnostic de uma situação (1973). Braga’s description of PLB provides a glimpse of the prison-neighbourhood nexus in its early stages of development as well as the historical continuity of indeterminate carceral thresholds within this emergent nexus. At this time (the beginning of 1973), 53 agentes were responsible for overseeing 371 PLB prisoners (Braga 1973, 14-23).45

43 The incarceration of “political” prisoners of the dictatorship was governed by art. 76 of the Lei de Segurança Nacional (Decreto-lei 898, 29 de setembro de 1969), which stated that such prisoners should serve their sentence without “rigor carcerário” (carceral rigour). In contrast, “common” prisoners’ rights were not safeguarded (if it is even appropriate to employ the language of rights when speaking of ordinary prisoners at this time). “Common” prisoners were confined separately from political prisoners under worse conditions (Oliveira, 69). Bahia’s political prisoners had the ‘privilege’ of occupying approximately 20 exclusive cells, located in Gallery F on the third floor of Corpo IV, where they had minimal contact with other PLB prisoners (Oliveira 69). 44 The Lei de Execução Penal (n. 7.210) was instituted on 11/07/1984. In 1995 the Regras Mínimas para o Tratamento do Preso no Brasil were developed and approved by the Conselho Nacional de Política Criminal e Penitenciária. This set of rules was established in view of the determination of the General Assembly of the United Nations, stipulated by Resolution 2.858 (20/11/1971) and reiterated by Resolution 3.281 (6/11/1974). 45 Braga’s report on PLB includes a survey of the prison population and the type of crime for which prisoners were sentenced (1973, 17-18; 14 as cited by Oliveira 2012, 73-4). Just over half of PLB prisoners (51.2%) were serving sentences for homicide and, notably, Braga did not include any category of offence explicitly related to narcotics.

The whole area [of PLB] is protected by barbed wire which, beyond serving to delimit [state] property, is one means used by the security staff to prevent escape of prisoners.

The big gate that provides access to the penitentiary serves as the dividing boundary between the group that lives ali dentro [inside] and the surrounding community.

The first impression after passing through the gate is that it is an area that houses a rural population. This is called the “área livre” (free area) of the penitentiary, because in it circulate [blue-uniformed] prisoners, those who, as a reward for their “good behavior,” are not subject to certain requirements. They are able to move ‘freely’ throughout the prison grounds and can reside, with their families, in private houses [built on the property]. There are several houses that do not follow a standardized model of construction [shanty-like structures]. Almost all are surrounded by a small garden, where vegetables and fruits are planted to help meet the substance needs of the [prisoner’s] family. The area itself where these houses are located is entirely planted with shady trees that make the environment seem like it offers a vida tranquila (a quiet life) and not like a penal colony. Small stores and bars exist to supply the community. There is even a public school that primarily serves children of prisoners, but that, space permitting, is also open to the surrounding population.46

Approximately 100 meters from the main entrance is another gate that provides access to the penitentiary building. This building is protected by another fence and is guarded by military police soldiers, armed with rifles and machine guns. Inside this boundary is a situation totally different from the previous one. There is rigorous and constant surveillance to prevent the escape of [black-uniformed] prisoners, that is, those who by their behavior have not won the trust of the administration and, consequently, live under the regime of isolation (Braga 1973, 17-18 as quoted in Oliveira 2012, 73-74 – my own translation).

Little more than a decade later, the illegal drug trade had expanded significantly in Brazil, Bahia, and within PLB itself (Amorim 2003). As of 2010, 22.8% of PLB prisoners were serving sentences for drug trafficking (Almeida 2012, 116). Drug trafficking is the most common offence type represented at PLB. 46 This school was open when I conducted preliminary fieldwork (2007) but had been closed by the time I returned to conduct the bulk of my dissertation fieldwork (2010).

In the late 1970s and 1980s Bahia’s prison system began to expand;47 PLB was enlarged and new prisons were constructed in its vicinity.48 During this period, Bahia’s penal population was concentrated in the state capital, primarily in “the Mata Escura Complex” (see table 1).49 People migrated to Mata Escura to be in proximity of imprisoned relations, contributing to the neighbourhood’s creation, consolidation, and development. In the 1990s, even as Bahia’s prison system entered a phase of systematic “interiorization” (which has entailed the construction of fourteen prisons in the interior of the state),50 Mata Escura and ‘its’ penal compound continued to grow.

47 At the time that Braga recorded her description of PLB, Bahia’s prison system consisted of PLB; the Manicômio Judiciário (forensic asylum); and the Casa de Detenção (House of Detention). The House of Detention had a capacity of 220 (SJDH, 1973) and was located close to the city center in an old fort, Largo do Santo Antônio. This institution was originally named “Casa de Correção” (House of Correction). However, this name is misleading insofar as the institution did not embody penitentiary ideals in any way (see Trindade's accounts 2008, 2011). Thus, the institution was renamed “House of Detention” in the 1930s. Bahia’s Presídio de Mulheres (women’s prison) was nested within the facilities of the House of Detention, until the House of Detention was deactivated during the burst of penal reform activity which seems to have been initiated in the 1970s (see subsequent section on “the gender of carceral forms” for a brief history of Feminina). 48 On the land surrounding PLB, in the late 1970s and the 1980s, the following separately-administered prisons were established: the Casa do Albergado e Egressos (the aforementioned open-regime prison), Penitenciária Feminina (a women’s prison, the predecessor of the institution where I conducted fieldwork), and Presídio de Salvador (with an initial capacity of 540) which replaced the aforementioned House of Detention. This cluster of prisons, including PLB, was designated as the Complexo Penitenciário do Estado (known colloquially as the Complexo Penitenciário Lemos de Brito or the Complexo da Mata Escura). 49 Only two units were located elsewhere in Salvador, outside the Mata Escura complex: the Hospital de Custódia e Tratamento and Colônia Lafayete Coutinho. 50 The state’s first prison of the interior was constructed in Feira de Santana in the 1980s. The Presídio Regional de Feira de Santana (with a capacity of 240 inmates) has subsequently been re-named Conjunto Penal de Feira de Santana. Bahia’s prison system did not begin to undergo a phase of systematic “interiorization” until the 1990s. The objectives of this policy were to increase carceral capacity as well as adhere to dictates of the Lei de Execução Penal. Humanization of prison units and rehabilitation of prisoners were stated goals (see Aguiar 2001).

Table 1: Prison Units in Salvador, Bahia

Prison Unit and Date of Construction Regime Location

PLB – Penitenciária Lemos Brito (1951) Closed (Sentenced Prisoners) Mata Escura

HCT – Hospital de Custódia e Tratamento (1973) Medida de Segurança Baixa do Fiscal (inimputável)

PS – Presidio Salvador (1976) Closed (Provisional Prisoners) Mata Escura

51 CAE – A Casa do Albergado e Egresso (1986) Open Mata Escura

Penitenciária Feminina (1990) Open, Semi-open, and Closed Mata Escura (Provisional and Sentenced 52 [Renamed “Conjunto Penal Feminino” in 2005 ] Prisoners)

COP – Centro de Observação Penal (1992) Closed (Provisional and Mata Escura Sentenced Prisoners)

53 CPLC – Colônia Penal Lafayete Coutinho Semi-Open Castelo Branco

CMP – Central Médica Penitenciária (1993) Support Unit Provides Medical Mata Escura Assistance

UED – Unidade Especial Disciplinar (2005) Closed (Provisional and Mata Escura Sentenced Prisoners)

CPS – Cadeia Pública (2010) Closed (Provisional) Mata Escura

Source: SEAP/BA (2012) (Carvalho 2013)

51 “Embora a Casa do Albergado e Egresso esteja situada de fronte da portaria principal, do lado externo da área do complexo, ela é considerada uma unidade integrante, do ponto de vista sistêmico, ao Complexo Penitenciário do Estado da Bahia” (E. J. Carvalho 2013, 59 n.36). 52 The institution was renamed to reflect the fact that women assigned to all security levels are confined within this single institution (de Oliveira Almeida 2006, 38). 53 Previously, Colônia Lafayete Coutinho, a semi-open regime prison, operated as the notorious Reformatório Penal Agricoa de Pedra Preta. Reportedly, during the military dictatorship, torture and arbitrary arrests occurred in this unit (Gomes 2010, 93; Oliveira 2012, 71).

Today, PLB remains Bahia’s largest prison.54 However, its iconic panoptic pavilion (“Corpo IV” – Fig. 8) was deactivated “in the face of the bankruptcy of the Benthamian proposal” (Gomes 2009, 92). More concretely, PLB’s original cellblock was closed in the wake of a scandal which demonstrated “the complete domination of the prison by the prisoners and a total lack of control by the responsible [state bureau]” (Comissão Parlamentar de Inquérito 2008). The scandal erupted when a major operation against drug trafficking – “Operação Big Bang” (June 2008)55 – targeted PLB as well as several of Salvador’s neighbourhoods. The message was clear: state agents charged with governing PLB had either lost control or been thoroughly corrupted. Military police – rather than prison guards – were sent into Corpo IV to (re)arrest a prisoner known as “the king” of the prison in an attempt to reclaim this carceral territory for the state. Many Soteropolitanos are capable of reciting the outrageous contents discovered by police in “the king’s” cell: two refrigerators stocked with beer, energy drinks, red meat, fish, and chicken; a plasma television and DVD player; exercise equipment; a double bed; 8 kilos of cocaine; three pistols; and R$280,000. This notorious scene has become emblematic of Bahia’s “failing” prisons. It is widely believed that prisoners are able to command far-reaching drug trafficking networks, order murders and kidnappings to be executed na rua (on the streets), and live like kings within the prison system. Rather than protect society, in the eyes of politicians and members of the public, “[e]normous social harms are emanating from [Bahian] prisons” (Paulo Gomes, o Promotor de Justiça).56

Today, in the shadow of the massive deactivated redonda (round unit), the majority of PLB prisoners are confined in four spatially-distinct, smaller-scale rectangular modules. I conducted the majority of my PLB-based research within one of these four modules and its visitor waiting area. Within the Mata Escura Compound, I also conducted fieldwork within and at the entrance of the compound’s only prison for women, Conjunto Penal Feminino (which I refer to as Feminina) (fig. 2C). The significance of my choice to study a prison for women as well as a prison for men cannot be overstated. Scholars of imprisonment tend to focus on either male or

54 With a population of 1450 prisoners (SEAP 2012). 55 Led by the Ministério Público and the Secretaria de Segurança Pública (the state bureau responsible for policing, not prison administration). 56 http://www.mpba.mp.br/noticias/2008/jun_02_traficante.asp#

33 female prisoners and prison ethnographers often conduct participant observation in a single institution (either a men’s or a women’s prison).57 By investigating the gendered experiences and social relations of male and female (ex-)prisoners, visitors, and other subjects of incarceration, and by comparing the regimes of imprisonment/visitation at two neighboring institutions (PLB and Feminina), my research has generated unique and important data which has implications for contemporary theorizations of the prison. After completing the present discussion of the Mata Escura prison-neighbourhood nexus, I outline how my findings and the employment of a gender lens deepen our understanding of carceral forms.

Between 2000 and 2005, the number of women in Brazilian prisons increased from 10,112 to 20,264; that is, from 4.3 to 5.6% of the total prison population (Walmsley 2006, 3). Consistent with these nation-wide trends, in the Mata Escura compound, female prisoners constitute approximately 6% of the total prison population. In addition to PLB and Feminina, the Mata Escura Compound contains five separately-administered prisons for men. In total, the compound confines approximately 3,200 men and 200 women (SEAP 2013). The steady expansion of this compound, since the 1950s, has been accompanied by the development of the community of Mata Escura.

As is the case with other Brazilian favelas (slums), a significant portion of Mata Escura’s growth was informal and ‘unplanned’, occurring through a series of invasões of forested, unoccupied land and concomitant processes of gradual residential and infrastructural auto-construction (see Holston 2008). At the beginning of the 20th century, 70 percent of the Brazilian population inhabited the countryside; by the turn of the century, over 70 percent were urban dwellers. Brazilian cities developed in an unjust, disorderly and illegal way as a result, at least in part, of the process of land concession during colonial and imperial periods (Arvitzer 2010, 153). As elites modernized city centers, “they expelled the working poor and forced them to reside in undeveloped hinterlands… in precarious and typically illegal conditions” (Holston 2008, 8).

57 Exceptions include Britton’s (1997) comparative study of male and female guards’ experiences in men’s and women’s U.S. prisons and Reed’s (1999) ethnography of a Papua New Guinean penal compound (which included men’s and women’s units).

Yet, rapidly expanding favelas also frightened urban elites (Skidmore 2009, 138). The strong association of favelas with the illicit extended beyond the issue of usurped land. Historically, favelas have been represented as enclaves of lawlessness or as major sources of social problems. Note the parallels between popular understandings of favelas and Bahian prisons; both are widely understood to incubate and disseminate danger into the wider social milieu. The media, expert interventions, and political campaigns depict the favela “…as a perversion of the city's social, moral, and economic order” (Hayes 2011, 81). The space of the favela itself is associated with crowded, unsanitary conditions that breed disease and crime; it is often represented as a safe harbour for illegal activities “populated by vagrants, drunks, criminals, prostitutes, and other social undesirables” (Hayes 2011, 81). In short, favelas have been commonly problematized as criminogenic spaces.

In the case of Mata Escura, the taint of the illicit far surpasses this general class-based and racialized “territorial stigmatization” (Wacquant 2007). Mata Escura suffers from special image problems because, in addition to the standard cast of disreputable characters associated with favelas, the neighbourhood harbours a prison in its very center (Caldas et al. 2007, 16). And, crucially, many of the Soterpolitanos I have spoken with believe Mata Escura’s origin is tied to the establishment and growth of the penal compound. Namely, people think of the neighborhood as a settlement of (ex-)prisoners and visitors (e.g. Amorim 2003). Indeed, there exists “an association between the image of the carceral population and the neighbourhood. The prison serves as a reference, saddling the community with a marginal identity, which diminishes local self-esteem…” (Amado 2007—my translation). Unquestionably, Mata Escura is inextricably linked to the penal compound in the popular imagination. Many understand the neighbourhood as fundamentally of the prison more than as a distinct and relatively independent neighbouring entity.

By approaching Mata Escura as a carceral form, I am able to grasp the shared history and meaning of the neighbourhood and penal compound. Before there was an “interface” there was an imminent carceral form, pre-conditioned by patterns of socio-economic inequality and responses to it by officials, elites, and the poor. But, as the neighborhood’s present-day reputation illustrates, the co-constitution of Mata Escura and “its” penal compound is not simply historical. I now turn to an ethnographic account of subterranean and symbolic flows of people and things constitutive of this prison-neighbourhood nexus. This account illustrates features of

35 carceral forms important to those of us struggling to destabilize carceral logics, namely, contested carceral closure, carceral indeterminacy, and processes of ‘decarceration’ through which carceral space is appropriated and produced as once-carceral, even if this status is incomplete and fragile. As Schept writes, “[p]erhaps most devastating to carceral expansion, resistance can take the form of reimagining once-carceral space, disrupting incarceration’s seeming inevitability and offering a counterhegemonic cartography” (2015, 252).

Flows and Stoppages Constitutive of the (Once-)Carceral

Today, some ex-prisoners and prison visitors continue to establish residences in Mata Escura. Posters around the compound entrance advertise rooms available for rent. I knew of a few relatively mobile young women (wives of prisoners in the early phases of marriage) who, at least temporarily, took up residence in the vicinity of the compound. One such woman, Taise (28), explained how renting a room nearby was not a purely pragmatic decision: At night, I can see the lights of [the cellblock] when we talk,58 when I cook him a meal [that she will bring on her next visit]. I can see his light and I can sleep because he is close.

Taise, ultimately, relinquished her rented room. Following a very rocky period in her marriage, Taise happily told me that she and her incarcerated husband were expecting their first child (together). Pregnant, Taise became more enmeshed with her affines and began living with them in another area of the city.

Rymunda (52) is also the wife of a PLB prisoner who has taken up residence in Mata Escura. Unlike Taise, Rymunda had been married to her husband for years before his imprisonment. They have three children together and hail from the rural interior of the state. Due to the prohibitive distance separating their home from the capital, Rymunda and her sons are only able to visit when time and money permit them to stay in Salvador for month-long stretches. During such stints (which generally overlap with school holidays), Rymunda and her youngest son, Enrique (7), stay within walking distance of the compound. They rent a small one-room brick outbuilding in the back garden of “Sr. Antonio’s” family home. The room contains a bed, an old stove, an empty fuel tank covered with a sheet, and a single shelf.

58 Taise’s husband, like many male prisoners, has access to a contraband cell phone.

On the agreed-upon day of my visit the garden is lush and cool, shaded by mature fruit trees. The trees’ branches droop under the weight of almost-ripe mangos and five different varieties of banana. The area is pleasantly smoky. O Senhor is tending a campfire because, at the moment, he is out of fuel. Enrique and three other boys are in the midst of a water fight in the outdoor bathing area. They emerge, dripping and naked, asking for coins to buy a popsicle. Rymunda scolds them for splashing (dirty) water back into the well before she allows me to give them money to buy us all popsicles from a neighbour’s household shop. Accustomed to water shortages which are typical in Bahia’s semi-arid interior, Rymunda is appreciative of Sr. Antonio’s 2-meter-deep well: “here we never lack water.” This is one of a few reasons Rymunda is contemplating a more permanent move to Mata Escura.

Generally speaking, residents of Mata Escura rarely lack water. When the public water company (EMBASA) first extended infrastructure to the area, the pipes only ran as far as the prison. Enterprising residents bought their own materials and were permitted, by corrupt police and prison administrators, to “pirate” the prison’s water supply and extend pipes to their households. This involved excavation of pipes “at the prison’s front door.” Officials collected bribes in the form of a fixed monthly rate from residents of the growing neighbourhood. Now, years later, water redirected from the prison is free to those who are connected to this covert infrastructure.

Eventually, EMBASA extended a legal water supply to the neighbourhood itself. The arrival of an alternative licit resource stream undermined the extant system of monthly pay-offs. Residents were now in a position to denounce corruption and alert the media. Police, afraid of losing their jobs, stopped demanding bribes.

Today, the majority of Mata Escurans do pay monthly water bills. However, there still exists a covert network of underground pipes enabling many residents to pay a “taxa minima” (minimum rate). Households tend to have two water taps: one that is connected to a billing meter and one that spouts prison water, compliments of the state. Those who can afford to be official consumers strategically use both taps, for example drawing cooking water from the official tank and using a clandestine tap in the garden for everything else. This allows them to avoid the suspicion of water company investigators. Additionally, receiving monthly water bills can be helpful when one is required to demonstrate proof of address, a common demand of many bureaucratic rituals. The case of the pirated prison water reveals the deep interconnection of the compound and the

37 neighbourhood. Moreover, the presence of an illicit subterranean infrastructure reminds us how difficult it is to determine where the carceral begins and ends. And, crucially, this murkiness is not simply an academic concern. Research participants believe “the state,” which is subsidizing their water consumption, is no longer aware of the re-routed water.

Salvador’s topography helps to condition the Mata Escura prison-neighbourhood nexus. The city expanded out from its center over a series of hills and ridges (Hita and Gledhill 2009a, 10). Senhor Antonio’s house—where Rymunda and Enrique stay—is located at the base of a valley in the part of Mata Escura residents call “Inferninho” (or “little hell”). This area, abutting the counterintuitively tall grey wall of the compound’s open-regime prison (fig. 6A), is the zone of Mata Escura most strongly associated with imprisonment. Around 5000 people live on Inferninho’s twenty travessas (lanes). Sandoval, a research participant, explains the origins of the area’s name: Many years ago, in inferninho, there lived prisoners who had left [the prison]. They had control over the location and police couldn’t enter. Even people from other areas couldn’t enter. Now the situation has improved. Prisoners died, the power of the state arrived, and there has been an influx of moradores de boa indole [residents with strength of character] with good conduct who do the right thing on the side of the law and justice.

To walk to/from the main entrance of the penal compound (an exhausting 15-minute journey, more like a hike than a walk), Rymunda and Enrique must ascend and descend a series of steep and narrow footpaths which, in many places, have been roughly paved by the residents themselves. The rippling effect of hand-poured concrete provides traction for those who negotiate these slippery slopes. Rymunda and Enrique navigate flooded patches by jumping or picking their way across makeshift balance beams. Towards the bottom of the hill a felled door bridges a filthy stream of sewage running between two concrete houses. Marilene, a resident of one of these houses, complains that she is still suffering from a sinus infection caused by rank fumes. She continues to decry the situation, explaining that a neighbour’s child recently died after a rat bite. With an expansive gesture, she attributes the death to “these conditions.” Indeed, regular flooding encourages zoonotic diseases such as Dengue and Dengue Haemorrhagic Fever to flourish in the area. Marilene recalls that during the rainy season it was impossible to sleep at night because of the mosquitoes: “The lids popped off the sewers and it was like a river down here. The sewage flows down from the prison. It’s impossible to walk at night.” Mata Escura is

38 saturated by excessive and mismanaged prison waste to the point that some residents are nocturnally confined within their homes.

The presence of the penal compound may amplify Mata Escurans’ vulnerability to life- threatening health risks in yet another manner. The municipal government considers Mata Escura an area at risk of a Dengue epidemic. This diagnosis intersects consequentially with the neighbourhood’s reputation as a violent, crime-ridden incubator of risk – problematically analogous to the prisons it adjoins. Violence, or its perception, impedes on the efforts of health workers to combat the spread of infectious diseases within certain areas. Workers are advised to suspend their projects and leave the location immediately should they feel endangered (O Correio 28/06/2012). The director of Epidemeological Security at the State Health Ministry has identified “tráfico e a criminalidade” (drug trafficking and criminality) as the greatest obstacle to effective dengue prevention (O Correio 28/06/2012).

Even among some local residents, Mata Escura, specifically Inferninho, is considered to be a relatively violent space. The following headline and excerpt from Massa!, Salvador’s most pulpy tabloid (primarily marketed to and read by the city’s poorest), touts the imprisonment of an Inferninho resident in an illustrative manner. Note the paper’s play on the word “hell”. [Headline:] Upon arrest, Chris, a resident of Inferninho, simply moves from one hell to another.

Chris goes to prison hell: The guy is the official killer of the gang of traffickers of Inferninho, Mata Escura…

General Panic

Local residents of Inferninho report, on the condition of anonymity, fear of living in an area with disputes between dealers. “They do not mess with us, but there is a fear of being on the street when there is a shootout…,” says a street vendor. “They go around armed right over there…” says a retired man (Massa! 05/12/2012 – underlining my own.).

I had lived in Mata Escura for months before I began to go “lá embaixo” (down there – to/through Inferninho), always accompanied, always during the day. Teens at the Center assured me: “it’s only dangerous for caguetes, X-9 [snitches, police informants]. It’s fine if you go, see, and leave it [what is seen] there.” One afternoon I paid a visit to Vania (47) in Inferninho; the father of her 4-year-old is incarcerated in the penal compound. Our interview was cut short when she received a call from him. She apologized for the interruption and instructed her daughter

Estephanie (9) to escort me back up the hill. As we walked through the narrow, winding streets we passed a group of young men lounging against a low wall. The smell of marijuana was strong. I averted my eyes, hoping they would recognize me as part of The Center. Many residents of Inferninho have had positive experiences with the Center which, in addition to sheltering children of prisoners, operates a pre-school which serves its wards as well as members of the community. Sister Adele, who runs the Center, aims to integrate rather than isolate sheltered children and, in the process, offers assistance to poor residents in need of support.

Rymunda tells me that she is thinking of relocating more permanently to Mata Escura, at least until her husband is released. Times are tough in the interior and travel back-and-forth is tiring, costly, and disruptive to Enrique’s schooling. School absences are particularly problematic because they can trigger an interruption and/or suspension of monthly Bolsa Família (federal cash transfer) payments. Rymunda has heard of the Center and the various supports Sister Adele is ‘rumoured’ to extend to families of (ex-)prisoners living in the area. For example, Sister Adele has helped ex-prisoners find employment and housing (often in the vicinity of the Center and, thus, the penal compound); she has invited neighbourhood children and youth to participate in reforço (after-school study sessions) and other programs at the center; and she has provided cestas básicas (staple food baskets meant to last a month) to people in need. Rymunda muses: “I could find work if the Sister would watch Enrique when he’s not in school.”59

While Mata Escura’s close association with the prison may deter some service providers and outreach workers, the long-standing problematization of this neighbourhood has also attracted various charitable agencies and given rise to certain targeted interventions. Similarly, both virulent waste and a valued resource flow from the penal compound. Ultimately, the presence of state agents and institutions within the prison-neighbourhood nexus give rise to insecurity as well as opportunities for guards, inmates, visitors, vendors, and others to creatively negotiate the

59 In Brazil, public schools have two daily sessions (there is also an evening session reserved for older students, especially those who have fallen behind). Children (and most adolescents) attend either before or after lunch. This makes it very difficult for parents of young children (viz. mothers) to work. Someone must be available to accompany children to/from school, provide them with lunch, and supervise them for the portion of the day when they are not in school. The crisis of child supervision is even more acute in neighbourhoods with an active gang culture; parents fear their children will be caught in the crossfire or recruited into a marginal lifestyle (see Millar 2014).

40 edges of imprisonment. These negotiations surface non-carcerality and might be regarded as conditions of possibility for future once-carceral spaces, subjects, and imaginaries.

In our ethnographic investigations of imprisonment, by moving from ‘prison culture’ to prison interfaces to carceral forms we are best able to understand the dynamics and diffuse reverberations of carceral expansion/concentration. Conceptualizing a plurality of carceral forms helps us to make sense of the experiences of growing numbers of people whose lives are intensely entangled with prisons. The concept of carceral forms insists upon the presence of elements which may be distinguished as non-carceral (imbricated with carceral elements). The possibility of politics – beyond perpetual carceral expansion and encompassment, homogenization and hegemony – resides here, in this tension. Starting with the relation, presuming the immanent sociality of prisons, draws attention to the question of how difference is, and can be, surfaced. The process does not necessarily begin with physically demolishing prisons or discursively deconstructing their effects (Strathern 1989). Rather, it is important to grasp non-carceral phenomena (e.g. emic conceptualizations, practical understandings, non- representational affects, etc.) immanent in the interactions of those people living their lives in the prison-neighbourhood nexus. These subjects of incarceration work with and against carceral logics, living their lives in a manner that extends but also exceeds, and possibly transforms or even recedes, the carceral.

Building on the insights of feminist criminology and anti-essentialist theory, I understand carceral forms as gendered. A social phenomenon is gendered to the extent that it reflects, reinforces, and (re)produces assumptions about masculinity and femininity (Britton 2011, 21). Because research participants’ engagements with crime, prisons, and one another are deeply gendered, as I show throughout this dissertation, gender difference is another important distinction expressed by carceral forms. Insofar as responses to forms generate knowledge about subjects’ various (in)capabilities and susceptibilities, we must ask: what do men and women’s contrastingly patterned experiences of the carceral reveal about social efficacy, masculinity, and femininity?

The Gender of Carceral Forms

Studies of imprisonment tend to engage unevenly with broader theoretical debates. Important anthropological work on gender, for example, has not significantly informed the study of

41 imprisonment. The majority of studies of imprisonment neglect women’s experiences. A significant number of scholars have responded to this andro-centric tendency by focusing on women prisoners or, in some cases, female visitors. However, questions of gender remain largely neglected. In this project, I do not reduce gender to what women do or experience. I study both men and women in non-reductive ways; lines of affiliation and identification drawn by gender are clearly cross-cut and qualified by such distinctions as class, status, race, and age. I do not understand gender as an endpoint of analysis but as an essential consideration in my investigation of imprisonment and (un)relatedness in Northeast Brazil and, more broadly, carceral expansion/concentration.

Employing the analytic of gender vis-à-vis men and women’s experiences of imprisonment throws important features of carceral forms into relief. First, this is one way of highlighting the plurality, uneven distribution, and unpredictability of carceral forms within a single ethnographic field. Analogical juxtaposition of Feminina and PLB’s gendered regimes of imprisonment/visitation make a number of contrasting carceral forms visible (see chapter 2). Moreover, the carceral/non-carceral thresholds associated with these forms are meaningfully distinguished by differing degrees of permeability. These thresholds are also porous vis-à-vis qualitatively different ‘inputs’ and ‘outputs.’ My comparison of PLB and Feminina has also shown the limits of a gender analytic and alerted me to the salience of other identity distinctions in the ‘determination’ of diverse carceral forms. For example, the significance of the judicial status of a prison population – whether it is composed of pre-trial detainees, sentenced prisoners, or a mixture of the two – is often overlooked in studies focusing on a single prison. Where judicial status is considered, it tends to be in the idiom of human rights discourse (Reed’s 1999 analysis represents a notable exception to this trend).

Second, beyond the inexhaustible quantity of possible carceral forms, a gender lens also highlights the polysemy of particular extant forms. I am able to grasp the multiple meanings of specific forms (e.g. the carceral technology of care, the carceral house, or carceral conjugality) by attending to plural masculinities/femininities and transgressive/normative gender performances (see chapters 1, 3, and 4). This provides a model for exploring convergences and divergences of carceral meaning among actors occupying different positions within intersecting hierarchies of difference (see chapter 5).

Third, a gender lens (Britton 2011) facilitates the interruption of powerful discourses which uphold contemporary practices of penality. Feminist theories/methods support my attempt to decenter the state as the author of carceral forms. A methodological commitment to the study of gendered social relations underlies an approach that privileges indigenous statements about, and practices of, relatedness over official discourses and policies designed to separate, punish, and confine. Delimiting a field site in advance of field work – for example, one that corresponds neatly to a given prison – reduces the scope of inquiry to those people and social relations that are present within the predetermined field. Following relationships, on the other hand, has enabled me to document how near, far, real or imaginary others (Fleetwood 2013) shape prison- based practices and performances of gender as well as the version of the carceral/non-carceral threshold that is ultimately drawn out.

This enumeration certainly does not exhaust the ways in which gender is integral to the conceptualization of carceral forms. For example, in chapter 2 I explore another dimension of carceral forms that a gender lens brings into focus – namely, their efficacy qua present absences which academics play a role in manifesting and maintaining. My main objective in providing this brief overview has been to establish that a gender lens encourages a comparative “follow-the- relation” approach to the study of imprisonment that offers a great deal to scholars interested in challenging received wisdom about Brazilian prisons in particular and carceral expansion/concentration more broadly.

To illustrate this point, consider the phenomenon of prison-based ‘gangs’ (criminalized organizations with carceral roots that exert tremendous influence over prison regimes as well as large swathes of urban territory). Brazilian prisons are synonymous, in the public imagination and the scholarly literature, with such organizations. These groups conspicuously embody the extreme, and ostensibly problematic, permeability of Brazilian prisons, garnering much more scholarly attention than other actors/actants that straddle, crisscross, and constitute carceral boundaries. Moreover, (masculinized) prison-based ‘gangs’ emerge as an object of academic inquiry primarily in the context of problem-oriented scholarship which runs the risk of reinforcing dominant, oppressive discourses and their underlying logics. Ultimately, these ‘dangerous carceral exports’ appear as the prison-society linkage par excellence in the Brazilian context, eclipsing innumerable other significant carceral forms (e.g. feminized forms) and upholding carcerally inflected conceptualizations of society and its construction.

In fact, prison-based ‘gangs’ are one of many possible carceral forms which may or may not manifest in a given field (this observation is also applicable to “interfaces” and “collateral damages”). Crucially, my comparative study of a men’s and a woman’s prison in the Mata Escura compound yielded the important finding that Feminina, unlike the men’s prisons that surround it, did not feature a prison-based ‘gang.’ This illustrates that a multiplicity of distinguishable carceral/non-carceral thresholds may be identified within a single penal compound, even when, according to policy, levels of carceral closure should be uniform. The thresholds that correspond with PLB and Feminina diverge in terms of their degree of permeability and the types of phenomena that both permeate and seep from the prisons. These differences can only be explained with reference to widely held ideas about gender. Although gender ideology alone does not explain which carceral forms are surfaced – e.g. prison-based ‘gangs’ or their present absence – or the nature of the thresholds that divide PLB and Feminina’s interiors and exteriors, recognition of the salience of this factor expands the scope of inquiry beyond state agencies and prison-based ‘gangs.’

Although gender analysis is not limited to the study of women, the inclusion of women’s experiences can productively complicate and thus destabilize conventional thinking about crime and the workings of criminal justice systems. As Naffine points out, [t]he continuing paradox of modern criminology and of modern criminal law reform is that much of it is concerned with male activity and yet it is often formally and practically blind to the maleness of its subjects and the significance of the man problem” (2003, 10).60 Introducing both female research subjects and a gender lens to “male-stream” prison studies opens this work up to a new type of scrutiny which often provokes a re-thinking of grand (genderblind) theories (for examples of this type of intervention see Bosworth 2000; Howe 1994; Maher 2000; Miller 2002). In this spirit, I provide a sketch of Feminina’s historical origins and current tendencies. In addition to introducing readers to a key sub-site of research, this brief discussion demonstrates the analytic potential – or necessity – of a gender lens, and establishes, unquestionably, that official penal policies and the state actors charged with implementing do not determine the status of carceral forms.

60 Men do vastly more crime than women. Though most men “do not enter the official criminal statistics, those individuals who do become known as criminals are usually men” (Naffine 2003, 10). The man problem (or question) asks: Why is this so? Feminist criminologists consider how ideas about gender shape this striking pattern.

The Gender of the Prison System

Feminist historians of imprisonment observe that the imprisonment of females, who represent a small (but growing) share of the total prison population, has tended to be something of an afterthought, to be achieved with the least effort and expense (Zedner 1995, 297; Moore and Scraton 2013; Freedman 1981, 15; Rafter 1985, 4). And, as Freedman observes, the neglect of female prisoners is “rarely benevolent” (1984, 10), contributing to harsh treatment. In the historical account of women’s imprisonment that follows, I show how these patterns hold in the Brazilian context.

The first record of women’s imprisonment in Brazil dates back to a report published in 1870 that describes Calabouço: a prison for enslaved men and women that, in this era, operated together with the Casa de Correção da Corte and, through which, circulated 187 female slaves between 1869 and 1870 (Soares and Ilgenfritz 2002, 52 as cited by de Oliveira Almeida 2006). In the 20th century, Jose Gabriel de Lemos Britto (lawyer, law professor, and author of Sistemas Penitenciários no Brasil 1925) was the first to call for a separate system of women’s prisons in Brazil when he proposed the construction of “a special reformatory” for women in 1923. Lemos Britto’s proposal reflects the notion, connected to international prison reform discourses of the progressive era (see chapter 2), that women require “special” treatment within the prison system (Oliveira Almeida 2006, 53). In 1924, the “Patronato das Presas” was created to assist the Conselho Penitenciário with the oversight of female prisoners (Oliveira Almeida 2006, 55). During this period, religious groups began to administer the confinement of women. At the time, the majority of presas (female prisoners) were accused of prostitution; the number of presas charged with vadiagem (vagrency) was also significant (Oliveira Almeida 2006, 54).

Lemos Britto’s studies (i.e. As Mulheres Criminosas e seu tratamento Penitenciário 1943) served as the basis of the creation of Brazil’s first dedicated Penitenciária Feminina in the old Distrito Federal (Rio de Janeiro) in the early 1940s.61 The movement to separate male and female prisoners, of which this institution is a part, was not entirely motivated by the desire to provide women with more gender-responsive and humane conditions of confinement. Rather, separation was motivated, to at least some degree, by the desire to prevent the disruptive sexual

61 Created by Decreto número 3971 of 02/10/1941.

45 stimulation of men (Oliveira Almeida 2006, 37-8). Brazil’s first dedicated women’s penitentiary was intended to increase control of both male and female prisoners’ sexuality as a means to improve institutional order – which is assumed to be a prerequisite of loftier goals of discipline.

Female prisoners confined in Brazil’s first women’s penitentiary, were initially administered by the sodality of the Bom Pastor. These nuns operated the penitentiary, regulating the education, labour, hygiene, and sexuality of their wards, in a manner consistent with Catholic principles. This religious “internato” (boarding school) sought to transform presas into pious, modest, discreet, docile, and peaceful women, dedicated to domestic duties (de Oliveira Almeida 2006, 38). However, with the growth of the women’s prison population, the sodality could no longer maintain institutional order. Thus, in 1955, state actors took over the administration of the penitentiary leading to its more thorough integration into Brazil’s prison system. Today, women’s prisons are administered by state-level penitentiary systems and headed by politically appointed directors. In the case of Bahia’s Feminina, this role has always been filled by a woman – the Diretora.

In Bahia, historically, females were confined, among a much larger group of male captives, in the capital’s Casa de Detenção (House of Detention – see note 23). Bahia's Presídio de Mulheres (women's prison) occupied one wing of this building until its deactivation in the 1970s. As mentioned above, in the late-1970s, through the 1980s, new prisons were constructed in Mata Escura on the land surrounding PLB (see Table 1). These included Presídio de Salvador (PS – 1976), an institution for the confinement of male prisoners. PS, with an initial capacity of 540, replaced the deactivated House of Detention and, like its predecessor, housed the state’s small population of female prisoners. In 1986, PS held 43 women (Braga 1986). As the women’s prison population grew, so too did demands for separation of the sexes and the construction of a prison reserved exclusively for women (Oliveira Almeida 2006, 38).

Salvador’s Penitenciária Feminina was inaugurated on March 8, 1990 – International Women’s Day. Located in the Mata Escura Penal Complex, it had an official capacity of 64 presas. In 2005, the institution was renamed “Conjunto Penal Feminino.” The label “conjunto” indicates that the prison contains a mixture of differently classified prisoners, reflecting the fact that Feminina confines both presas provisórias (provisional or remand prisoners) and presas condenadas (sentenced prisoners). Moreover, within Feminina’s population of sentenced

46 prisoners, there are women assigned to serve their sentences in various regimes representing all possible security classifications: open-regime; semi-open regime; and closed-regime.62 Importantly, at Feminina, women with different security classifications occupy the same physical space (e.g. the same cellblock and, in some cases, the same cell). When prisoners assigned to different regimes are confined together, they are typically governed in a manner deemed appropriate for the highest-level security risk that is present. This issue was flagged by the Conselho Nacional de Justiça in the section on Feminina in their 2011 report on the Bahian carceral system: …the number of convicted presas assigned to a semi-open regime that serve their sentence in a closed regime, in complete subversion of the principles of Execução Penal established in the Lei de Execuções Penais, draws attention in a negative way.

This “excessive security” (when institutional security practices exceed judicial mandates) has been recognized as a widespread problem of women’s imprisonment (Hannah-Moffat 1995). In part, the problem of excessive security, as with the issue of the geographical dislocation of female prisoners from their families and communities of origin, is a function of the relatively small scale of the women’s prison population and the correspondingly low number of prisons for women.63 Simply put, fewer existing prisons means that it is difficult to physically disaggregate differently categorized prisoners. As I show in Chapter 2, this distinguishing feature of Feminina’s regime of imprisonment – when combined with pervasive ideas about gender (held by presas and prison staff alike) and a population of pretrial detainees that is growing at an alarming rate (IBA 2010) – has serious implications.

Twenty years after Feminina’s inauguration, just prior to the commencement of fieldwork, Feminina’s physical plant was in a poor state of repairs. Inspections verified complaints of faulty

62 Within a closed regime, prisoners are only permitted to leave (handcuffed with an escort) for medical appointments or court hearings. Within a semi-open regime, prisoners are, theoretically, permitted four furloughs per year – over Easter, Mothers’ Day, Fathers’ Day, and Christmas – and are eligible for daytime work release. Within an open-regime (half-way house), prisoners leave daily in the morning, returning to the institution each night. 63 These characteristic features of women’s imprisonment – which contribute to the harshness of regimes of imprisonment/visitation – are gendered insofar as the size of the women’s prison population reflects the sex/gender gap in criminal offending (Naffine 2003; Souza 2012) which, itself, reflects, expectations and ideas about masculinity and femininity.

47 electrical wiring, poor sanitary conditions,64 expired fire extinguishers, and inoperable hydrants in an environment without an emergency exit, adequate lighting or a fire alarm. In response, the diretora banned stoves from cells, citing the fire hazard these presented (de Beer 2010, 25). Previously, presas, like PLB presos (male prisoners), had been able to supplement (or substitute) institutional rations with privately provisioned foods that could be prepared inside prisoners’ own cells. However, in the name of safety, at a time when the women’s prison population is positively exploding in size, an entrenched and meaningful practice was prohibited. Feminina’s stove ban limited already scant opportunities for presas to perform activity (i.e. food preparation) associated with “respectable femininity” (Fleetwood 2014). It also circumscribed presas’ ability to cultivate and maintain relatedness with non-prisoners and fellow inmates through commensality. Moreover, by increasing presas’ reliance on scarce institutional rations, the stove reform exacerbated anxieties about the quantity and quality of available food and, thus, escalated tensions among prisoners. In these respects, the prohibition on cooking is emblematic of a broader trend at play at Feminina whereby unplanned infrastructural and institutional deficiencies intersect in a particularly perverse way –viz. fire safety violations combine with an over-extended food budget – to enhance the “pains of imprisonment” (Sykes 1958) experienced by female prisoners. Presas responses to painful deprivations – and staff interpretations of and reactions to these responses – are deeply gendered.

Whereas Brazilian prisoners generally endure conditions of confinement that are relatively poor (Human Rights Watch 1998), these hardships have tended to give rise to solidarities, compromises, and improvisations that ameliorate hardship, to at least some extent (Darke 2013a and 2013b; Lourenço and Almeida 2013). The state’s consistent failure to meet its obligations toward prisoners; the insufficiency of institutional resources including staff, infrastructure, and supplies; as well as the incompleteness of bureaucratic rationalization and the consolidation of legal authority has traditionally left space for prisoners to secure certain compensatory prerogatives. The resultant regime of imprisonment tends to involve a degree of negotiation between agents of the state and prisoners as I, among others (Lourenço and Almeida 2013), have been able to observe at PLB. However, at Feminina, this negotiated regime is being dismantled,

64 For example, pipes running from bathrooms were often clogged. These stoppages resulted in regular sewage backups and leaks (De Oliveira Almeida 2006, 36).

48 leaving presas to endure the worst of the criminal justice systems’ shortcomings in the absence of many traditional compensatory prerogatives. As I elaborate in Chapter 2, Feminina’s regime constrains the ability of presas and their visitors to compensate for the scarcity of institutional resources and otherwise cope with pains of imprisonment. The cumulative outcome of these dynamics is an especially repressive regime which both causes and is caused by a high degree of atomization (or depoliticization) among presas. And, in the absence of substantial solidarity, it is hard to imagine how this state of affairs might be successfully resisted.

In analyzing these findings, I have developed the concept of “compliance with a vengeance” (chapter 2) which builds on “equality with a vengeance” – a term used by critics of the parity model of penality (Daly and Chesney-Lind 1988, 525). Similar to how the parity model emphasizes treating female offenders as if they were male, particularly when the outcome is punitive, at Feminina, I observed a pattern of highly selective (and strategic) compliance with broader state, national, and international penal imperatives. For the most part, reforms that were enacted also increased the power of staff and the repression of prisoners.

This trend is further illustrated by a subsequent development in Feminina’s history. In March, 2010, in response to the dilapidation of the physical plant of the prison, Bahia’s Ministério Público requested an interdiction of the site. The following month, while presas were still confined in the crumbling edifice, renovations began. These were discontinued in August, though only a small fraction of the job had been completed (O Correio 06/10/2010). Public officials, under pressure to address this untenable state of affairs, opted to relocate prisoners until renovations could be completed. In October, after debating where to relocate presas, the SJCDH transferred Feminina’s 87 inmates to a physically adjacent unit, the Centro de Observação Penal (COP). The day before, COP’s male prisoners (approx. 100) had, themselves, been relocated to the annex of the compound’s newest prison: the Cadeia Pública de Salvador.65 Effectively, both the COP and Feminina organizations – prisoners and staff – were transposed to alternative sites

65 The Mata Escura Complex’s newest prison – Cadeia Pública – is meant to confine male remand prisoners. Its “super-max” design represents a new technologically-advanced phase of prison construction that ostensibly restores the omniscience and control of prison guards without requiring them to have physical contact with prisoners.

49 within the Mata Escura penal compound. 66

It is worth taking a moment to situate COP within Bahia’s carceral landscape because the status of this institution is revealing of broader tendencies. Brazilian law specifies a prisoner’s “carceral trajectory” (Marchetti 2002) through the penal system in considerable detail. After sentencing, a prisoner should spend his/her first weeks or months in an observation centre such as COP where a team of experts will conduct interviews and carry out personality and criminological exams in order to select the most appropriate penal facility to “resocialize” that particular individual offender. In practice, however, Brazil’s prisons lack both the staff and infrastructure to comply with the law (IBA 2010, 52). Despite being designated as the unit in which the criminological exam is to be conducted (art. 96 LEP), over the years, COP’s function had been reconfigured. Long before presas’ arrival and the displacement of COP and its inmates to an alternative, improvised site, COP had evolved into a prison for special (male) inmates such as (ex-)police that would have had difficulty living in other units (Carvalho 2013, 58). According to Edumundo Reis, Promotor de Justiça da Vara de Execuções Penais de Salvador: … what should be the exception, became the rule… [COP] has been used as a unit to hold pre-trial or convicted ex-police officers, prison guards or prisoners who are being threatened within the system. In short, COP’s inherent function has been distorted by an excess of prisoners incarcerated within it…the prison system is growing dramatically, including the number of ex-police and those outlawed by the facções criminosas [criminal factions] vying for power within the prison system.

COP’s special set of prisoners continues to be confined, as a separately administered population, within the Cadeia Publica – in a prison within a prison. Notably, there is no parallel separate, protective prison available to individual female prisoners viewed as “special cases.” Instead, at- risk or highly educated67 presas are held in isolation cells and segregated from the general population of the prison. And, as scholars have show for trans prisoners in the United States, this “protective” measure is difficult to differentiate from the use of solitary confinement as part of an

66 For the remainder of this dissertation, unless otherwise indicated, I will use “Feminina” (rather than “COP”) to refer to the physical plant of the prison in which women were actually confined for the duration of my dissertation research (the former site of COP). This usage reflects how research participants referred to the location/institution. Though, notably, many prisoners and visitors also use the acronym CPF – short for Conjunto Penal Feminino, Feminina’s current, official name. 67 In Brazil, people holding a university degree are, by law, to be confined separately from ‘common’ prisoners (Adorno 2010, 125).

50 internal system of punishment.

Although the relocation of the Feminina organization to COP was supposed to allow renovations of the condemned building to resume, the project remained stalled throughout the period of my fieldwork. While the move continued to be described as ‘temporary,’ it persisted far beyond a timeframe in which the renovation could reasonably have been completed (CNJ 2011). This is significant, and lends support to the “compliance with a vengeance” interpretation, because conditions of confinement at COP, in several respects, are inferior to those which had existed in Feminina’s original site. Moreover, the move itself disrupted routines in a manner that seems to have helped administrators gain control over presas and the prison’s carceral/non-carceral threshold. For example, staff have stemmed the flow of cell phones and hard drugs (viz. crack cocaine) into Feminina. Moreover, they have undermined the consolidation of a representative body of female prisoners. Elsewhere, often assuming the form of ‘prison-based gangs,’ such organizations have strong ties to Bahia and Brazil’s powerful criminal factions as well as neighbourhoods affiliated with particular ‘gangs’/factions. At the same time as Feminina has become less permeable in these regards, it has become increasingly (selectively) permeable to external judicial oversight.

Chapter Summaries

I have developed the concept of carceral forms to grasp material and symbolic articulations and circulations that meaningfully merge carceral with non-carceral phenomena, significantly affecting the lives of subjects of incarceration. Each chapter of this dissertation highlights and explores a different carceral form or forms.

Chapter 1, which focuses on the carceral safety net, challenges assumptions that carceral expansion/concentration (“hyperincarceration”) exclusively fuels disruption or causes the breakdown of kinship ties. By focusing on the experiences, concerns, and innovations of prison visitors, specifically mothers of imprisoned adult daughters, I explore how the prison emerges as a refuge and resource in contexts of violence, deprivation, and uncertainty. I am particularly interested in how these mature women practically understand, and mobilize, the simultaneously disintegrative and integrative effects of incarceration in the pursuit of social reproduction. I argue that imprisonment, qua “technology of care,” enables the mothers in question to perform “relational interventions,” cultivate consideração (consideration), and incite their

51 dangerous/endangered68 adult children to follow the caminho certo (right path). That is, in and through the prison, creative actors strategically sustain, strain, and sever social relations to protect and improve criminal kin.

Chapter 2 compares the regimes of imprisonment/visitation at Feminina and PLB. I employ a gender lens and the concept of “carceral forms” to unpack an astute observation voiced by a Feminina visitor: “pessoal de Feminina sempre são desfavorecida” (folks of Feminina are always disadvantaged). These “folks” (prisoners and visitors of Feminina), according to the speaker, are disadvantaged vis-à-vis folks of the compound’s six men’s prisons. This chapter considers two carceral forms in particular – the prison visit and the prison-based ‘gang’ (as well as its present absence). While prison-based ‘gangs’ operate (from) within most of the penal compound’s prisons, this carceral form is notably absent from Feminina. Yet, the ‘normalization’ of this form in the compound, and throughout Brazil, means that, in certain respects, this is a present absence, an absence that is consequentially registered. With a focus on the domain of visitation, drawing on findings from ethnographic research conducted in and around Feminina and PLB, I explore possible explanations for and implications of the conspicuous “nonexistence” of a prison-based ‘gang’ at Feminina. What emerges is a picture of gendered and unequally harsh regimes of imprisonment. That is, it seems that folks of Feminina do tend to be disadvantaged within the compound. Indeed, the capacity of subjects of incarceration to surface, submerge, and shape carceral thresholds is fundamentally gendered and unequally distributed. Ultimately, presas’ experiences of a particularly harsh regime of imprisonment both register and underlie the atomization of Feminina’s prison population at the same time as they reflect, reinforce, and produce ideas about gender and the “triple deviance” of female prisoners.

Chapter 3 focuses on a network of social regulation that, following Garland (1985), I refer to as “the penal-welfare complex.” This carceral form foregrounds the relationship between penality and another ‘external’ social institution which surrounds and supports it – namely, welfare. I investigate this carceral form through an extended case study. Specifically, I reflexively trace the

68 I use the designation dangerous/endangered to capture a two-fold concern towards people who both pose a(n) (in)direct threat to their intimates and who, themselves, are threatened. In terms of the threat these figures pose, it is not simply that they might select victims in their own social circle. More often, relationships with such people are dangerous because they increase one’s own vulnerability to external dangers (e.g. violent police or vengeful enemies) as well as to the internal, subjective threat of criminalization or “demoralization.”

‘disappearance’ of Robison, the toddler son of Ivete, a female remand prisoner. I situate this occurrence within the broader context of Ivete’s life. One woman’s experiences of care and its withdrawal reveal a great deal about how Brazil’s penal-welfare complex is implicated in processes of “public abandonment” and “de-kinning.” The central question explored in this chapter is: how is a state of expendability made manifest in the prison-neighbourhood nexus under study? I approach this question by tracing Ivete’s emergent disposability. Ivete’s trajectory reveals expendability to be the culmination of two processes in particular: public abandonment and de-kinning. Although these processes of differentiation, disconnection, and exclusion are pervasive features of contemporary life-worlds generally, they are found to be particularly acute in the context of intersecting penal and welfare policy pragmatics.

Chapter 4 examines how youth of the low-income urban periphery respond to rising rates of criminalization and imprisonment. Specifically, I focus on young women who forge intimate relationships with imprisoned men. These women – predominately racialized and structurally underemployed – are struggling to make ends meet, progress to the next ideal stage in the family/personal life cycle, and lead rewarding lives in contexts of deprivation, uncertainty, and insecurity. While some of their relationships with prisoners stem from investment in a gendered oppositional culture, others creatively engage with the prison as a means to be/become “ordinary” adult women (Miller 2010). In this examination, the concept of carceral forms finds expression in carceral conjugality as well as “carceral houses” embedded within “configurations of houses.” Both of these mutually constitutive forms consequentially encompass carceral and ‘non-carceral’ elements. First, carceral conjugality, in the iteration I document here, involves imprisoned husbands and ‘free’ fiancés/wives. The second form – a “carceral house” or a “carceral configuration of houses” – involves a web of houses (re)produced, at least in part, by carceral forces. At the same time, carceral spaces are transformed, in many respects, into houses in and through exchanges with ‘non-carceral’ houses that belong to the same (emergent) configuration. I argue that the contested transformation of carceral space (viz. prison cells) into a house, conditions and is often conditioned by the consummation of carceral conjugality. Moreover, these imbricated carceral forms enable some women to perform gender and generation – respectable adult femininity – when other avenues are largely foreclosed to them. Insofar as such women’s respectability is accomplished through practices of imprisonment, we

53 might also think of their reputations as the result of a generative weaving together of carceral and ‘non-carceral’ elements and, thus, as another carceral form.

The carceral form explored in the fifth and final chapter of this dissertation is the (extralegal) televised arrest. I approach the televised arrest as an entity that is co-authored by a range of judicial and non-judicial actors located throughout the prison-neighbourhood nexus. This chapter pivots around an account of the televised arrest of a key informant and close friend, Leleco Jardim. Leleco’s arrest and research participants’ various responses to it provide a window onto the ways in which televised arrests bring “penal judgment” (and carceral logics) home. At the same time – as penality becomes increasingly participatory and public; as the gap widens between the legal offender, the essentialized figure of the evil criminal, and eminently familiar presumed criminals; and as the prison’s pre-eminence as the site of punishment and (re)habilitation in the modern state is destabilised by the (re-)emergence of the “mass-mediated pillory” – agentive opportunities arise for research participants to intervene in the field of crime control. These interventions are possible (thinkable and feasible) because subjects of incarceration tend to mobilize televised arrests as actionable narratives (stories that incite action and involve actors in their unfolding). In short, I argue that televised arrests, equivocal in meaning, are often interpreted by subjects of incarceration in a manner that provokes immediate pragmatic action; encourages involvement in the ongoing construction of the event; and yields critical insights with the potential to contribute to a recession of the carceral.

Chapter 1 The Carceral Safety Net

Introduction: Ambivalence in Kinship and the Prison

“I prefer her there, in prison” — Edina, a prison visitor, commenting on her imprisoned daughter.

I am sitting in a modest little concrete house that has been auto-constructed on recently invaded land — the marginal outgrowth of an already peripheral neighbourhood. The house belongs to Edina, a 51-year-old Afro-Brazilian woman who has helped with my research. We are recording a life history interview when she sends her adolescent daughter, Eliane, into the home’s only bedroom to fetch an envelope of dog-eared photos. Edina sorts through the stack, showing me an out-of-date picture of her eldest daughter, Neginha (a diminutive meaning “blackie”), who is currently a pre-trial detainee at Feminina. As Edina taps the image of Neginha, she says: “Her hearing is scheduled for next month; Neginha may come home.” I smile enthusiastically, saying: “I hope all goes well and she returns home soon.” I quickly learn, however, that Edina is not eagerly anticipating Neginha’s release as I had expected. Instead, Edina prefers that her daughter remain imprisoned: I would rather [Neginha] be in prison than on the street because she doesn’t stay here [at home]. On the street, she is eating, drinking. There [in prison] she isn’t going to die. I prefer her there, in prison. There in prison she doesn’t worry me, I can sleep without worrying about her.

How does a mother come to value her daughter’s imprisonment? In this chapter, I answer this question. More broadly, I document and analyze how, in a context of insecurity, the prison emerges as a technology of care. I use this term to refer to the way subjects of incarceration use the prison — a pervasive feature of their social landscape — to fend off (or exploit) crises in order to achieve social reproduction at the level of the household or “configuration of houses” (Marcelin 1999).69

Social reproduction involves the maintenance of people and groups on a daily and generational basis (Bakker 2003, 67). This kind of maintenance not only requires survival (securing the

69 This term refers to the way houses are imagined and lived, in interrelation with other houses that participate in their emergence, in Salvador and the Bahian Recôncavo (Hita 2008; McCallum and Bustamente 2012; Marcellin 1999). In this social milieu, both symbolically and concretely, the house only exists in the context of a configuration of houses (Marcellin 1999, 37).

55 necessities of life) but presupposes “the development and transmission of knowledge, social values and cultural practices and the construction of individual and collective identities” (Bezanson and Luxton 2006, 3; see also Elson1998). I propose that one way the latter “socialization” component of social reproduction is brought about is through “habilitation.”70

Habilitation, a term I have adapted from prison studies literature, refers to a transformative process through which people “are morally remade in the image of certain ideals regarding appropriate social and ethical conduct so that they become ‘fit’ to be among us” (Waldram 2012, 101). A notable finding of my research is the extent to which habilitative projects occurring within the prison are directed by non-professionals — namely, prison visitors seeking to improve the conduct and consideração (consideration) of dangerous/endangered kin.

When household social reproduction is threatened, one possible intervention is habilitation or, more specifically, the cultivation/restoration of appropriate levels of consideration among relatives perceived to be deficient in this regard. Deficient consideration is problematic from the perspective of household reproduction insofar as consideration “denotes recognition of what one has received, allowing for active entry into the symbolic cycle of reproduction of the family, the kinship network, and society” (Hita 2008, 27). In short, “consideration” implies acknowledgment and enactment of “mutuality of being” (Sahlins 2013) – that is, participating in one another’s existence, being deeply interconnected, and having a sense of shared fate. Crucially, this quality of being is not an inevitable concomitant of Brazilian kinship; it is both constitutive, and a potential consequence, of kinship.

Consideration is an emic concept through which Brazilians reckon their degree relatedness with others. It is “a fundamental concept of the Brazilian social world” (da Matta 1991, 64) that is integral to the kinship system. According to Hita, this principle is: …the third term — together with consanguinity and affinity —… through which mechanisms of selection, integration and exclusion are activated, mediating relationships of affinity, friendship, neighbourhood, god-parenthood or belonging to a group, and transforming the fictitious relative into an effective or operational one. This dilutes the

70 Other mechanisms of this ‘socialization’ component of household reproduction include, for example, criação (lit. creation, but implying both ‘nurturing’ and ‘raising’ children — (Pina Cabral 2013, 83) and educação (lit. education which, in Brazil, connotes both the development of book knowledge as well as sociability, manners, or comportment; to be educated can signify a person who knows how to act in situationally appropriate ways — Bartlett 2007, 1622)

efficacy of the principle of blood and institutes the modality of “choice” through which the relative “in principle” may become an effective relative (Hita 2008, 4-5).

Through “consideration,” neighbours may become co-parents; friends may become siblings; affines may become close relatives; and children’s caregivers may become aunts or even mothers. Indeed, many Brazilians speak of having multiple mothers, for example, “the mother who nursed me, the mother who raised me and the mother who gave birth to me” (research participant quoted by Fonseca 2004, 170). In short, through consideration, a person who is unrelated according to criteria of consanguinity or affinity may come to be viewed, and treated, “as if s/he were consanguineous” (Hita 2008, 4-5). Consideration also shapes consanguineal relationships. Not all blood relatives are considered. Certainly, all blood relatives are not considered equally: “consideration is selection in action” (Marcelin 1999, 21) producing and legitimizing discrimination and inequality within hierarchical family homes (Hita 2008, 27) and configurations of houses. For example, a granddaughter who was considered by her recently deceased grandmother might expect to receive a greater inheritance than other kin. “[T]he condition of a ‘relative of consideration,’” Hita summarizes, “encompasses all the individuals who conform to a specific network of closer co-operation” (2008, 4-5 — emphasis my own).

This formulation is apt but does not address the issue of consideration persisting (in a lopsided manner) in the face of one party’s non-conformity. Some adults and many children, who are recognized as (potential) relatives of consideration and who derive benefits from this categorization, cannot be relied upon to conduct themselves in the manner commensurate to this social position. Yet, persistently uncooperative – or even harmful – (in)action by problematic parentes (relatives) does not mechanically result in a negation of consideration. People who have nurtured and raised, for example, youth who fail to properly reciprocate consideration, often continue to extend care. Aspirations that, one day, reciprocal consideration might be (re)elicited or (re)activated are remarkably persistent.

The notion of consideration is often mobilized to comment on the quality of particular relationships. Research participants speak proudly of the presence of consideration (an unambiguously good thing) and bemoan its absence. Betrayals of supposed-intimates, for instance, might be explained with reference to a “falta de consideração” (dearth of consideration). More specifically, subjects of incarceration often express concern about drug use and addiction in terms of consideration. An adult son who supports his crack-cocaine habit by

57 repeatedly selling the household cooking-gas canister might be said to take this harmful action because drugs have diminished his consideration: “when he smokes he nem considera ninguém (doesn’t consider anybody).”

Although subjects of incarceration do not explicitly characterize imprisonment as a means to cultivate consideration, I observed numerous people operationalizing it in this way. “Improper” or “insufficient” consideration is a high-stakes issue with which research participants grapple incessantly. Criminalized kin are disproportionately vulnerable to a number of losses (i.e. loss of material goods through an increased vulnerability to criminal victimization; loss of respectability which can negatively impact employment, housing, inclusion in mutual support networks, and other dimensions of personal security; loss of freedom through incarceration; and loss of life through extralegal state-administered punishments or the violence of acquaintances/rivals). Because having consideration means sharing responsibility for one another’s wellbeing as well as sharing a mutual susceptibility to harm – relatives of consideration share an “interdependent existence” in which they live each other’s lives and die each other’s deaths (Sahlins 2013, 24) – the vulnerabilities experienced by consubstantial criminals are shared, at least to some degree, by their relations. Moreover, as I discuss below, criminalization is locally understood to spread through relational proximity. Thus, harbouring a criminal in a network of closer co-operation threatens to stigmatize the group and/or degenerate and diminish consideration in its members, compounding mutual susceptibility to harm (see chapter 5). It is in light of these dynamics that some people respond to the incarceration of dangerous/endangered kin as an opportunity to habilitate them and avoid (further) losses.

Many scholars writing on kinship tend to emphasize the positive rather than negative aspects of kinship (Carsten 2013, 246; Strathern 2014). However, following Das 1995, Peletz 2000, Lambek 2011, Schuster 2015, Strong 2016, Reece 2016, and others, I attend to the ambivalent qualities of kinship. The prevalence of ambivalence within the institution of the family, a primary site of socialization, arguably informs research participants’ habilitative engagements with the prison. First, for people whose lives are entwined with dangerous/endangered yet “considered” criminal kin, prison sentences enable families to ‘outsource’ coercive incapacitation to the state and harness the spatial and relational constraints this entails.

Figure 9. A father confines his drug addicted son at home in the northeastern state of Piauí (Photo: Douglas Ferreria, G1).

Second, many subjects of incarceration, especially young people and females,71 have had to rely upon abusive intimates to get by (e.g. Machado and Noronha 2002; Goldstein 1998; 2003; Hautzinger 2007). Arguably, such experiences corroborate the idea that a punitive and powerful other might be useful in the quest to accomplish social reproduction. Insofar as women are disproportionately harmed and hemmed-in by the double-edged qualities of kinship in patriarchal contexts such as Brazil, it seems they might be more inclined to endure the pains of imprisonment/visitation in order to reap modest rewards.72

Eliciting support from abusive intimates and institutions – a tactic I refer to as “appropriative endurance” – is one of three classed and gendered tactics that I discuss in this chapter. The remaining two tactics are “containment” and “relational intervention.” In short, the tactic of containment is a means of ameliorating personal/familial insecurity through deliberate inaction, self-restraint, and the spatial-symbolic confinement of self and others. Relational intervention refers to poor Bahians’ attempts to survive or improve their lot by reworking relatedness. Common examples of this tactic include moving to a new neighbourhood, joining an Evangelical church,73 and the circulation of children (which is discussed in more detail in chapter 3). Like

71 Bahia’s sex/gender system (McCallum 1999), including but not limited to the sexual division of labour, contributes to the feminization of poverty. Women, especially young women who are childless or mothers of small, dependent children, are often compelled to access crucial resources through sexual and/or conjugal relationships with men. Alternatively, they may turn to employers, other patrons, hierarchical religious or charitable organizations, etc. However, all too often, relatively powerful providers of the conditions of life are also abusive. 72 Although I observed men and women engaging in “habilitation,” the vast majority of prison visitors are female. 73 Goldstein (2013 [2003]) explores young women’s structured choice to become crentes (lit. believers, refers primarily to Pentecostals) – or “convert” to evangelical Protestantism – in a Rio shantytown. In Brazil, and across Latin American, Pentecostals are predominantly female, outnumbering males by a ratio of two to one (Chestnut

59 residents of the Rio de Janeiro favela studied by Penglase (2014), denizens of Salvador’s prison- neighbourhood nexus have learned to “live with insecurity” by developing a “tactical” approach to social life. Drawing on de Certeau (1984), Penglase describes this tactical approach as a way of operating characteristic of the poor and powerless. Tactics, he writes, do not directly challenge or resist systems of oppression or the more powerful. Rather, a tactical approach means “maintaining a constant attentiveness to how to dodge, evade, or turn to one’s advantage the obstacles that life placed in one’s path” (2014, 7).

I trace three interrelated tactics as they are enacted both in the neighbourhood and the penal compound in order to demonstrate interplay between penal and quotidian obstacles as well as continuities in ways of maneuvering around and harnessing them. 74 Tactical practices of imprisonment – i.e. engaging the prison as a technology of care to habilitate dangerous/endangered relations – are always already inflected with extra-carceral elements. Moreover, by attending to a tactical mode of operating within and across prison boundaries, which is not reducible to mere endurance, I also highlight the sometimes hard-to-discern creative agency, (re-)productivity, and strivings of subjects of incarceration. Although tactics may not directly challenge sources of oppression, in this case, poor, penalized research participants like Edina assemble an aspirational carceral form that announces a political possibility. In direct contrast to most iterations of state-led penality the prison qua technology of care has the potential to combat social exclusion. As subjects of incarceration weave and wield this habilitative version of the carceral safety net they act according to convictions at odds with raciological thinking about criminality (Moodie 2010; Moore 2015a; Penglase 2007). Whereas prison abolitionists (see Sudbury 2010) might imagine a world without prisons, habilitation efforts encourage us to contemplate a world without inveterate criminality, a world in which confinement need not be synonymous with the measured infliction of pain (Beccaria 1995 [1764]; Ignatieff 1978),

1997, 22). Goldstein traces two sisters’ “fluctuating religious fervor” (220), showing how their practices of Protestantism are connected to their relatedness with dangerous/endangered (and later dead) crime-involved men. Goldstein argues that, beyond religious conviction, the sisters’ identification as crentes is “at least partly influenced by a desire to distance themselves (and potentially their partners) from the real or potential conflicts in which the men were enmeshed” (220). 74 Logics applied to make sense of extra-carceral challenges inform aspirational practices of imprisonment. At the same time, cumulative experiences of imprisonment shape these logics. Writing of Brazilians’ historical passages through a particular prison, Chazkel 2009 has argued that experiences of imprisonment constitute a process of civic education.

60 repression (Spitzer 1975; Wacquant 2010b), discipline (Foucault 1977), or criminalization/prisonization (Clemmer 1940; Comfort 2008).

Approaching the prison as a technology of care complicates major theorizations of imprisonment generally and the Brazilian prison in particular. Wacquant, echoing a common concern of punishment and society scholars, claims that “the Brazilian carceral apparatus only serves to aggravate the instability and poverty of the families whose members it confines…” (2003, 201). However, my research complicates this view by revealing how people (re)produce, work with and against, but also exceed carceral logics as they go about securing a familial life for themselves in Salvador’s prison-neighbourhood nexus. Like familial relations, engagements with the prison are often ambivalent (Comfort 2008). This quality is highly compatible with a carceral forms approach. This approach helps us to grasp ambivalent carceral processes by throwing four generalizable premises into relief. First, subjects of incarceration face challenges stemming from sources other than the prison. Practices of imprisonment may help them negotiate these challenges. Second, prisons are deeply interconnected with other social institutions and spaces. In this chapter, for example, I focus on how the meaning of imprisonment emerges in relation to the socio-symbolic space of the street as well as institutions such as the police and the family. Third, non-prisoners residing in heavily penalized neighbourhoods must be conceptualized as resourceful co-authors of carceral effects, not simply unintended victims. Finally, long-term, cumulative experiences of incarceration shape people’s sense of what the prison does, what it might be made to do, and how best to navigate life’s dilemmas.

An analysis of familial and carceral ambivalence that is developed around these premises, answers the call of scholars (e.g. Wacquant 2002a; Comfort 2008) who have critiqued “collateral damage” conceptualizations of prison-society relations. Such conceptualizations tend to represent prisons as catalysts of (negative) change which impinge upon and damage the “extramural world.” For example, Bramen, an ethnographer who worked with families of prisoners in the U.S., asserts that US prisons create a set of “second-order problems” that further “social detachment” insofar as they drain the resources of families, frustrate the norm of reciprocity that inheres in family life, and stigmatize poor and minority families (2004, 221— emphasis my own). When carceral effects are understood in terms of “collateral damage,” the prison tends to appear as an isolated institution that acts alone when, in fact, any effects of imprisonment actually involve continuous inputs from—and complex interrelations with—other

61 institutions (viz. the family, labour market, welfare system, etc.) and systems of inequality (i.e. intersecting hierarchies of class, gender and race). Additionally, this “collateral damage” framework perpetuates the myth that prisons exist outside social space, only irregularly and disruptively intruding into the social domain (Wacquant 2002, 388). Finally, as the idiom of “collateral consequences” would suggest, contributors to this body of literature tend to limit their analyses to the harmful effects of imprisonment. This perspective does not give creative and tactical actors sufficient credit for their capacity to make the most out of their engagements with the prison. Practices of imprisonment enable as well as constrain.

A Polymorphous Carceral Form: The Carceral Safety Net

Scholars who have gone beyond a damage assessment framework of carceral effects, have pointed to ways in which the contemporary prison serves as a carceral safety net. Bourgois, for example, observes that, in the context of advanced punitive neoliberalism in the U.S., “[i]mprisonment has become the most aggressive and well-funded de facto housing and drug treatment policy for the poor” (2011, 2). Likewise, Comfort’s 2008 ethnographic investigation of women who visit incarcerated male partners in a California prison, reveals the prison to operate as a “peculiar refuge” (17) and “primary ‘social agency’” (18). In the wake of the retrenchment of social assistance provision — the shift from welfare to “workfare”75 — and the general dearth of social-welfare programs in the U.S. (i.e. affordable health care and supportive family policy in the form of child allowances, subsidized child care, etc.) “the criminal justice system emerges as the most consistent and powerful public institution available to low-income women” (Comfort 2008, 17). In this context, Comfort documents poor women’s “ambivalent” (2008, 8-13) use of the prison as a “tool provided to them by the state” (2008, 17) as they attempt to manage tension- fraught gender relations (e.g. a partner’s domestic violence or substance use).

Unfortunately, considerations of the safety net function of the contemporary prison are limited in two respects. First, this function is often attributed to the ostensible rise of the neoliberal penal state. Comfort, for example, claims that “the utilization of penal confinement as an unusual

75 In 1996, President Clinton, a Democrat, took legislative action to end “welfare dependence.” The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which he signed into law, dismantled the federal administration of state assistance, established a five-year lifetime limit on benefits, and eliminated guarantees of help to even the poorest families (Comfort 2008, 195; see Goode and Maskovsky 2001).

‘resource’… arises specifically in the context of a post-welfare state characterized by an absence of alternatives” (2008, 18).76 In contrast, my research reveals that the prison is mobilized as a resource under the Brazilian dictatorship in the context of a developmental state (1930-1990) as well as during the era of democratization and neoliberalization. During the latter period poverty- reduction programs were established and social services expanded under the leadership of the Workers’ Party. Today, according to Scheper-Hughes, there is “a safety net for women and their infants” that “is strong, large, and deep” (2015, 301).

Since the mid-1990s – under the administrations of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2002) and especially Luis Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010) – a new social welfare regime has emerged in Brazil. The programmatic element at the heart of this regime is the conditional cash transfer (CCT). CCTs – targeted, non-contributory safety nets to alleviate poverty – “have spread globally in tandem with neoliberalism” (Saad-Filho 2015, 1231). Brazil’s Programa Bolsa Família (Family Grant, PBF), one of the largest such programs in the world, “has served as something of a global model and inspiration” (Ferguson 2015, 12). In 2013, PBF included 14 million families comprising 50 million people or 25% of Brazil’s population (Saad-Filho 2015, 1234). Approximately 50% of beneficiaries live in the Northeast (Hall 2008, 807), the poorest of Brazil’s regions and the site of my field work. PBF provides benefits to “poor” and “extremely poor” families, defined (in early 2015) as those with a monthly per capita income of 70-140 reais (US $25-50) and less than R$ 70, respectively. The means-tested program comprises a basic monthly benefit of R$ 70, paid to extremely poor families, and two variable benefits: 1) R$ 32 per child under 15-years-old (up to three children); and 2) R$ 38 per child aged 16-17 (up to two children). In short, recipient families can receive between R$ 70 and R$ 242 (US $25-85) per month (which they access through a bank card), with the average transfer being R$ 150 (Saad- Filho 2015, 1233).

Women are the nominal recipients of the benefit, effectively acting as the government’s agents in ensuring compliance with its conditions (Lavinas 2013, 28). These conditions are meant to

76 This analysis is problematic insofar as it neglects continuity in the U.S. over time. As Gowan notes, “[f]or more than a century, American jails have sheltered many of the vagrant or indigent, often upon their own request. Old- timers have half-affectionately called jail time ‘three hots and a cot’, for at least 60 years (2002, 501). Moreover, this analysis casts the Keynesian welfare state in an inappropriately rosy glow (see Mayer 2010 for a critique of Wacquant’s all too positive portrayal of Fordist welfare policies).

63 encourage the poor to take up their “rights” to education and health services (Lindert et al. 2007); strengthen recipients’ position in the labor market; and, ultimately, interrupt the intergenerational transmission of poverty. In order to receive the two variable benefits: a) families must make regular visits to health clinics (for vaccinations, pre-/post-natal care, and check-ups) and b) children must attend school (at least 87% of the time for children ages 6-15 and 75% of the time for children ages 16-17). Although these regulations are lightly enforced (Saad-Filho 2015, 1233), PBF has failed to reach an estimated 2.2 million families (Lavinas 2013, 28). In part, this is because the imposition of burdens on recipients serves to reduce take-up. For example, PBF requires that all members of recipient families possess a birth certificate and, thus, that they have surmounted the multiple challenges involved in applying for and acquiring this document. Before Bolsa Família and the Beneficio de Prestação Continuada (Continuous Welfare Benefit, BPC) – another non-contributory program created during the neoliberal era which grants pensions to indigent seniors and younger disabled individuals – many poor Brazilians “remained entirely unintegrated into any major social program” (Hunter and Borges Sugiyama 2011, 2).

CCT programs such as PBF are beleaguered by technical flaws and unintended effects. Technical flaws refer, for example, to inadequacies in the program’s targeting mechanism such as the issue of under-coverage, or “errors of exclusion,” whereby poor or extremely poor families (intended recipients) are not included in the program. Additionally, the PBF benefit is not linked to inflation. Thus, between 2009 and 2015, the value of transfers declined in real terms by 25% (Saad-Filho 2015, 1237). In terms of the actual effects (and unintended consequences) of PBF, the program’s effectiveness in reducing poverty and inequality is questionable. CCTS hardly seem to pose a radical challenge to the status quo.

Recently, Brazil has been lauded for reducing income inequality and growing its middle class (Lopez-Calva 2012). However, the 2010 national census shows that Brazil still has a long way to go to become a more egalitarian society. Brazil is organized hierarchically with most Brazilians typically identifying as either below an "elite" or above a "lower" class (Skidmore 2009, 6). According to the 2010 census, 25 percent of the population struggles to live on an average monthly per capita income of up to R$ 188 (CDN$ 106) and half the population on up to double this amount (R$ 375). This compares to the monthly minimum wage in 2010 of R$ 510. Importantly, a relationship exists between marginalization and ethno-racial identity. While the

64 average monthly income of whites is R$ 1,538, those who are preta/o (black) and parda/o (dark or mixed race) have average monthly incomes of R$ 834 and R$ 845 respectively.

Ultimately, programs like Bolsa Família address only the worst symptoms of deprivation for those who manage to register, meet conditions, and stay registered, while leaving structures that reproduce poverty and inequality largely intact by, for example, subsidizing low wages (see Saad-Filho 2015; Hall 2008). Despite significant achievements, at best, PBF belongs to the paternalistic workfare tradition: …it buttresses the reproduction of poverty and inequality while it allays their most galling consequences. Consequently, PBF is valuable but it is also limited and conservative. Only in the age of neoliberalism would such a narrow programme be so sorely needed, and deserve general applause (Saad-Filho 2015, 1246-7).

Critics on the Left have also expressed concern that CCTs may function to undermine and domesticate what might otherwise become more radical political pressures from below (e.g. Ivo 2008). However, this claim is unproven (Ferguson 2015). In fact, ethnographic evidence from Salvador, Bahia suggests that Brazil’s CCT program is not promoting a “‘depoliticisation’ of poverty and inequality” (Gledhill and Hita 2009b, 15). Gledhill and Hita observe that an assistentialist approach, when applied on the scale of PBF, seems “more likely to encourage than restrain popular aspirations to go further” (2009b, 15).

Today, despite the existence of some state welfare provision, the Brazilian prison continues to be re-purposed into a carceral safety net of sorts. Thus, it would be inaccurate to interpret the carceral safety net as a function of welfare retrenchment. Moreover, as Edina’s life history illustrates, it is not exclusively an artifact of neoliberalization; instead, the prison “is woven deep into the fabric and life course of the lower classes across generations” (Wacquant 2002a, 388). If we neglect the historical continuity of the carceral safety net, we risk misunderstanding its causes and consequences.

This theme of consequences — or effects — brings me to a second limitation shared by extant theorizations of the carceral safety net. These theorizations tend to be suffused with pessimism and can be overly deterministic. In the final analysis, prisons are depicted as locked in a functional embrace with harmful neoliberal policies more generally. This perspective is epitomized by Wacquant’s influential theorization of the neoliberal state and the shift from the

65 social to the penal management of poverty (2011/12; 2010b). In short, he argues that the neoliberal state is characterized by a historically novel wedding of expansive “prisonfare” and restrictive “workfare” (which compels participation in exploitative, flexible employment as a condition of public support). This novel “carceral-assistential lattice” (2009, 304) regulates the poor and thus manages social insecurity stemming from economic deregulation. According to Wacquant, the workfare/prisonfare apparatus is functional because it “has come to serve three missions” (2011/12, 206): 1) it bends “fractions of the postindustrial proletariat” (2009, 307) to precarious, low-wage work; 2) it warehouses (and thus neutralizes) its “most disruptive or superfluous elements” (2011/12, 206-7); and 3) it reaffirms the authority and legitimacy of the State when its mission of social and economic protection has been renounced (2010b, 198).

Functionalist accounts of the neoliberal prison leave little room for the consideration of “possible contradictions and disjunctures” (Mayer 2010, 100). Comfort, for example, concludes that visiting women’s practices of imprisonment ultimately benefit the prison itself (2008, 17). Furthermore, Bourgois depicts indigent addicts as “trapped in an ‘abusive carceral cycle’” whereby any benefits of incarceration derived by the urban poor are negated insofar a criminal record, “exacerbated by a low skill level imposed by years of forced idleness in a purposefully hostile carceral environment devoid of rehabilitative programs… condemns them to chronic unemployment upon their release from prison” (Bourgois 2011, 2). When the carceral safety net is interpreted as an appendage of a well-functioning repressive regime, meaningful struggles and alternatives are erased. Subjects of incarceration do not appear as actors and, as Mayer notes in a critique of Wacquant’s theoretical model, there is “no indication as to where opposition to this regime might emerge from” (2010, 100). My analysis, which emphasizes the agency and contingent politics of subjects of incarceration, draws on Foucualt’s insight regarding the problem of ‘what is to be done’ about imprisonment: The problem, you see, is one for the subject who acts – the subject of action through which the real is transformed. If prisons and punitive mechanisms are transformed, it won't be because a plan of reform has found its way into the heads of the social workers; it will be when those who have to do with that penal reality, all those people, have come into collision with each other and with themselves, run into dead-ends, problems and impossibilities, been through conflicts and confrontations; when critique has been played out in the real, not when reformers have realized their ideas (1991, 84-85).

Edina’s life history serves as the backbone of the present analysis. In each section, I draw on a different chapter of her life story to foreground major extra-carceral sources of insecurity within the perilous milieu of the prison-neighbourhood nexus. In turn, I discuss tactical responses to these intersecting obstacles to social reproduction. I then explore how sedimented and shared experiences of living with insecurity inform practical understandings of imprisonment and a resultant carceral form – namely, the technology of care. Finally, I analyze how this form enables subjects of incarceration to realize both components of household social reproduction: 1) day-today survival of members; and 2) the intergenerational transmission of knowledge, values, practices, and affects. In her engagements with the prison, Edina draws from a gendered and classed repertoire of tactics that she has developed over the course of a lifetime of struggles not only to survive individually but to live mutually with socially con-substantial kin in a context of insecurity. This is particularly challenging because the fate of her household, her self — is linked to the fate of criminal kin who are, at once, both dangerous and endangered.

Crack é Cadeia ou Caixão (Crack is Jail or a Coffin): Imprisonment as an Alternative to Death

Figure 10. Public service announcement on a billboard in Salvador. This anti-drug campaign was at its height during the period of my dissertation fieldwork. The campaign’s alliterative warning – that consumption of crack-cocaine will result in death or imprisonment –reflects and reinforces a commonly expressed local perception about the consequences of involvement in the drug trade generally and dependence on crack-cocaine specifically.

In the vignette that follows, I describe my first encounter with Edina. This ethnographic encounter reveals how police violence — a topic I did not set out to research — seeped into my study of (un)relatedness and imprisonment. It also serves as a poignant reminder that subjects of incarceration suffer serious harm and hardships stemming from sources other than the prison. Moreover, it offers a window onto the manner in which meanings of imprisonment are forged in

67 light of perceived contrasts between carceral and ‘non-carceral’ (in)securities, spaces, and institutions. This latter point is crucial. Pace punishment and society scholars who have emphasized the ways in which the prison becomes continuous with rather than separate from the neighbourhood (see McTighe 2017; Cunha 2008; Wacquant 2000, 2001), the ongoing salience of rupture must be investigated. It is precisely because the prison is not the same as the street that creative social actors might come to value it. Although scholars often characterize the contemporary prison as one organ within an integrated system of neoliberal penality, we cannot grasp how the prison is deployed as a technology of care if we do not attend to the meaningful distinctions people draw, for example, between punitive containment and extralegal police violence – carceral versus ‘capital’ punishment.

Feminina has two visitation days/week – Wednesdays and Saturdays, 9 am to 1 pm. Visitors arriving at peak times can expect to wait 30 minutes to an hour (or more) before being called into the reception area for revista (a search of bodies and belongings). This waiting period provided me with an opportunity to meet, observe, and interact with visitors. Rain or shine, I spent two mornings a week outside of Feminina talking with visitors and sharing some of the discomfort of occupying an inadequate waiting area for extended periods of time.

The waiting area is little more than an infrequently-used road. There is no bathroom. There is no secure location to store prohibited items such as cell phones or umbrellas. Immediately beside the entryway, there is a small bench that fills up fast on visitation days. Occasionally, desperate visitors stash prohibited items beneath this bench for the duration of their visits, taking a calculated risk that the items will still be there when they exit. Without adequate seating, the majority of visitors mill about or find precarious resting spots as they await processing. Some congregate on the stairway that leads down to the “waiting road” while others perch on top of a narrow retaining wall, their feet awkwardly dangling above an open drainage gutter. There is no shelter or shade aside from a small awning directly above the entryway. When visitors do huddle together under this canopy — to escape the rain or the blistering sun — they’re ordered to disperse: “You can’t block the entrance!”

Edina comes to Feminina approximately twice a week to visit her daughter Neginha. The day we

68 first met, Edina was sitting on the aforementioned retaining wall nibbling on a kola nut,77 an indication of health problems and food insecurity, as she chatted with a couple of other, older mothers. I was making the rounds – greeting those I already knew and introducing myself to others. In order to facilitate these sometimes-awkward interactions and minutely alleviate the discomfort of waiting, I was in the habit of bringing a thermos of sweet black coffee and a sleeve of tiny, disposable cups to share with visitors. As I poured coffee for the women in Edina’s group (though Edina herself declined due to the recent influence of Mormonism in her life) their conversation caught my attention. I asked if I could join them and they responded by shuffling over and offering me a spot on the ledge.

The women were commiserating over the recent, violent deaths of their sons. At least two of the three women had lost a son to gun violence in the last year. Edina’s son was killed by police; the other woman’s son was killed by a local drug trafficker. I listened to their conversation with rapt attention until we were all startled when a rat ran (or swam) through the gutter, its wake splashing our dangling flip-flop clad feet. Following the sudden appearance of the rodent, the women’s conversation shifted from the threat of violence to the subject of inadequate houses. Edina, for example, expressed a desire to finish the floors of her house; she has found snakes and other pests inside and this concerns her.

Visiting and Earning: Livelihood and Practices of Imprisonment

In this section, I explore how Edina, at various points in her life, has secured the necessities of life in and through the prison. I also identify circumstances – past and present – that have provoked her to turn to the prison (viz. gendered experiences of violence, “lack of consideration,” and crises of social reproduction). Edina’s story highlights processes of familial disaggregation and exclusion originating from beyond the prison that are addressed, in part, through practices of imprisonment.

Edina lives in an “invasion” on the edge of Calabetão, a neighborhood located in close proximity

77 These nuts contain caffeine and other chemicals that function as stimulants. They are chewed to restore vitality, ease hunger pains, and relieve various ailments. Edina told me that it helped her to manage her hypertension. The nuts were introduced to Brazil by enslaved Africans.

69 to Mata Escura and the prison compound. She is the mother of seven children (including the son who was killed by police). Edina also has six grandchildren. She currently has no husband because, as she puts it, the husbands she “arranges” never work out. Edina currently lives with her two youngest children and two of her grandchildren (the 11- and 8-year-old sons of her imprisoned daughter). She makes a living, primarily, by “hunting” recyclables. This work involves collecting discarded bottles, cans and other “materials” to sell to a local scrap yard — an unregulated enterprise consisting of a yard, a truck and a baling press. Here, materials are sorted and bundled before being sold on either to larger scrap dealers or directly to recycling plants.78 The collection of discarded materials is not a new practice among Brazil’s urban poor (see Jesus 1962). However, as Millar (2014) points out, the growing global market in recyclables — which generates an estimated U.S. $200 billion annually (BIR 2010 as cited by Millar 2014, 36) — has contributed to an explosion of this work and its transformation “from a small-scale activity involving primarily reuse into an alternative form of urban employment connected to global markets” (2014, 37).

Shortly after my initial encounter with Edina I visited her home to conduct an interview. We met at the entrance to the penal compound after one of Edina’s regular visits. Although it was raining and I offered to pay both of our bus fares, Edina insisted on walking home. During the 30-minute downhill journey, she filled a plastic bag with discarded drink containers. She was also carrying a second sack of recyclables that she had gathered on her way to the prison. During her visit, she had managed to successfully store this bag under the aforementioned bench in Feminina’s waiting area. Whereas analyses of imprisonment often draw attention to the prohibitive cost of visitation and how this contributes to the social isolation of prisoners or the impoverishment of prisoners’ families (e.g. Comfort 2008; Owen 1998), Edina’s activities register the visits’ economically-productive potential.

As we walked and Edina “hunted”, she spoke about – and demonstrated – her high level of consideration within the neighbourhood where she has lived, off and on, for half a century. Within Calabetão proper, our pace slowed as Edina stopped to greet passersby and shout

78 “The processed paper, plastics, and metal are then sold to a range of packaging, construction, automotive, and textile industries, reaching the United States, Europe, and increasingly, China” (Millar 2014, 37).

70 pleasantries into the open (but barred) windows of houses. Edina pointed out a little shop and explained that, due to her relationship of consideration with the owner, she is able to take items on credit (fiado) and sell them, at a small profit, to people at the prison. For example, a large clear re-sealable plastic container (like Tupperware) can be sold for R$ 15 at the prison. After re- paying the shopkeeper R$ 10, Edina would be left with R$ 5 cash-in-hand (the same amount as the cost of two adult bus fares). There is a good market for transparent re-sealable plastic containers among prisoners and visitors. This is especially true at Feminina, where the presence of pre-trial detainees as well as sentenced prisoners means there is a high turnover of inmates and thus plenty of new, unequipped visitors. Prison rules (or customs) dictate that this is how home- cooked meals are transported into the compound’s prisons; transparency is required to facilitate manual search procedures. Prisoners and visitors aspire to obtain containers of the greatest volume and highest quality to maximize the amount of food supplied and minimize messy, wasteful leakage (prison rules specify the number of permitted containers rather than an admissible quantity of food). Edina, with her imprisoned daughter’s assistance, also sells catalogue hygiene and beauty products (viz. Avon and Natura) to prisoners and their visitors. The money Edina earns through these collaborative practices of imprisonment helps her to financially support her family.

Edina’s enactment of financially beneficial practices of imprisonment is neither unprecedented nor unique.79 Prior to her present engagement with the prison, during her formative years, she had already experienced sustaining and stabilizing effects of practices of imprisonment.

Edina (51) came of age in Northeast Brazil – one of Brazil’s poorest, most marginalized regions – during the military dictatorship (1964-1985). In 1964, a military coup backed by the U.S. (Black 1977; Parker 1979) toppled the left-leaning presidency of João Goulart, ushering in twenty-one years of military rule. The junta was especially concerned about the Ligas Camponeses, a peasant organization led by a lawyer from the Northeast (Scheper-Hughes 2015,

79 In the introduction, I discuss prison vendors, non-prisoners who make a living selling goods and services at the entrance to the penal compound. Additionally, chapter four’s analysis of carceral conjugality contains evidence of wives and girlfriends of prisoners who manage to derive economic (and other) benefits from visitation.

270).80

Significantly, the perilous situation of peasants and seasonal contract workers in Northeast Brazil, at the dawn of the dictatorship, is partly a result of state-led development efforts. In the 1960’s, like many countries in the Global South, the Brazilian government used loans from the World Bank and other Western lenders, along with money from private investors, to industrialize. To acquire foreign income to repay its debts, the developmental state encouraged landowners to expand production of cash crops, particularly those non-food crops for which there was demand in the Global North. Increased production of cash crops required modernized farming techniques and plenty of land. Small farmers, forced off the land, had to find agricultural employment or migrate to growing cities in search of jobs that, for the most part, did not exist.

In the early 1960s, when Edina was a toddler, her family migrated from the state of Bahia’s rural interior to participate in a land invasion occurring on the outskirts of the state capital. The invasion – which has come to be known as Calabetão81 – is located off the BR–324, a principal federal highway connecting Salvador to Feira de Santana (the largest city in the Bahian interior). The paving of BR–324 was completed in 1960 (Zorzo 2005). In 2009, the highway was privatized, widened, and converted to a toll route.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ research on the everyday violence of infant mortality in a shantytown in Pernambuco (a state neighboring Bahia), provides us with a sense of what life and death were like for the rural poor in Northeast Brazil at the time when Edina’s family joined waves of landless peasants migrating to Salvador’s urbanizing periphery.

80 Although the Ligas made some headway with landless peasants and sugarcane cutters working on large plantations and usinas (industrialized sugar mills), they posed no great Communist threat (Scheper-Hughes 2015, 271). 81 This name likely refers to Maria do Calabetão, an important 20th Century Candomblé leader (mãe do santo) in Bahia.

Now they were seasonal contract workers, earning roughly a dollar a day to cut and sack cane. Poor, hungry, disoriented, they threw together homes made of straw, mud and sticks, and—in the worst instances— scrap material. They threw together families in the same bowdlerized fashion, taking whatever was available and making do… For these people, who lacked water, electricity, and sanitation, and faced daily food scarcities, epidemics, and military police violence, premature death was an everyday occurrence (2015, 271).

Making a living in the informal economy of Salvador’s urbanizing periphery during the early years of the military dictatorship would not have been significantly easier than the life of a seasonal agricultural worker. Edina’s father worked as a mechanic and her mother ran a vending stall. Edina is the oldest of seven children who lived past infancy – the only child born “fora de casal” (of a different father). Edina suspects her exceptional paternity had something to do with her expulsion from the household. When she was thirteen, her mother threw her out of the family shanty on the pretense that Edina was no longer a virgin (an accusation that Edina vehemently denies to this day).82 Today, Edina bemoans the fact that, even once she’d grown up, her mother didn’t seek her out – neither when Edina had her own first daughter nor when her casa caiu (lit. house collapsed). This metaphorical idiom is used to describe undesirable situations, especially those in which everything seems to be going wrong, one’s life is in shambles, and a person has little capacity to circumvent the chaos. Edina expresses a deep sense of injustice as she says: “My mother never helped me – only my children help. My son worked and always helped me but then the police killed him…”

To summarize, in the early 1970s, prior to the hegemonic consolidation of neoliberal ideology, Edina’s ties to her family were severed as they withheld care from her in accordance with an established cultural script (relating to proper gendered conduct). In a similar vein, Scheper- Hughes’ primary thesis in Death without Weeping (1993), concerns “lifeboat ethics” or how mothers “let go” of infants perceived to lack “a talent for life.” In the precarious context of shantytown life, especially during the dictatorship (1964-85) and the early and uneven transition

82 In Northeast Brazil, where sexual containment is emblematic of respectable female behavior, “[g]irls and women experience constant difficulty in maintaining their own credibility as sexually self-controlled virgins or wives” (McCallum 1999, 284). Perhaps Edina’s mother expelled her daughter from the household to remove a trace of her own past sexual indiscretions. In chapter 4, I discuss Salvador’s sex/gender system and notions of respectable femininity in more detail.

73 to democracy (1985–1992), many infants did not survive the first year of life. Under “murderous economic, environmental, and political conditions,” Scheper-Hughes writes, lapses of attention by mothers who were themselves struggling for survival proved to be lethal (2015, 272-3).83 In short, structural violence that exceeds the harmful effects of neoliberalization contributes to deficient consideration and familial decisions to withhold care or effect exclusion. Somewhat counterintuitively, the prison, often viewed as an instrument of structural violence, may in fact be used by creative social actors to negotiate perilous conditions of life.

After Edina was cast out of the family home, she joined the already-crowded household of Dona Amelia (the mother of a close friend). Edina also relied on other friends for support because Dona Amelia already “had many, many children” and struggled to get by. In fact, it was Dona Amelia’s practices of imprisonment that enabled her to make ends meet and support several dependents. Edina explains: Dona Amelia didn’t work but she did visit a prisoner. Back then the prison wasn’t like it is now. They [the prisoners] grew beans, rice, and corn. When I was around 18, Dona Amelia brought me along on a visit to see her “husband”. She put me out there so I could meet someone as well. Then, the help [ajuda] Dona Amelia earned [ganhava], I earned as well. In order to earn you had to have someone, there [at the prison].

So, I brought help [resources – in the form of staple crops] to the house as well [Dona Amelia’s household]. The prison was in the same area as it is now but it was very different 40 years ago. The prison was very good, it had open air, they gave things to the prisoners. Now everything has changed. You can only visit a prisoner if you are their wife or mother. You can’t visit like we used to visit…

As a youth, Edina managed to endure a form of gendered abandonment with the assistance of a mutual support network shored up by the prison. And, through the tutelage of Dona Amelia, Edina learned to enact practices of imprisonment that enable her to secure a livelihood and her belonging in a family home. Today, forty years later, Edina is again engaged in the task of

83 Such cases of gendered abandonment during the dictatorship, call into question theorizations of social abandonment as a consequence of a socially-disintegrative deep neoliberalizaiton that radially transforms sociality and subjectivities (e.g. Biehl 2005). Familial decisions to withhold care and effect exclusion – which Biehl has analyzed in terms of the spread of neoliberal market values, pharmaceutical mediation of domestic relations, and “social abandonment” of unruly and unproductive household members (2005) – are shown here to prefigure Brazil’s “deep neo-liberalization” (Gledhill 2005). I critically engage Biehl’s conceptualization of social abandonment in chapter 3.

74 weaving a carceral safety net. She visits her eldest daughter at the same penal compound she first visited as a young woman and is able to integrate prison visits into an established livelihood as well as net modest profits selling ‘carceral commodities.’ Once again, her practices of imprisonment support household reproduction on a daily and generational scale. Counterintuitively the prison affords Edina the opportunity to approximate rather than abandon (or be abandoned by) Neginha.

In the prison-neighbourhood nexus, imprisonment is “absorbed” into everyday life.84 Much of the time, rather than being world-annihilating, imprisonment figures as a “normal event” (Garland 2001a) or a “quasi-event” – a small turning that surfaces aspects of the everyday which were otherwise hidden or reorients relationships (Das 2015, 12 citing da Col and Humphrey 2012). For people accustomed to operating tactically, who are endangered rather than well- served by the status quo (see Warren 2002) – occasions of imprisonment might be creatively engineered “to deflect everyday life from its accustomed paths of repetition and routine” (Das 2015, 12). When pervasive insecurities and present (inter-)personal trajectories threaten to undermine familial continuity and flourishing, exposing members (and the group) to fatal risks, imprisonment may represent an opportunity as much as a constraint. To the extent that imprisonment constitutes a budding – or fully manifest crisis – or “turning point” (Greenhouse 2002, 9 citing Habermas 1976) – it has the effect of making outcomes unpredictable and encouraging “a shift in attention toward what will happen next… or toward what might have happened” (da Col and Humphrey 2012, 2). And, in some cases, the unsettled circumstances and insights brought about by confinement, might prove to be liberating (Greenhouse 2002, 9). In this sense, practices of imprisonment have the potential to yield more than financial benefits of the sort I have emphasized up to this point. To engage the prison as a technology of care is to mobilize this institution toward ends that exceed mere survival. Beyond enabling the poor to access day-to-day necessities of life, practices of imprisonment might be integrated into ethical life projects crafted around the issue of cultivating moral subjectivity and, thereby, “bringing about an [improved] eventual everyday from within the actual everyday” (Das 2012, 134).

84 Cunha (2008) has described ways in which the Portuguese prison is “absorbed” by poor neighbourhoods and, vice-versa, how these poor neighbourhoods have been “absorbed” by the prison.

Gender, Insecurity, and Tactics

Returning to Edina’s life history, I continue to situate the prison in a wider social milieu characterized by profound insecurity. I also document illustrative instances of three classed and gendered tactics (viz. appropriative endurance, containment, and relational intervention) the poor enact to live with insecurity in Salvador’s prison-neighbourhood nexus.

Expelled from her natal family when she was only 13, Edina carved out a fragile and subordinate position of belonging within Dona Amelia’s crowded house. It seems that her inclusion in this household was contingent, at least to some degree, upon her contributions. Edina continued to stay with Dona Amelia until, at age 19, she lost her virginity to a man she met at the beach. This sexual encounter developed into an effective marriage,85 at which point it was no longer necessary or appropriate for Edina to continue to visit the prisoner Dona Amelia had connected her with.86

Edina and her first husband lived together until he left her. The dissolution of Edina’s first marriage meant she had to leave the place in which the couple had cohabited. Ideally, marriages (and procreative sex) ought to yield a house which, in the event of a separation, the woman retains (with her children).87 However, this outcome is far from guaranteed. In cases where a lasting house is not established — e.g. because of virilocal residence within an extended-family household or because the conjugal couple rents (or borrows) a space – ex-wives are entitled to very little and may be left scrambling to access housing. Among research participants, serial marriages tend to correspond with high levels of residential mobility and housing instability. This is a pattern that seems to exacerbate overall insecurity among women (and their dependants) in particular.

85 I use the term marriage as most research participants do – to refer to the union of a cohabitating couple. 86 Edina consistently and hotly insists that she “saved” her virginity until she met the man who would become her first husband. In Edina’s narrative, her first conjugal union corresponds with her first experience of sexual intercourse. At the same time, she speaks openly about her long history of visiting the prison and associating with known criminals. This suggests important contours of the cultural construction of gendered morality (cf. Mayblin 2010), indicating which sorts of acts and relationships threaten — and which might bolster — respectable femininity. Among the heavily penalized poor, the “courtesy stigma” (Goffman 1963) of associating with a convict seems to be less of a concern than the stigma attached to “unconstrained” female sexuality (occurring outside of marriage). 87 In Brazil, women are primarily responsible for educating and caring for children (Rebhun 1999, 119-20).

Edina, at age 22, quickly met a new man after the dissolution of her first marriage. What other option did she have? This man impregnated her but resisted “taking responsibility”. He did not marry Edina (that is, he did not cohabitate with her) or sufficiently provide for her and their unborn child. It is possible that, in time, he might have done these things. However, he was killed before Edina gave birth to their child. When Edina was seven months pregnant with her eldest daughter, Neginha (the daughter who is currently imprisoned at Feminina), the genitor was killed in a briga (a lethal street confrontation – see Linger 1992). Neginha’s father died fighting, with a weapon in his hand, after having instigated a confrontation with two brothers. As Edina explains it, this death was all too predictable: he “was valentão [very macho], he showed up at parties looking for a fight.”

Brazil’s sex/gender system tends to provoke men’s violence and involvement in the world of crime at the same time as it discourages similar behavior in women. Beyond constraining women’s own performances of violence and crime, gender ideology encourages women to curb the violence of others.

Gendered Violence and Containment

More than one million people were murdered in Brazil between 1980 and 2011 (Scheper-Hughes 2015, 278).88 Violence, “once concentrated in major cities in the south” has spread, over the past decade, “to the interior and to the north and northeast of the country” (Scheper-Hughes 2015, 278). The vast majority of homicide victims are male Afro-Brazilians (Murray et al. 2013). Indeed, interpersonal violence “has grown into a major public health problem in Brazil” (Murray et al. 2013, 472). Since the 1930’s, infectious diseases have accounted for an increasingly smaller proportion of deaths, while deaths caused by violence have steadily increased (Barreto et al., 2011). Since the 1960’s, child death rates (and birth rates) have also plummeted. Scheper- Hughes, reflecting on a recent ethnographic re-visit to the Northeast, observes that, today, women do not lose their infants. However, adolescents and young men who survived that first year of life are all-too-often “cut down by bullets and knives… by local gangs, ‘strong men,’ bandidos, and local police in almost equal measure” (2015, 301).

88 See http://www.mapadaviolencia.org.br/mapa2012_cor.php.

The death of Neginha’s father reflects the relationship between masculinity and violence in Northeast Brazil. Most of the physical violence of brigas is initiated by men (Linger 1992, 246). In Northeast Brazil, as elsewhere in the world (Drybread 2014; Hautzinger 2007; Messerschmidt 1999, 1996; Bourgois 1995), men accomplish desirable forms of masculinity (e.g. hegemonic or oppositional masculinity), in part, through violence or by displaying a readiness to respond to affronts with violence. 89 Messerschmidt interprets violence (and crime) by men as “a form of social practice invoked as a resource, when other resources are unavailable, for accomplishing masculinity” (1993, 85). Bourgois’ 1995 account of the harms perpetrated by male crack sellers, in their quest to be respected in de-industrializing New York city, supports this theory. In short, various conditions (e.g. poverty, joblessness, service sector employment, everyday uneven class relations, etc.) and situations (e.g. a wife’s adultery, a perceived threat or slight proffered by a posturing man, etc.) are experienced as “masculinity challenges” to which men might respond with violence, as a means of “doing gender” (Messerschmidt 1993, 1996, 1999).90

Masculinity challenges are a function of the fragility, instability, and contingency of performances of masculinity. As Hautzinger notes in her study of violence and gendered power struggles in Salvador, Bahia, “successful masculinity in Brazil can be precarious, where a man must either dominate and prevail over others, or be demoted to nothing, to nobody” (2007, 133). That is, men “do masculinity” at continual risk of being identified as less than “true men” – as a person more likely to “be eaten” than “to eat” (Kulick 1998; Goldstein 2003; McCallum 1999, 285).91 Performances of masculinity tend to be more heavily policed than performances of

89 Violence enables men to do masculinity in at least three respects: first, it demonstrates a man’s ability to draw upon those assets of human bodies – and enact qualities –typically regarded as masculine (i.e., toughness, strength, courage, independence); second, it prevents men from becoming non-men or viados (slang term for the passive partner in male homosexual intercourse – see Kulick 1998) in the eyes of peers, which might result if an affront were ignored; and, finally, if a man is successful in a confrontation, his dominance and power over the other party is established. 90 For examples of this analytic from Brazil see: Drybread 2014; Hautzinger 2007; Goldstein 2003; Linger 1992; Penglase 2014. Hautzinger’s study, in particular, sheds light on the prevalence of violence against women in Salvador, Bahia. 91 In talk of sexual intercourse in Bahia, as elsewhere in Brazil, the woman “gives” (dá) and the man “eats” (coma). Among the people with whom I work in/around Salvador’s prisons, language from the domain of food and eating is applied metaphorically to the domain of sexuality. Specifically, the verb comer, “which means both “to eat” and to actively consume another person sexually, is connected to male [masculine] sexual activity” (Goldstein 2003, 236 – emphasis my own). In contrast, “[w]omen and others perceived as being in the sexually passive position are generally the metaphorical receivers” (Goldstein 2013 [2003], 309). Broadly speaking, Brazilians construct binary

78 femininity (or non-manliness) precisely because of the devaluation of femininity within a patriarchal society.92 In such societies, status, respect, and other rewards are disproportionately available to men, particularly those who exhibit characteristics associated with highly valued cultural constructions of masculinity.

The “doing gender” approach has helped scholars explain the sex/gender gap in lethal and non- lethal violence as well as the gap in criminal offending.93 Whereas, for males, doing crime and violence might be a means to accomplish masculinity, most law-breaking acts do not help women accomplish “respectable femininity” (Fleetwood 2013; Miller 2001). Indeed, for women, involvement in crime is quite costly and promises few rewards. As criminologists studying the gender gap in white-collar offending have observed: “The separation between what is feminine and what is criminal is sharp, whereas the dividing line between what is masculine and what is illegal is often thin” (Steffensmeir et al. 2013). Ideas about gender operate not only to limit women’s violence and involvement in the world of crime but also incite women to circumscribe the criminality and violence of others. For example, women are obliged to pre-empt intimate partner violence through self-restraint – containment of their own urges.

In Northeast Brazil, the gender ideology marks women as in need of containment and control (both self-control and control by dominant others) (McCallum 1999; Mayblin 2010). Both men and women are understood to embody forces and desires (e.g. a sexual drive). But, whereas men are expected and encouraged to be mobile and free to realize these desires, women are to exhibit

gender identities as either “homen” (men) who eat or “not-men” – women, travesties, viados (passive homosexuals) – who share a desire for real men (penetrators); have a capacity to arouse desire in them; and are eaten by them (see Kulick 1998). Crucially, this binary and hierarchical sex/gender system emphasizes “corporeal action and positioning in relation to other bodies, over biological essence or ‘sex’” (McCallum 1999). 92 Of course, this isn’t to suggest that women, their sexuality, and performances of femininity are not policed. However, whereas men tend to be “classified according to degrees of masculinity in that one is ‘more’ or ‘less’; a man, femininity is something of a ‘non-issue’—a woman is either good/moral or bad/immoral” (Mayblin 2010, 141 citing Melhuus 1992). 93 Men are, generally, more likely than women to get into violent disputes and men's disputes (compared with women's) are more likely to cause serious injury or death to combatants (Messerschmidt 2010, 621). Likewise, men are more likely to engage in crime than women (Naffine 2003). In Brazil, 87% of police-recorded “offenders” were male in 2009 and 94% of the nation’s adult prison population was male in 2011. For a systematic review of quantitative research on crime and violence trends in Brazil, see Murray et al. 2013. This review supports the notion that males are more likely to engage in crime and act violently toward others.

79 restraint. Women’s sexuality, speech, anger, and violence must be contained, in large part, because of the anticipated violent reactions of men. As McCallum notes, [t]here is an urgency to this multiple imprisonment within a self- containing body… women and their offspring, through their endless financial demands upon the man, can bring him to his knees, socially, economically, psychologically. He must be free to go out and battle in the world, earn money, spend it on drinking with his mates, or on sexual adventures. To return to his condition as husband-provider-father must be his own choice. If a woman ‘provokes' him (provocar), pestering him until he can stand it no more (encher o saco) and, uncontained, dares question the trajectory of his body in the world beyond the house, what better means of reply than lashing out at her verbally and even physically?94 The blows serve to force her to contain herself again – ficar na dela (keep herself to herself, not react). And indeed, the need to keep oneself to oneself is constantly reiterated in day-to-day living in Salvador… Both men and women constantly need to restrain themselves in daily life in Salvador. But the onus is often on the woman to deflect another's provocation. The act of self-control is one way that female gender is constituted (1999, 284).

This form of tactical inaction can stabilize volatile domestic situations, maintain crucial mutual support networks, and forestall retributive cycles of violence.

Women are not only expected to pre-empt intimate partner violence by containing their own urges within themselves. Women also feel pressure to keep themselves and their family members (especially young children and daughters) cloistered within the feminized domain of the house (see chapter 4) and away from the unsafe and criminogenic masculinized domain of the street. In short, women, who are primarily responsible for childcare, are often compelled to keep themselves and their children, especially adolescent girls, spatially and symbolically in/of the

94 Historically, when a Brazilian man killed his wife or lover, he could often escape punishment by invoking the “defense of honor” or defense of “violent emotion” (similar to temporary insanity in the U.S.). Defense of honor was equated with self-defense justifications of murder. Although the first penal code of the Brazilian empire abolished this legal privilege, it remained a customary defense that could be used in murder trials. Indeed, over the years, its uses expanded to protect, for example, husbands who killed wives merely on the suspicion of her unfaithfulness (Page 1996, 255). By the late 1970s, people began to protest jury verdicts that resulted in the acquittal of men who had killed their wives (Hautzinger 2007, 185). In 1991, Brazil’s Supreme Court ruled that a man can no longer kill his wife and win acquittal on the ground of “legitimate defense of honor” (Brook 1991, n.p.). However, on retrial, a judge permitted the defense of honor, the jury acquitted the defendant, and, under the law, no appeal was permitted (Page 1996, 255). By the 2000s, all-women police stations, specializing in attending to women, were operating throughout Brazil. As Hautzinger notes, “[t]he principal rationale for instituting the [Women’s Police Stations] was to intervene in the impunity that male offenders typically experienced in the Brazilian law enforcement and legal system” (2007, 2).

80 house. This is a near impossible task insofar as poor women are often required to support their households financially by engaging in extra-domestic income generating activities.95 When women are drawn out of the house to make ends meet, many have no choice but to leave children and adolescents unsupervised. This presents a dilemma which some women respond to by locking children/youth inside the house during their absence. The “structured choice” (Wesely 2006) to turn homes into sites of coercive confinement involves weighing the dangers of the street against the threat of house fires.

Figure 11. Grace (the daughter of an ex-presa) escapes through window bars with her coursin while her mother is out.

Thus far, I have discussed several of the ways in which women deploy a tactic of containment to limit or pre-empt violence by, for example, sublimating their own impulses to avoid provoking abusive intimates or spatially/symbolically confining self and others (viz. dependants) to the family home. Additionally, in Northeast Brazil, women (particularly older women) are able to accomplish morality by suffering. One suffers well by containing one’s own suffering – publicizing one’s suffering only in conventionally subtle ways – and by bearing suffering on behalf of others (Mayblin 2010, 67-93). By assuming the role of paradigmatic self-sacrificing mother, women are able to symbolically capitalize on their suffering in a manner that enables them to transfigure and deal with problems and foster productive social relations (Mayblin 2010, 92-93).

95 Millar (2014) poignantly captures this tension between the obligation to contain/care and to work/provide in her account of a mother’s structured choice to decline a formal work contract (a job with benefits).

Prison visitation certainly provides grist for the mill of “socially productive suffering narratives” (Mayblin 2010) and, thus, can enhance visitors’ capacity to negotiate dilemmas and deficient social relations. By enduring the pains of visitation (well) to extend care, visitors perform self- sacrifice. Moreover, they are able to approximate and inhabit the same space as dangerous/endangered kin while avoiding the tensions and resentments garnered when it is up to them to police/punish conduct. Although containing a daughter at home is ideal, it is not always possible.96 While state-led incarceration is clearly less compatible with respectable femininity than a state of being in/of the house, it nonetheless restricts prisoners’ physical access to the deadly and demoralizing domain of the street in a manner analogous to family-based practices of confinement. Only by attending to broader patterns of gendered violence (and its containment) can we grasp the incorporation of the prison into a protective and ethical carceral form by good sofredoras (female sufferers) versed in the arts of containment.

Precarious Work

At the time of Neginha’s father’s death, and following Neginha’s birth, Edina was staying “at a house where [her] aunt and prima [female cousin] also stayed.” According to Edina, this prima encouraged her to do many coisas erradas (wrong things) to support herself and her baby. 97 For example, Edina went to work with her prima at a bar that sold liquor and food. The cousins were tasked with the job of increasing sales by flirting and, at times, “prostituting”98 themselves. The female owner of the bar instructed them to do whatever it took to encourage patrons to purchase alcohol. Edina recalls having to drink quite heavily while performing this work.

96 This house-oriented iteration of the tactic of containment has both practical and ethical dimensions, which of course cannot be easily distinguished in practice. Containing self and family members within the house serves to establish the respectability of concerned parties, especially females, as well as protect dangerous/endangered intimates from violent victimization and/or becoming demoralized criminals who, themselves, perpetrate violence. In some cases, concerned parents unable to adequately contain and control their adolescent daughters send them to group homes created to shelter female victims of exploitation or family violence. Families in Mata Escura used a local organization’s 20-year-old Casas Lar program in exactly this manner (http://www.acopamec.org.br/casa- lar.php). 97 Notably, in this case and as is often the case, Edina also accessed crucial resources such as shelter and work/income through her relatives. Also, the fact of conviviality and cooperation indicates that a measure of consideration obtained between Edina and these relatives. Thus, although this connection seems to pose a threat to Edina’s security, it is not altogether problematic. Rather, this is a good example of the centrality of ambivalence in kinship (Peletz 2000). 98 Although prostitution has never been criminalized in Brazil, the prostitute herself has always been a figure of moral depravity (Hayes 2011, 109 N.33).

Though Edina’s willingness to disclose her involvement in sex work may seem surprising in light of previous observations about sexual virtue, prison visitation, and the relative importance of these factors in assessments of respectable femininity, it is significant that Edina situates her sexualized labour at the bar in relation to her status as an unsupported mother. Other feminist scholars of Latin America have pointed out a discourse, espoused by female sex workers and others, in which identification as a self-sacrificing mother justifies, at least to some extent, a woman’s involvement in the sex trade (Kelly 2008; Brennan 2004). Edina’s account of this period of her life emphasizes how she was drawn, by obligations toward her infant daughter and proximity to dangerous/endangered intimates such as her cousin, into gender deviant performances (viz. heavy drinking and promiscuity in a masculinized street-like domain). Edina’s behavior was, at once, both marginalizing and integral to her capacity to mother.

According to Edina, the female owner of the bar “liked women” and was attracted to Edina’s cousin. When this cousin “arranged a guy” (arranjou um cara — entered a relationship with a man), her boss was displeased. Eventually, this tense situation erupted in violent conflict when Edina’s cousin viciously attacked her female boss with a broken bottle. As police arrived on the scene, Edina ran and hid in the nearby forest with baby Neginha.

Relational Intervention (1): A spatial-relational fix

Ultimately, Edina managed to escape this incident unscathed, uncharged, and unemployed. To ensure the survival and continued integration of her small family unit (consisting of mother and baby daughter) Edina relocated to Salvador’s city center. Edina’s micro-migration distanced her, both physically and symbolically, from people/places associated with her lover’s death-by-briga, her disreputable employment at the bar, her cousin’s assault and its investigation by police, etc. At the same time, Edina’s relocation put her in proximity to the affluent, relatively powerful citizens of the capital’s bairros nobres (noble neighbourhoods). From this socio-spatial location, Edina was able to arrange live-in domestic work as a nanny and find a woman to shelter and care for Neginha (for a fee).

I interpret Edina’s move as a “spatial-relational fix” – a sub-category of the broader ideal-type of tactical response to insecurity I have labeled “relational intervention.” Transforming the everyday configurations of relationships within which one is embedded can ameliorate circumstances and support ethical projects. Edina’s move to the city center represents an attempt

83 to modify her and Neginha’s conditions of life, including their primary relationships, and, thus, cultivate mutual moral subjectivity. At once, the move brought Edina away from dangerous/endangered intimates and unresolved disputes and into the orbit of people who could support her “moral striving in the everyday” (Das 2012, 134). Employment as a live-in domestic worker in the feminized, moral domain of an affluent familial home conveys a certain degree of respectability (as indexed by proper gendered containment within a house) while opening up the possibility of patron-client exchanges and the kind of “insurance” this represents.

After fleeing the periphery for the city center, Edina spent roughly a year living and working “na casa dos outros” (in a house belonging to others). During this period, she saw Neginha occasionally. On one of these visits Edina was disturbed to find that her toddler (just over a year old) had stopped walking, did not talk, and seemed malnourished. Edina immediately left her job, withdrew Neginha from the informal boarding-nursery, assumed all child-care duties, and began looking for employment that would allow her to live in her own home. However, the job Edina ultimately found was another live-in domestic position. Edina had little choice but to find a new woman to care for Neginha.

Edina remained in this position until the arrival of her second child, Alan. Although Edina did not marry Alan’s father, his network of relations offered her and her two young children a place to stay, at the home of the single brother of an aunt of consideration. This arrangement indicates that Alan’s father was married to another woman and that Edina was his outra (concubine).

Abusive Intimacy and Appropriative Endurance

As we have seen, Edina’s life has been characterized by extreme housing instability. Until she was able to construct her own house in Calabetão, she often found herself living, de favor, in the houses of others. At other times, she was able to access the money required to rent a room and carve out a degree of familial autonomy. This pattern, of moving from one precarious living situation to another, was interrupted when an ex-husband returned from protracted out-of-state travels with a desire to reunite. The once-estranged couple reconciled and their second marriage lasted twelve years, begetting two children. For over a decade, Edina and her husband worked together at one of Salvador’s largest open-air markets, living together with Edina’s children, in a room located in the rear section of Edina’s husband’s brother’s home. Such residential arrangements — where a nuclear family occupies one room in the crowded house of relatives,

84 utilizing the kitchen and bathroom facilities of the main house — are a common response to economic constraint. Edina recalls this relatively stable period as “good” but not without its challenges. Her husband was a heavy drug user. Additionally, throughout this marriage, Edina was routinely “mistreated” (raped) by her brother-in-law (the homeowner). Edina speaks of abuse at the hands of her brother-in-law in a straightforward manner, framing these experiences as part on an overall trajectory of suffering that she has endured since being evicted by her mother at age 13.

During one of my visits to Edina’s house, when we had just finished discussing her longest, 12- year, marriage and the bitter compromises it entailed, her abusive ex-brother-in-law — now a frail, elderly man — actually appeared on her doorstep. Initially, as reflected in the following excerpt from my field notes, I did not recognize him for who he was. The old man lingers at the door, complaining about his struggle to obtain disability payments. He has suffered an injury and is unable to work. Uninvited, he enters the house and makes himself more comfortable. When conversation turns to the issue of violent police, he declines to comment, saying that such talk could have dire consequences. I interpret his words as a both a refusal and a warning. Shortly after his arrival, he leaves. As he turns and makes his way down the crumbling dirt road, Edina raises her eyebrows and bulges out her eyes. “What is it?” I ask. At first, she doesn’t respond. Only when the man is well out of earshot does she finally speak: “That’s him, the guy I was just telling you about!”

Edina took some satisfaction from the eerily timed visit of her rapist. Throughout our conversations, Edina punctuated her accounts of events with truth claims (insistences) and she treated this man’s sudden appearance as a seal of veracity which authenticated everything she had been telling me. For my part, when I recall the way he perched shirtless and uninvited on the edge of Edina’s plastic-covered sofa – next to her children and grandchildren – I am unsettled by the proximity and intimacy of violence as well as Edina’s capacity to endure it. But, of course, Edina is not the first woman to live with intimate (partner) violence as a means to realize household reproduction. Nor is this the only occasion in which Edina has enacted appropriative endurance to get by.

Edina’s life history repeatedly demonstrates that intimate ties can insulate one from the oppressive relations of an exploitative and racist society but also increase exposure to situations, forces and practices which can leave individuals and families deeply vulnerable to harm. Reflecting on her past, Edina remarks:

In my life, I have done many things. I’ve mixed with many good and bad people. I’ve sold my body to raise my children. It has been a vida muita sofrida [tough life with much suffering]... For many years, I lived de favor [for free] in the homes of others – at times I was mistreated [a euphemism for “raped”], humiliated, even obliged to rob people.

Perversely, Edina’s experiences might position her as a dangerous/endangered intimate vis-à-vis her own children. Many Brazilians assume that criminal mothers bear and raise criminals (Moore 2015a). Edina, herself, entertains this explanation for her family’s troubles. On occasion, after expressing concern about a descendant’s conduct or prospects, she would dejectedly conclude by reciting a common idiom: “filho de peixe, peixe é” (the offspring of a fish is a fish). Although Edina cannot entirely discount this theory of crime, she does not succumb to its fatalism. Edina’s actions reflect her hope that individual and familial criminal trajectories can be interrupted and reversed.

In order to grasp how the prison – an ostensibly harmful institution – emerges as a source of life and hope, we must consider the extent to which subjects of incarceration, particularly women, have been, and can reasonably expect to be, dependent upon meaningful social relationships (e.g. with friends, cousins, partners, affines, employers, etc.) that simultaneously help and harm. At the same time as the carceral technology of care resembles appropriative endurance in this respect, it also has the potential to ameliorate some of the problems associated with both abusive and dangerous/endangered intimates. Whereas scholars have analyzed and debated how punitive containment of abusers might serve victims of intimate partner violence (e.g. Comfort 2008; Hautzinger 2007), less attention has been paid to the matter of how imprisonment might be used by parents and other care givers to (re-)moralize – or habilitate – consubstantial criminals. It is in this sense that practices of imprisonment might disrupt raciological accounts of the criminal Other which underlie contemporary trends in the government of populations.

Beyond improving our understanding of carceral possibilities, parsing these two types of injurious intimates – those who are abusive and those who are dangerous/endangered – usefully nuances the notion of “dangerous intimacy” (Penglase 2014) and thus equips us to critically revisit scholarly accounts of sociality among the Brazilian poor. Penglase employs the category of “dangerous intimates” to describe the status of bandidos (drug dealers) within a favela “where almost everyone knows everyone else” (2014, 72). He writes:

On the one hand, [drug dealers] were tied to other residents through relations of kinship, friendship, and long-term propinquity… On the other hand, people of [the neighbourhood] made a pervasive distinction between residents who were involved in drug dealing and the vast majority who were not. If drug dealers were social intimates, they were also seen as a source of danger that was never completely domesticated… [They were] seen as both pseudo kin and radically other, as dangerous intimates (Penglase 2014, 88 – emphasis my own).

My research findings support Penglase’s claim that knowing how to live in a favela involves knowing how to navigate relationships with “social intimates” capable of inflicting harm at any time. However, Penglase and other Anthropologists of urban Brazil neglect the extent to which many poor Brazilians, who understand that the fates of family members are deeply interconnected, must also grapple with the dilemma of thorough identification with and as consubstantial criminals-in-the-(un)making. This points to a category of dangerous intimates who are not perceived as “radically other” and impossible-to-domesticate. The need to disaggregate and complicate the category of “dangerous intimates” is further evinced by the fact that subjects of incarceration negotiating the criminalization of kin and self (where criminalization is a murky, possibly reversible, process) often find it exceedingly difficult to know who is involved in the world of crime and just how involved they are, even within one’s own household. The ability to clearly distinguish between “social intimates” who are and aren’t involved in drug dealing cannot be taken for granted. Developing analyses of sociality around this ostensible “pervasive distinction” ignores the salience of uncertainty, ambiguity, and status mutability.

Nonetheless, it is true that inhabitants of Salvador’s poorest neighbourhoods tend to live in close proximity to actors (e.g. police, prison guards, drug traffickers, landlords, kin) who exacerbate their insecurity. When spatial-relational fixes99 are not available, people who have been harmed and/or anticipate harm as a corollary of intimacy, have little choice but to endure or circumscribe

99 Above I described a micro-migration as a spatial relational fix. Another example of this type of relational intervention relates to the prevalent issue of childhood sexual abuse. To pre-empt or terminate the abuse of female children at the hands of stepfathers, (prospective) victims are often sent to live with other relatives (Goldstein 2013 [2003], 254; Fonseca 1991, 143).

87 injury. Alternative responses – such as public denunciation100 or vigilantism101 – are risky. These measures might provoke retribution or jeopardize one’s position in essential mutual support networks. The plausibility of such measures is also complicated by the feminized impetus to contain, ignorance or uncertainty, the affect of consideration, and habitus (Bourdieu 1977).

Responding to Police Violence

For Edina, a female neighbour named Nalva has come to embody many of the dangers of direct resistance. At one point, many years ago, Edina rented a room from Nalva. At the time, the landlord-tenant relationship was rather unremarkable. However, in light of recent events – Nalva and her husband played a role in the extralegal police execution of Edina’s son, Edilson – this propinquity is invested with new significance. In the wake of Edilson’s tragic death, Edina dwells on her past and ongoing interactions with Nalva. This familiar neighbour-relation has come to represent the way in which so many of Edina’s closest ties are fraught with uncertainty and peril. As Edina narrates her past, she keeps looping back to Nalva as well as to the loss of her son. She emphasizes, repeatedly, that she knows (“conhecer”) Nalva and her family – that she even lived in Nalva’s property, never suspecting that Nalva would be responsible for her greatest source of suffering (the murder of her son). Edina is painfully aware that the potential for violence is an immanent and imminent feature of meaningful social relations. Yet, relationships, and the mutual support networks they form, also constitute crucial lifelines. This leaves people in a bind. As Edina puts it: “I never expected that [Nalva’s] husband would order the police to kill my son but the world works in ways that we can’t possibly imagine…”

“The Police Killed my Son”

Crucially, the carceral technology of care is assembled within a perilous context where other agencies of the “repressive state apparatus” (Althusser 1971) are relatively more lethal. Here is

100 Much has been written about the operation of a “law of silence” imposed by drug traffickers in Brazilian favelas (e.g. Penglase 2009), but here I am more interested in how denunciations are constrained by dispersed obligations and dependencies; gendered expectations of (self-)containment; and, perhaps, a fragmentary and emergent ethos of non-violence. 101 For example, a vigilante response might involve calling on male kin or local drug dealers to deter abusive husbands (see Penglase 2014; Goldstein 2013 [2003], 195; Fonseca 1991, 151).

Edina’s account of Edilson’s death; I have quoted her at length. Nalva’s sons smoked a lot [marijuana, possibly crack]. Those two liked to kill as well. Another son worked in this business of the police – he also likes to kill. The problem grew and grew. One of Nalva’s sons would go to the BR [nearby highway] to rob people. The police caught him and killed him. Her other son sold a refrigerator and headed down to the boca [drug selling/consumption point] to smoke. On his way down, malandros [crooks, deadbeats, streetwise scoundrels] grabbed him, stole his money, and killed him.

I saw Nalva crying. I arrived and everything was stopped, folks were just watching. I went and spoke with my son [Edilson, who was eventually killed]. I told him that something happened down below. He said he didn’t see anything. I was headed toward my house when a colega [acquaintance] explained what had happened. I returned to tell my son. I went back [to where many residents were gathered] and Nalva – the mother – started crying again. She just kept crying “my son, oh my son!”.

I had never lost a son but I felt it [Nalva’s pain]. I hugged her, calmed her down not knowing that her husband would send a bunch of police to kill my son – really not to kill my son but to kill the traffickers (but that day my son was down there...). Nalva’s husband has knowledge [of the police], the whole family has knowledge – one of their sons has knowledge because he already worked with the police.

Nalva’s son died on the 13th. On the 18th… they [police] killed my son and one other boy. I lost my son, he was brutally killed by police.

On that day, my son was with someone who sold porqueria [filth, drugs]– my son did not sell, he smoked [marijuana] and hung out with some folks who sell – you see? The police came, it was a total siege. My son ran and they shot him in the chest, they killed my son and threw him there [Edina gestures wildly with her arm]. They are guilty... The traffickers continue but [the police] are satisfied because they killed someone Police Violence and Impunity in Salvador

The state of Bahia has an alarmingly high rate of police killings. In 2010, in Salvador and its surrounding metropolitan region (the Região Metropolitana de Salvador or RMS), police killed at least 187 people.102 The RMS has a population of almost 4 million people, which is roughly the same population size as that of Los Angeles, California. In 2016, the Los Angeles Police

102 That is, 187 deaths were classified as acts of resistance to arrest.

Department led U.S. police forces in fatal shootings, with a total of 19.103 Within Brazil, the possibility of being killed by the police in Salvador, Bahia’s capital, is at least three times higher than in the city of São Paulo, which is notorious for its high rates of police violence (Brinks 2008, 223). And, within Bahia, as elsewhere in Brazil and Latin America (e.g. Goldstein 2003), the poor, who are enduring the worst living conditions, are the social group most susceptible to violent crime, including police brutality. In 2000, the total rate of homicides in some of Salvador’s low-income neighborhoods was in excess of 100/100,000 (as compared to 20/100,000 for the city’s general population) (Chaves Viana et al. 2011).104

Importantly, these homicide rates do not include most police killings which tend to be classified as autos de resistência (AR – acts of resistance to arrest) as opposed to homicides. When police killings are categorized in daily security bulletins as acts of resistance, the dead person is designated as the ‘author’ rather than the victim of the act. In the first half of 2011 Salvador and the RMS had 1114 homicides (including 77 categorized as acts of resistance). This means that at least 6.7% of violent deaths were authored by police (O Correio 14.07.2011). When we consider that only 25% of homicides in Bahia are ‘solved’ (where the author of the act is identified) (O Correio 05.01.2012) and take into account abundant evidence of police participation in ‘off- duty’ extermination groups engaged in social cleansing (or “private justice”) (Brinks 2008), we may logically estimate that so-called acts of resistance actually constitute only a portion of police-authored killings.105 Yet, despite numerous cases of police killings every year, it is difficult to encounter a single instance in which a police officer has been convicted of murder (Brinks 2008, 224).

Brinks (2008) argues that the source of police violence and impunity in Salvador “is a normative rather than an informational failure” and that “impunity results from the application of an

103 https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings-2016/ 104 Between 2000 and 2006, Salvador’s homicide rate increased by 98.5% (to 39.7/100,000) (Chaves Viana et al. 2011). Between 2006 and 2010 this rate increased by an additional 70% (to 62/100,000) (O Correio 07.02.2011). Note, the United Nations considers a homicide rate of 12/100,000 to be ‘acceptable’; in 2010, Canada had a homicide rate of 1.62/100,000 (Government of Canada) and, in 2006, Toronto had a homicide rate of 2.6/100,000 (Statistics Canada). 105 A review of the major newspapers from 1996 through 1999 found that 15% of Salvador’s ‘homicides’ in those years were attributed to the police while 8% were attributed to ‘extermination groups engaged in social cleansing’ (Brinks 2008, 224).

90 effective rule of decision that permits the use of deadly force to control crime” (224). In other words, although information about killings by police is generally available (killings occur in a relatively open and casual way), investigations are rarely completed if they are even opened: judicial formalities are barely observed.106 In short, the judiciary applies permissive informal rules which legitimize the arbitrary use of force. Included among these permissive practices is the ready categorization of police killings as acts of resistance. But how are these processes – these normative failures – experienced by subjects of incarceration? How might such experiences shape subjects’ engagements with the prison? And how might creative carceral engagements condition an alternative, life-extending vision of crime control?

Classed Tactics: To have or not to have conditions

Throughout fieldwork, I was struck by participants’ frequent use of the idiom of condições (conditions). Subjects of incarceration often make claims and frame explanations in terms of having or not having conditions. The following example illustrates this idiom of conditions as it is articulated vis-à-vis police violence.

One day, outside of Feminina, a group of waiting visitors (including Edina) began discussing a protest staged by an (ex-)police officer in Edina’s own neighbourhood of Calabetão. The officer was facing homicide charges for his alleged role in killing a man. It is notable that the accused avoided preventative detention, which is a measure that tends to be overused by Bahian judges (IBA 2010). As the accused awaited his trial, in an attempt to forestall judicial proceedings and avoid conviction, he erected a 20’ tower and “imprisoned” himself within it. Inside his spectacular cell, he went on a hunger strike, garnering the media’s attention. Through the media, he pleaded innocence and demanded an end to his prosecution. What I found most surprising about this story was the fact that a police officer had actually been charged for murder in a context where police impunity is expected. I, however, was the only one who was surprised by this fact. The others knew that the deceased victim had been a reasonably well-off business man.

106 In a recent newspaper interview, a prosecutor tasked with the “external control of police activities” (Gacep) said she was unable to provide a count of the number of cases initially categorized as acts of resistance that lead to homicide charges against police (O Correio 14.07.2011). The adjunct director of the NGO Global Justice, explains that various factors inhibit investigations of alleged acts of resistance, namely – concealment of the actual crime scene; removal of evidence; intimidation of witnesses; and the common practice of ‘false rescue’ (where police ‘rush’ the victim to hospital although the victim is already deceased) (Brinks 2008, 158).

They understood, all too well, what affluence means in terms of the operations of the criminal justice system. In a matter-of-fact manner, Edina explained the situation: “[the victim’s] family has condições and wants results. Families with more conditions go after justice.” The implication, of course, is that justice is largely out of reach for families lacking conditions.

“Conditions” can refer to an individual or group’s financial situation, physical health, and/or social status. Talk of conditions usually registers their presence (or absence) in relation to a given project. For example, people remark on whether or not they have adequate conditions to pursue legal “justice”, raise a child, visit the prison, or simply make ends meet. This idiom of conditions – a de-responsibilizing discourse – acknowledges the physiological, symbolic, and structural forces that underlie subjects’ differential capacities to act, accomplish, and become. For those lacking the conditions to tackle injustices and insecurities head-on, a tactical approach to living makes a great deal of sense. Recall, tactical responses to challenges emphasize creativity, improvisation, and the ability to carve out zones of temporary autonomy and pleasure while not engaging in a potentially costly battle with larger and more powerful structures of authority (Penglase 2014, 7). These qualities of tactics make them hard to discern and trace. Tactics of endurance and containment, for instance, hinge at least in part on deliberate inaction and forestalling anticipated events and thus might be missed altogether. Surfacing traces of tactics – i.e. crises averted or weathered (see Povinelli 2011, 2012) – brings subordinated actors’ accomplishments and the underlying conditions of these into analytic view. In turn, this offers us a glimpse of politics – an absence of consensus surrounding diagnoses of, and what constitutes a proper response to, crime and, more broadly, the “surplus population” (Marx 1926).

“They Killed My Son… And I Did Nothing”

At the time of my first recorded interview with Edina, 10 months had passed since Edilson’s death. Although she had repeatedly asked God to remove her pain, so far, her prayers had gone unanswered: My tears don’t stop… the death of a son is excruciating. There are times when I don’t feel that he died. There I times that I feel he will still arrive at home. It’s hard, it’s hard… It’s lunch time and I don’t have a plate of food for my son. At times, I leave a little bit of food in the pan thinking it’s for him, that he’ll arrive. But he won’t arrive so it’s very hard...it’s a torment. I’m thinking that my son will come and he will not come back.

The death of Edina’s unarmed son was categorized as an AR and was not investigated. This

92 catastrophic event and its implications haunt Edina. I was able to observe, first-hand, the frequency with which Edina referenced (or was wordlessly affected by) the violent death of her son. This loss seemed to bleed into every moment and dimension of her life, coloring her experiences of the most mundane tasks and, arguably, informing her approach to the imprisonment of “dangerous/endangered kin.” Edilson’s death is especially significant to Edina, not only because he was her son, but also because he was a worker. The significance of this status is captured by a striking scene that unfolded during a visit to Edina’s home.

In the midst of a conversation about Edina’s work history, she rose abruptly from the table, disappearing into the bedroom. Moments later, she emerged brandishing a worn, canary-yellow t-shirt emblazoned with the logo of a major chain of electronics stores (Ricardo Eletro). Edina held the shirt up and said: “You see? He was a worker! A worker – not a bandit! He worked here, this is his uniform. He worked, he helped me...” Edilson worked, formally, in the service sector and contributed to the household. Unlike two of his older siblings — Neginha and his brother Alan — Edilson had not “chosen the wrong path,” – he was a worker not a bandit.107 This is what Edina pronounced, and sought to convince me of, as she proffered Edilson’s uniform as proof, proof of her son’s status and as a sign of the (former) goodness of their mutually entwined lives.

Within the prison-neighbourhood nexus, it is difficult to identify Edilson as a worker given dominant systems of categorization. Prevailing logic casts such identification as oxymoronic. Simply put, moral (non-criminal) conduct is supposed to insulate favela residents from violent victimization. Placing the victim of an extrajudicial execution within the worker-category destabilizes the “myth of personal security” (Arias and Rodrigues 2006),108 a powerful ideology

107 Millar (2014) provides an excellent overview of the symbolic value of the worker (viz. the formally-employed worker) in Brazil’s moral order (also see Veloso 2012; Penglase 2007; Goldstein 2003). In short, in the 1930s, President Getúlio Vargas exalted “the worker” as the model Brazilian citizen and, generated “a worker—criminal dichotomy that continues to function” (Millar 2014, 41). And, in recent years, in the context of intense public anxiety about violent street crime connected to drug trafficking, “the symbolism of ‘the worker’ has taken on added meaning” and the Brazilian poor “have taken up the trabalhador—marginal (worker-marginal) or trabalhador— bandido (worker-bandit) dichotomy” (2014, 41). Indeed, research participants commonly invoke the term “trabalhador” as a synonym for law-abiding, moral citizen. 108 Arias and Rodrigues 2006 have written about the “Myth of personal security” that operates in Brazilian favelas. They argue that people who have no choice but to live in dangerous places deal with the fear of physical violence by cultivating a powerful ideology that says those who conduct themselves appropriately will be respected and insulated from harm. Respect is thought to hinge on whether or not you drink, smoke, sniff or engage in sexual

93 that undergirds any limited sense of security enjoyed by vulnerable people like Edina. This myth orients local securitization tactics and provides people with some sense of control over their safety. The pervasiveness and utility of this myth mean that Edilson’s status as a worker may be called into question by the fact of his extrajudicial execution. Perversely, death-by-police can fix the deceased’s marginal status in the eyes of neighbours whose own mental wellbeing depends upon the perpetuation of the myth of personal security. Furthermore, public “confirmation” of one person’s lethal-marginality can tarnish the moral reputation of their closest relations, rendering these friends and family members more vulnerable to various possible harms than they were before.

To some extent, Edina’s status as a creator-of-workers (upstanding citizens) was shaken when Edilson’s shooting symbolically repositioned her as the mother of a dead bandit, a social identity which can exacerbate personal/familial insecurity and constrain agentive capacity. Following Edina’s insistences upon Edilson’s decency, as she painstakingly folded her dead son’s yellow uniform, she reflected on why, after his death, she “did nothing”: I desired to go to the television station to get it off my chest, to speak [to make a public denunciation]... but I didn’t... I wanted to go to the newspaper, say that they killed my innocent son…it’s just that we have to entregar tudo nas mãos de Deus [surrender everything into God’s hands]. Also, my acquaintance died because of a haircut... the police came late at night and killed everyone in the house. I – here – don’t have any security. As if I’m going to speak out and go looking for a problem with the police. They’ll come and kill me as well. My acquaintance [from Calabetão] had his own razor to cut people’s hair. A guy got his hair cut but didn’t want to pay so he went… and complained [to the police] that the barber had threatened him with a revolver. The police came and abused the barber, they threw hot oil at him. It was on television... The police were expelled [lost their jobs] but then they returned on a night patrol, invaded the house, and killed everyone inside. Because of this I’m afraid to take measures and turn in the police who killed my young son. It came out on Bocão [popular news program] that my son wasn’t do mal [evil], he was gente fina [a great guy]. It came on Na Mira [another popular news program] that he was a good son, and he really was. I am certain that God will give me victory.109

impropriety. Arias and Rodrigues refer to this local understanding of security as a “myth” because, in actuality, uses of violence are strategic and tend to reflect the relative power – versus moral status – of the perpetrator and victim. 109 But, actually, Edina is not certain. Although Edina professes her faith in divine justice throughout our interview, it emerges that she is experiencing an intense crisis of faith. She speaks extensively about how she had to leave her

Edina’s extensive experience of police violence; her gendered obligations as a primary caregiver and breadwinner; her positional impotence understood in terms of lack of conditions; and the unravelling of a major orienting myth, have combined to deter her from denouncing those responsible for the death of her son. Edina does not know what the outcome of a complaint would be, though she has good reason to suspect that taking such measures could be risky. And, if she were to be killed or injured, what would become of her children and grandchildren?

Although Edina asserts that she “did nothing” in the wake of Edilson’s death, I have tried to grasp her tactical (in)action. Edina sought to endure this crisis in a manner that did not jeopardize the remainder of her family. She struggled to contain her urge to cause problems for those who have acted injuriously (i.e. Nalva’s family and the police) and thereby pre-empt further violence. I suggest that a similar form of tactical (in)action is at play in Edina’s decision not to fight Neginha’s most recent detention but, instead, to utilize it.

By emphasizing tactics of (in)action (i.e. endurance and containment) and exploring the prison as a technology of care (a relational rather than violent intervention), I complicate accounts of local responses to (in)security that privilege “paradoxical” support for police violence (Caldeira and Holston 1999; Caldeira 2001, 2002; Paes-Machado and Noronha 2002; Gay 2010). These accounts presume and seek to explain a contradiction: why do the main victims of police violence (the working classes) “support” extrajudicial police action? Across the literature on urban crime and policing in Brazil, it has been emphasized that poor people of all colors express acceptance of, and even enthusiasm for, police violence against suspects (e.g. Penglase 2014; Scheper-Hughes 2015) and, thus, are at least partly responsible for perpetuating their own violent subordination as it is structured by “disjunctive democracy” (Caldeira and Holston 1999; Holston 2008). The following concluding remarks made by Brazilian sociologists investigating the problem of police brutality in Salvador, Bahia are illustrative: Instead of analyzing police violence as something that comes from above or is externally imposed, against the will of the individuals and groups affected, we have preferred to discuss the possible conditions that make certain abuses plausible and acceptable for many, including the victims… For the residents of urban areas, where informal control

church following the death of her son (because she could not stand to be there with the couple who ordered the police to murder her son) and how, although she is experimenting with different churches, she is not a true believer (crente) because she feels rage and murmura (murmurs) too much.

mechanisms are not strong, delinquency is endemic, and effective policing nonexistent, violent methods conducted by police or by extermination groups are considered a type of protection against insecurity. Police abuses directed at the ‘marginals’ are supported, revealing a violence that is the very negation of law… (Paes-Machado and Noronha 2002, 74—emphasis my own).

My research, simply does not support this picture of paradoxical support for police violence among the poor. Edina, like most of the subjects of incarceration with whom I work, expresses incredible frustration with, and disapproval of, police brutality. Although subtle condemnation of police violence and deployment of understated ‘non- or anti-violent’ tactics may, in fact, coexist with “a pervasive cultural pattern that associates order and authority with the use of violence” (Caldeira and Holston 1999, 272-3), it is important to surface tendencies that could represent “the possibility of other possibilities” (Fontein 2014). Rather than attempt to explain why poor and working-class Brazilians ostensibly (and paradoxically) support police violence and then analyze this support as a major source of insecurity, I tentatively trace the conditions that make certain abuses implausible and unacceptable to many subjects of incarceration. To grasp this “otherwise” (Povinelli 2014) we must not reduce actors to automata or essentialized stereotypes of “the poor.” Emphasizing the heterogeneity of the category of the urban poor is crucial.110 Here, I focus on a significant swath of this population, of which Edina is emblematic, namely kin of criminals.111 Consubstantiality with criminals may operate as a condition of the implausibility

110 Ethnographers of urban Brazil often overlook social and economic differentiation between as well as within favelas (Hita and Gledhill 2009a). There is a good reason for this tendency. Favelas and their residents are generally burdened by ‘territorial stigmatization’ (Wacquant 2007) and discriminated against by more affluent city dwellers. In recent years, elites have ceased to associate favelas with the working-class poor; favela residents are increasingly perceived as marginais (marginals) — a term that has come to signify involvement in crime (Millar 2014, 41; Perlman 2010, 157; Roth-Gordon 2009, 58). Thus, ethnographers develop approaches to research and representation meant to counter these harmful processes of symbolic violence, criminalization, and stigmatization. Unfortunately, these well-meaning approaches can result in some erasure of complexity and contradiction. A relatively common research design/representational strategy involves focusing on those residents who do not directly participate in the drug trade (e.g. Penglase 2014). What emerges is a portrait of a community of decent hard-working people caught between drug traffickers and violent state agents. Writing of Caxambu, the favela at the center of his recent ethnography, Penglase observes that people “made a pervasive distinction between residents who were involved in drug dealing and the vast majority who were not” (2014, 88). In contrast, I try to consider the meanings and importance of this distinction without reifying it. Many, if not most, of my research participants are, in fact, involved, in some sense, in the world of crime. At the level of experience, the categories of criminal/marginal and citizen/worker are rarely mutually exclusive. The subject is conceived as in-formation and the outcome of this formation regarded as uncertain and contested. That is, instead of approaching “non-involvement” as a static characteristic and a starting point, I analyze it as a discursive claim and a contingent accomplishment. 111 In Caldeira's (1999, 2001, 2002) analyses of Brazilian violence, democracy, and socio-spatial transformations, economic crisis jeopardizes positions across the social spectrum, feeding a sense of uncertainty and disorder, and

96 and disapproval of certain abusive approaches to securitization.

Criminal Kin: Dangerous and Endangered Intimates

At the same moment that Edina was mourning Edilson’s unjust death, contending with Neginha’s imprisonment, and helping me with my research, her oldest son, Alan (an adult criminal who is both dangerous and endangered), went missing. Alan drinks heavily, uses drugs, and is involved in criminal enterprises. After two days of unanswered calls to Alan, still unable to locate her “problematic son,” Edina told me, I’m not going to lie. If [Alan] were also imprisoned I wouldn’t worry. Because, when he’s free... he only wants to be up to something. [In an unpleasant, aggressive voice she imitates her son:] ‘tou pra matar, pra morrer!’ [‘I’m for killing, for dying’]… If you [Hollis] were a lawyer I still wouldn’t get him out [of prison], no way.

The scope of this chapter does not permit further discussion of the unfolding of Alan’s disappearance. I only raise this issue to point out that Edina, deeply concerned about the fate of this consubstantial criminal, has entertained the idea that his imprisonment might be desirable. This shows that Edina’s opposition to police and trafficker violence extends beyond its application to “innocent” worker-victims like Edilson. She also disapproves of arbitrary lethal responses to “real” criminals like Alan and Neginha. Mutuality of being persists in the face of criminalization. However, criminalization can certainly act as a countervailing force to consideration and pose a threat to household security and social reproduction. Recall that consubstantiality with dangerous/endangered criminal kin represents an important yet understudied dimension of “dangerous intimacy.”

Among subjects of incarceration, the figure of the criminal often represents both an immediately dangerous “external” threat as well as an emergent autochthonous condition. The perception of these two, related, possibilities, and the tension between them, informs a plethora of quotidian

stimulating actors to elaborate prejudices and marks of distinction. “Talk of crime” emerges as an important mechanism of policing social boundaries and making sense of experience. A primary feature of this discourse is the category of the criminal which poses clear-cut distinctions between those who belong and those who do not – criminals are always portrayed as perverse, marginal, with no family ties. Although Caldeira observes that “talk of crime” oscillates between two registers (the categorical level of stereotypes and the level of specific accounts that frequently contradict/complicate categories), her analysis focuses on the categorical level, inviting questions regarding the relationship between the two levels – the folding together of crime, crisis, and kinship. In the context of crisis, what politics might emerge when criminals are recognized as kin?

97 decisions and acts occurring in and around Bahia’s prisons including, I would argue, the mobilization of the prison as a technology of care. Crime interventions other than extralegal police violence (and punitive containment) become thinkable when the criminal threat is practically understood as autochthonous or infinitely proximate. Frequently, among denizens of Salvador’s prison-neighbourhood nexus, the threatening Other is conhecido as well as sabido. These terms, which both translate to “known” in English, have distinct meanings in Portuguese. Conhecer means to know in the sense of being familiar or acquainted with a particular entity while saber means to know in the sense of comprehension. To know (conhecer) connotes intersubjectivity and relatedness whereas objectivity and objectification are more characteristic of the kind of knowledge (sabedoria) associated with saber (e.g. wisdom).

It is not my intention to fortify harmful stereotypes by portraying the urban poor as uniformly “involved” in the “world of crime.” However, analytic room must be allowed for the possibility of criminal involvement.112 Indeed, many of my research participants are seriously preoccupied with: a) how to prevent oneself and those one “considers” from becoming criminal; and b) how to manage or reverse processes of criminalization (of intimates) once these have begun. This major preoccupation coexists with, but may be analytically distinguished from, both “fear of crime” (qua fear of being victimized by external-criminals) as well as concern about being mistaken for, or unfairly treated as, “a marginal” by violent authorities (concerns about misrecognition) (Penglase 2014, 158-61).

In emic terms, resistance to actual “involvement” in the world of crime is expressed in talk of two paths: o caminho errado (the wrong path) and o caminho certo (the right path). These alternative paths anticipate disparate futures. The wrong path leads to “cadeia ou caixão” (jail or a coffin – see fig. 10) while the right path represents the cultivation of moral subjectivity and a route to improved personal/familial security and wellbeing. Importantly, Edina’s creative engagement of the prison as a technology of care registers a parsing of possible outcomes of the wrong path. That is, cadeia is vastly preferable to caixão precisely because carceral confinement affords the possibility that consubstantial criminals might, one day, take the right path.

112 The nature of my research design (as outlined in the introduction to this dissertation) has meant that most of my study participants are either engaged in criminalized activities or are intimately connected to criminals. I cannot ignore the struggles and strivings of those for whom criminality is a deeply personal challenge or possibility.

Criminal kin are not necessarily regarded as inveterate criminals by their intimates. Rather, subjects of incarceration often explain criminality as the outcome of a relational process which may be subverted. Unfortunately, the relational and processual emic theory of criminal becoming that underlies the perceived mutability of criminal status is also one key dimension of the threat thought to be posed by criminal kin to the household and configuration of houses. Criminal kin threaten to contaminate (or criminalize) those people they are closest to. And, the danger presented by a spreading stain of criminalization is enormous. One of the most pressing challenges confronted by research participants is the problem of how to care for criminalized kin while striving to sustain a good family into the future. The prison, qua technology of care, presents one possible solution to this high-stakes puzzle.

Cadeia as technology of care

It has been established that, for much of her life, Edina has managed to “earn” in and through the prison. In moments of extreme deprivation and uncertainty, when life-sustaining ties have been strained or severed, Edina has engaged in – securitizing, sustaining – practices of imprisonment. But, the prison does not simply enable subsistence; nor is this institution best understood as an always-already present safety net. Certainly, this is not how imprisonment is experienced by research participants like Edina. Rather, subjects of incarceration who manage to derive modest benefits from the prison must actively and creatively weave a carceral safety net from a tangle of thin and frayed threads; they must learn to cast this net in order to capture resources and “social- capitalize” on the coercive capture of dangerous/endangered criminal kin.

In the final section of this chapter, I explore the prison as a technology of care. I begin by fleshing out the details of Edina’s present situation that have not yet been established in previous sections. Particularly, I attend to one of Edina’s greatest accomplishments – her casa própria (own house).113 After more than four decades, Edina has finally managed to produce a material legacy, a manifestation of her ceaseless labour that cannot be ignored. Her tactical approach has, eventually, yielded more than a temporary space of autonomy. Edina has now achieved the status of dona da casa (lit. female owner of the house). Her house represents the culmination of an

113 I expand on the topic of houses and gendered personhood in chapter 4.

99 ethical project and the foundation of ongoing ethical endeavours. Yet, these gains are still quite fragile, threatened by forces largely beyond Edina’s control and by consubstantial criminals – one vector of insecurity over which Edina may be able to exert at least some influence.

In a previous section, we learned of the abuse Edina endured during her twelve-year-long marriage. Edina left the home of her abusive ex-brother-in-law and ended her marriage when she heard of a land invasion occurring on the margins of Calabetão. In my terms, this move may be conceptualized as a form of relational intervention – namely, a spatial-relational fix. When Edina “invaded” the land, the area where her house now stands “was mata pura” (pure bush). Indeed, this area feels considerably less urbanized than the neighbourhood proper. Houses are single story dwellings, a mixture of shanties and brick buildings. Most have an unfinished under- renovation appearance. The forest is close, throwing shadows over unpaved roads and dusty quintals (yards).

Over the years, since clearing and claiming a small plot of land, little by little and with a great deal of sacrifice and support from her earning children (including Edilson and Alan), Edina has built her house. She was able to access a windfall of building materials (and construction labour) through a now-ended romantic relationship that commenced around the time she joined the Calabetão invasão (shantytown). This romantic union also begot Edina’s two youngest children. Although this man ultimately abandoned Edina (and the children of their union), Edina has managed to retain the house he helped her construct. With a modest sense of pride, Edina describes her casa própria: It was a barraco (hut, shanty) made of paper and plastic. There was a project to fix the road [occurring just outside of the invasão] and I started to like one of the workers. He started to help me with materials for the house. He helped me with everything. Then he went elsewhere for work and married another woman. The house is feinha [ugly modified by the diminutive] but it’s mine. I don’t pay rent. I don’t pay electricity – it’s de gato (pirated). I don’t have any way to pay so I installed gato. The water is also de gato. I don’t have a [working] refrigerator...

Although Edina has managed to secure housing, which is a major accomplishment, she still faces a number of challenges and uncertainties. Currently, two issues in particular are causing her extreme anxiety: the death of Edilson and the unaccounted-for absence of her son Alan (who she repeatedly refers to as “the problematic one”). In contrast, as mentioned at the outset of this chapter, Neginha’s imprisonment does not bother Edina. In fact, Neginha’s carceral confinement

100 diminishes Edina’s worry and constitutes a rather unexpected source of hope.

This is the fourth time Neginha has been imprisoned. In the past, prior to Edilson’s death, Edina expended great effort and scarce resources to secure Neginha’s release. My oldest son [Alan] gave me a big television on Mother’s Day. I had to give it to a lawyer to get Neginha out [of prison the first time]. Then she ended up in prison again – she had stolen again. I gave R$ 20, R$ 100, R$ 30, R$ 40 to the lawyer and got her out again and again. But, it looks as if she likes it in there [prison]; she does the same thing again and again. If she didn’t like it, it only would have been the one time – so this time I’ll leave her there.

As Edina puts it, “this time” she has stopped fighting to bring her daughter home. While Edina may have stopped resisting Neginha’s imprisonment, it would be erroneous to presume that she has abandoned her daughter as a lost cause. Edina comes to value Neginha’s imprisonment, in part, because it keeps her daughter out of the hazardous and immoral domain of the street. But, Neginha’s imprisonment also represents an opportunity for longer-lasting change. The separation and containment entailed by imprisonment can be used by concerned kin to perform a type of relational intervention that I have termed “carceral habilitation.”

Relational Intervention (2): Carceral Habilitation

Whereas scholars studying violence in contemporary Brazil often focus on ostensible (and paradoxical) support for brutal responses to crime and disorder, Edina’s creative deployment of the prison brings an alternative non- or anti-violent response to insecurity into focus. Like tactics of containment and endurance, relational intervention centers on the perpetuation of familial life without recourse to lethality.

To review, relational intervention involves reworking a field of relations to protect and/or improve intimates. Above, I identified one permutation of this tactic — the spatial-relational fix — that hinges on the relocation of self or others to a new social context (i.e. a different neighbourhood, part of the city, region, or state). Such displacements tend to be analyzed in terms of economic migration. And, certainly, the quest for wages contributes to the spatial trajectories of subjects of incarceration. However, if we look more closely at specific cases of relocation and consider these in light of social practices that tend to be analyzed separately, such as child circulation (Fonseca 1986, 2006), the tremendous growth of evangelical churches in

101

Brazil (Goldstein 2003; Chestnut 1997; Selka 2005, 2007; Burdick 1998), and patronage (Collins 2008; Ansell 2015) we may begin to see them as instances of a broader tactic.

Reworking relatedness entails a dual process of separation and approximation or disintegration and integration. Avoiding or altogether abandoning certain social contexts removes or distances a person from one web of relations and implants them in another. According to indigenous views of personhood and agency, relational extrication/immersion alters the arrangement of interpersonal influences and, thus, has the power to transform the conduct and character of deficient subjects.

The idea that shifting social context can transform subjects and not simply alter the situations they find themselves in is crucial. Certainly, some relational interventions need not work at this deeper level to be effective. For example, I observed numerous spatial-relational fixes that involved removing a person from an immediate danger posed by an unpaid debt, a spurned lover, a rixa (feud), a warrant, alemães (enemies) etc. Through the creation of distance, minimization of opportunity, and the passing of time, threats may be mitigated without transforming the person/group served by the intervention. However, in a great many cases, there is hope that relational interventions will yield deeper, longer-lasting results with the potential to improve particular selves as well as the moral status and future prospects of whole families. This function of changes in social geography is particularly well documented in the case of child circulation (Leinaweaver 2007). And, it is in this sense that relational interventions may be conceptualized as ethical projects in Das’ sense of the term (2012).

The transformative capacity of relational interventions presupposes a relational/processual emic theory of (de)moralization. This theory underlies the important local perspective on criminality outlined above whereby criminalization is caused, at least in part, by relationships with criminals. In Bahia’s prison-neighbourhood nexus, friendships, romances, and closeness with criminals are regularly cited to explain why a particular person has taken “the wrong path.” Consider Edina’s remarks about Neginha: Neginha goes to houses where she shouldn’t go, houses where gente [folks] sell porcaria, houses that have a bunch of women thieves who don’t like to work – they like to go to stores and fill their bags without paying. Neginha caí presa [lit. fell prisoner] because of this, because quem esta no meio de quem que não presta não presta também [those who are in the middle of those who are of no use are also of no use].

102

Neginha’s imprisonment has the potential to facilitate the cultivation of moral subjectivity insofar as it separates her from deviant, unruly ‘friends’ and renders her receptive to approximation by Edina, who suffers the indignities of visitation well. During bi-weekly visits, mother and daughter spend time together talking, eating, working, and extending small acts of care. This conviviality – and the “closer co-operation” underlying Edina and Neginha’s Tupperware and Avon enterprises – is a precondition of consideration, a cornerstone of the perseverance and wellbeing of the household over time. Through the carceral technology of care, Edina strives to cultivate Neginha’s moral subjectivity and shore up the security and futurity of their shared family.

I conclude this section by quoting Edina at length, allowing the connections she draws and the contradictions she expresses to remain intact and unresolved. The following excerpts of our interview were voiced moments after Edina declared that she prefers Neginha in prison. Her remarks speak to the essential link between consideration and household reproduction and register Edina’s frustration and uncertainty about her ambivalent familial life. As Edina expressed these thoughts, she was tearful and, at times, distraught. I repeatedly offered to terminate the interview but she insisted we go on. From the bottom of my heart – if I am lying may God punish me – If I were to begin my life today I wouldn’t want any children. I would not want children because they don’t obey, they don’t respect; because I have suffered. We fight to raise our children. I am 51 years old and they are already raised – one is 20, another is 28, another is 30. I order them to work: ‘You want money? You really like money? Go work!’ I fought and I fought correndo atrás [running around, going after things] to provide for them. I take in laundry to earn R$ 5, R$ 10... [Edina is overwrought; for a moment, I cannot understand her].

In the beginning, I didn’t even go to visit Neginha [in prison]. After three or four months, I went. But, I earn – like I showed you – R$ 5-10, R$ 15- 20, R$ 20-25. I bring products for her to re-sell [inside the prison]. This money that she gives me is a help. But, I’m still enraged that she prefers to stay there than [here] at home.

I don’t bring [Neginha’s] sons [that Edina is caring for] to visit her. I’ve never brought them. She is a mother who, outside [of prison] doesn’t care for her children. If she made an effort I would make it happen, get all the documents in order. I’ve taken care of the boys since before Neginha was in prison. She has a baby and leaves it here while it’s still wet. She heads for the street. She does not have love for her children [Edina’s grandsons are present throughout our interview]. She has some other children that

103

she will bring here for me to raise. I’ll raise them in the way and according to the conditions that I can manage.

My life is a sacrifice. It’s very difficult but, even so, esta dando pra viver [it’s worth living] because people seek to help me. They keep their cans and bottles [to give me]. I go out at night with my grandsons hunting [recyclables] around here. I’m able to raise my children. My son that the police killed helped me but the police got him and killed him so I don’t have a way of getting money any longer... I have a son de menor [under 18] who earns a minimum wage. At times he gives me R$ 200, at times R$ 100 – it’s not every day, it’s like monthly... at times it’s not even monthly.

I used to receive “bolsa escola” [government social transfers currently titled ‘bolsa família’] but my card was blocked because they keep track of the children’s school attendance. My grandson – who Neginha registered at the prison – was registered with the incorrect age. He’s 8 years old but his identification says that he’s 10. He’s not in school because of this confusion. I’m trying to see if I can repair his identification so that I can [access] this money properly – because it’s the only money that helps me out.

Note how the prison continues to have negative connotations. Edina is enraged by her daughter’s “preference” for the prison over home; a paperwork error by prison social workers has prevented a child from attending school and blocked Edina’s access to CCT payments. Even as Edina manages to weave a carceral safety net, she remains largely overwhelmed by other challenges (viz. economic insecurity and extreme yet warranted concern for her children and grandchildren). Although Edina is willing to experiment with the prison as a means to morally remake Neginha so that her eldest daughter might one day become a contributing member of the household, this result is far from guaranteed. Yet, minimally, the prison is serving as a refuge, protecting Neginha from the perils of the street and alleviating Edina’s well-founded anxieties. As such, Neginha’s preventative detention represents a favourable sort of indeterminacy. Perhaps Neginha will live long enough that appropriate levels of consideration for her mother, her children, and other relatives might be drawn out. The possibility is retained as long as Neginha is in a cadeia (prison) and not a caixão (coffin).

104

Conclusion: Ambivalent Outcomes of Social Reproduction

To the extent that Edina’s household is successfully reproduced in and through the prison, what knowledge is transmitted? What values, practices, and affects are instilled within and across generations?

One corollary of rising rates of incarceration is the concentration of experiences and effects of imprisonment among poor, racialized sectors of the population (Garland 2001a; Wacquant 2000, 2001, 2010a, 2010b). Among young black males (and their families) in large U.S. urban centers, “imprisonment has become normalized” in the sense that “[i]t has come to be a regular, predictable part of experience, rather than a rare and infrequent event” (Garland 2001a, 6). This “normalization” has also been documented in Portugal where the peculiar form of the drug economy and mode of its repression led to the prison becoming “a reality embodied in the daily life” of ill-reputed neighborhoods, “where it has become an ordinary element of many biographies, a banal destiny” (Cunha 2008, 333).

Edina’s story exemplifies that imprisonment – like extralegal police violence – is a penal institution that structures the everyday lives of those who inhabit Salvador’s urban periphery, a group that is disproportionately criminalized and penalized. Yet, like Neginha’s post-release path, the cumulative result of this structuring is still undetermined. What we know, is that subjects of incarceration are also subjects “of action through which the real is transformed” (Foucault 1991, 84). At present, however, these subjects, are coming into collision (e.g. Edina and Nalva); running into dead-ends, problems and impossibilities; and enacting connected but disparate tactics instead of a shared strategy (de Certeau 1984). While critique continues to play out in the real (Foucault 1991, 85) it is important to attend to the specificity of formative carceral experiences rather than make assumptions based on the logic of currently dominant carceral discourses. As a growing share of this population comes to identify with/as dangerous/endangered criminals, and congregate in the interstices of the prison-neighbourhood nexus (e.g. the group of Feminina visitors who mourned the deaths of their sons), ephemeral tactics may congeal into counterhegemonic discourses and condition a strategic response to life’s shared obstacles. Thus, my analysis of carceral normalization tracks its unfolding within a particular (though not exceptional) life. Now, to conclude this chapter, I turn to a final vignette which underlines the processual, indeterminate, and ambivalent character of both Edina’s

105 familial life story and the carceral normalization of which it is a part. The scene, which transpires in Feminina’s visitor waiting area – also foreshadows my subsequent analysis of women who meet and marry imprisoned men (see chapter 4).

Today, Edina is accompanied by her 16-year-old daughter, Eliane. Eliane is tall, shapely, neatly dressed, and meticulously groomed – “a very pretty neginha,” her mother remarks. As the pair waits to be admitted to the prison, a young man wearing a paint-spattered blue work uniform passes by, stealing a glance at Eliane. Moments later he reappears and approaches us, now proffering a bible with an ornately carved and painted wooden cover. He passes the book to Eliane who receives it without hesitation. She runs her fingers appreciatively over the handiwork before returning it.

Although only a few words are exchanged before the man departs, much is communicated: 1) this man is interested in Eliane; 2) he is not only dressed as a worker, he is clearly a talented craftsman; 3) he identifies as fiel (a faithful Christian). What Eliane doesn’t initially realize is that this man is also a prisoner. When this fact registers, she asks why he is outside. I explain the system of Fardos Azuis (see the introduction to this dissertation) and Edina nods knowingly in agreement, adding: “it means he has good behavior.”

A kindly guard steps out of the reception area to smoke a cigarette. She asks why Eliane is not in school today, a Wednesday. Edina explains that Eliane attends school at night because “she lost three years.” Eliane is in the 4th grade. Whereas Edina is pleased that Eliane is studying “pra ser alguem melhorzinha e nunca cai nesta vida” (“to be someone a little better and never fall into this life”) the guard expresses concern, asking how Eliane fell so far behind. Edina’s initial response is oblique: “Falar é facil, não é Dona Iris?” (“Talk is easy, isn’t it Dona Iris”). Then Edina elaborates, explaining how she had struggled to “tirar identidade” (obtain an identity document), a requirement of school enrollment. Edina says that it would have cost R$ 22 to obtain the document and she simply didn’t have the “conditions.”114 In addition to this obstacle, Edina identifies another factor underlying Eliane’s years-long absence from school: “She didn’t

114 Although there are laws and policies in place to ensure that all citizens are able to obtain identity cards, accomplishing this task nonetheless requires outputs of already-scarce energy, time, and money (e.g. bus fare and cost of photographs).

106 go because she didn’t have ID and she only had a small notebook. She was ashamed — the other students would mock and tease her. Now she has a beautiful notebook!”115

The guard finishes her cigarette and I continue to chat with Edina and Eliane as they await processing. Echoing a sentiment that I have heard her mother express, Eliane announces that she doesn’t plan on having any children of her own; she hopes to become a dentist or a professional singer. She already sings evangelical music which she prefers to Catholic and Jehovah Witness music (“too boring!”) as well as pagode (local pop music – see chapter 5). According to Eliane, “Pagode é tudo baixaria, the lyrics are all about sex.” Eliane attends an Assembleia church, “only on Sundays,” because of her evening school commitments.

By the time that Edina and Eliane’s number is finally called by an on-duty guard, Eliane is having second thoughts about entering the prison. She does not want to endure revista íntima, even the less-invasive version that is required of minors, who are strip-searched in the presence of their parent. Eliane raises the hem of her denim skirt to reveal a pair of shorts. She says: “I even shower in my underwear. I don't want to show myself.” Edina beseeches the guards to allow her daughter to enter without being searched: “My daughter is a virgin...” Eventually, a compromise is struck and Eliane is permitted to come in only as far as the gated entrance to the patio/cell-block area. From this supervised location, she can speak to her older sister, through bars, for a few minutes.

For Eliane, imprisonment is not yet entirely ‘normal;’ she is certainly not accustomed to visiting prisons. Yet, this normalization process is underway and furthered during the quasi-visit I have just described. Chatting with a charming crente convict and undertaking her initiation to visitation with her practiced mother helps to “dispel the sense of apprehension inherent to an unfamiliar institution” (Cunha 2008, 332) and nourish receptiveness to the radical – or at least ambivalent – opportunities prisons and prisoners might represent. Although the prison indubitably harms, subjects of incarceration have reason to imagine the separation and constraint

115 Indeed, the expense of school uniforms and supplies was a common theme of conversation among research participants. Children and youth expressed desire for nice, new items or embarrassment over what they had; a mother stood over her daughter’s shoulder barking instructions as the daughter requested that her father (separated from her mother) cover these costs; families discussed strategies for who to talk to about second-hand uniforms or how to scrape together funds at the beginning of the school year.

107 it effects might be productively endured, contained, and marshalled as a relational intervention.

In the Brazilian context, at least, we cannot presume punitive confinement is impoverishing, criminogentic, stigmatizing, or a catalyst of fragmentation (of families, classes, etc.). These processes must be investigated, as I do throughout this dissertation. In the next chapter, I take the reader into two of the prisons where I conduct research: PLB and Feminina. This comparison reveals that neighbouring prisons differ significantly, for example, in terms of their relative degrees of permeability as well as the atomization of their populations. Why is Feminina, in many respects, more a “world apart” than PLB? How do regimes of visitation/imprisonment in the Mata Escura penal compound reflect, reinforce, and produce ideas about gender? How are these ideas imbricated with presas’ atomization?

108

Chapter 2 The Commission116 and its Present Absence: Gendered Regimes of Imprisonment/Visitation in the Mata Escura Compound Introduction

“Pessoal de Feminina sempre são desfavoricida.”117 I jotted this quotation down in my notebook when I heard it voiced, outside of the penal compound, by a female Feminina visitor. The woman was expressing the idea that people affiliated with the women’s prison—presas and their visitors—have it worse than male prisoners and their visitors. Her observation, which is supported by my research, contradicts a stereotype common in North America as well as Brazil, namely—that women receive more lenient treatment than men within the criminal justice system.118 I took note of this comment precisely because I found it both unusual and accurate. Perhaps this sentiment would not have bubbled up into speech at all were it not for the exceptional circumstances of the day.

The visitor’s critical insight was articulated during a compound-wide strike by unionized guards. Significantly, this day-long labour stoppage was carried out on a Wednesday.119 The penal compound’s eight prisons each have their own unique visitation schedules (see table 2). Feminina visits occur Wednesdays and Saturdays 9-11:30 am. Only one of the compound’s

116 Lourenço and Almeida argue that it is valid and productive to import and employ the conceptual term “prison gang” when describing and analyzing the Brazilian situation (2013, 2-3). According to Lourenço and Almeida, the term clearly designates a collectivity of people organized in the prison. For the purposes of this dissertation, however, I employ the term “commission” in an attempt to avoid replicating and reinforcing dominant discourses of problematization that contribute to the criminalization, marginalization, and punitive containment of so many people. “Commission” is the indigenous term I heard used most by research participants. However, because guards are more likely than visitors or prisoners to speak directly about the presence of such groups due to a prevailing “law of silence” among those most affected by these groups (viz. prisoners and their visitors), the term “commission” privileges state agents’ naming practices. Bahia’s first ‘prison-based gang’ was initially identified by guards as the “Comissão da Paz” (commission of peace). Over time, however, it seems that prisoners replaced the term “commission” with “command,” connoting a more powerful and antagonistic entity and conjuring up the spectre of notorious prison-based ‘gangs’ in the South of the country (e.g. São Paulo’s Primeiro Comando da Capital – PCC – and Rio de Janeiro’s Comando Vermelho) (Lourenço and Almeida 2013). 117 Translation: “People of Feminina are always disadvantaged [vis-à-vis people associated with the compound’s prisons for men].” 118 This mythical yet enduring vision—that criminal women are less likely to be arrested and to receive harsh punishments—has been labeled “chivalry theory” by criminologists. 119 http://g1.globo.com/bahia/noticia/2011/10/agentes-penitenciarios-fazem-manifestacao-em-salvador.html

109 men’s prisons, Presídio de Salvado (Anexo), shares Wednesday as a visitation day. Not incidentally, Anexo (originally built as a stand-alone wing of a larger prison but now separately administered) confines a relatively low number of prisoners (approx. 300) compared to the compound’s other men’s prisons. Whatever motivated guards to mount their strike on a Wednesday, pessoal de Feminina perceived this as a particularly unfair choice. Their visit scheduled for the following Wednesday had already been cancelled because of a public holiday and they felt disproportionately burdened by these interruptions.

Guards timed their mobilization to coincide with the early-morning (7 am) arrival of visitors outside the compound. Before visitors enter and make their way to specific prisons, they must first pass through an initial checkpoint at the main gate (see Introduction). The strike shut this checkpoint down, spawning a growing mass of perturbed visitors. As successive city buses arrived, and passengers weighed down with bags of goods disembarked, the crowd – mainly composed of poor, racialized women – spilled off the curb, seeping onto Avenida Cardeal Brandão Villela, a major thoroughfare. Members of the guards’ union, the vast majority of whom are men, counted on this developing scene to make the value of their work visible. Stalled visitors were staged as conspicuous signs of dysfunction; their disorderly accumulation attracted the media and featured prominently in coverage of the event. Consider the following remarks made by a guard with a megaphone: The system is functioning precariously. The government creates propaganda that Pacto Pela Vida [the state-wide public security plan] is working but the system is chaotic!... This is a 24-hour mobilization. We have to ask for the forgiveness of family members but the prison managers should have called you to let you know.

Of course, visitors know this is an absurd suggestion. It is unfathomable that staff would have called to notify them.

As the strike continues, a number of familiar Feminina visitors congregate around me, looking for answers. Will today’s visit eventually proceed? Will it be rescheduled? Lindenalva declares: “I have to enter. My sister called. She needs clothes. She’s leaving today.” Paulina arrives with her two pre-school-aged grandchildren in tow; she has been caring for them while her daughter – their mother – is imprisoned (Paulina also has a son imprisoned elsewhere in the compound). Paulina’s wiry brown calf is wrapped with gauze where she had a parasite surgically removed. She is especially anxious about today’s visit because her hospitalization caused her to miss the

110 last three. Making it here today – especially with her grandchildren in tow – was no easy feat. Alone, Paulina is able to walk to/from her invasão120 in about 45 minutes. Accompanied by her grandchildren, however, she must borrow a disabled friend’s bus pass. Although children ride for free, without this pass, she can’t afford the cost of her own return bus fare.

At shortly after 8 am, a car driven by an employee of the compound pulls up to the complex. Military police assigned to control the compound’s perimeter swing open a gate, allowing the vehicle to pass. Almost imperceptibly at first, the crowd around me stirs. Then, a steady stream of visitors begins to flow into the compound. Paulina picks up her youngest grandchild and takes the other by the hand. Familiar with the social script of “invasion,” carried along semi- anonymously in the crowd, buoyed by a sense of entitlement and indignation, visitors like Paulina breach the perimeter and descend towards Feminina and Anexo (fig. 12). Impulsively, I join them.

Figure 12. Visitors “invade" the penal compound during guards' strike

When we arrive at Feminina, visitors request entry: “This wasn't announced.” “We shouldn't lose our day, it’s a lack of respect.” “Next Wednesday’s visit is already cancelled because of the Holiday…” The head of security shakes her head as she denies their appeal – “If we let you enter here, there will be an uprising down there [she gestures toward Anexo].”121 The visitor next to

120 Pão de Lima 121 The rationale espoused by Feminina’s head of security is reminiscent of a practical understanding observed in 19th century U.S. penality. In the 1840s, Eliza Farnham, the matron of the women’s unit located in the Sing Sing

111 me sighs with disgust as she sums up the situation: “Presos cobram but here at Feminina no.” The verb “cobrar” means to “exact a toll.” This visitor is asserting that male prisoners, unlike inmates of Feminina, are willing and able to forcibly respond if provoked.

Without the benefit of such ‘collective representation,’ yet unwilling to accept defeat, visitors switch from making claims on the basis of collective rights to making personalistic pleas. An aggregate of supplicant clients appears, appealing to the moral decency of a familiar patron: “Dona Nede, por favor, pelo amor de Deus, não tem condicões…” (…please, for the love of God, I lack conditions). The idiom of conditions (Chapter 1) is often used in conjunction with assertions of respectability to invite a charitable response from a social superior122. Interestingly, at this juncture, at least one woman (re-)recognizes the common predicament she shares with her fellow visitors and mobilizes individual tactics on behalf of the group. She beseeches the head of security to minimally permit visitors to deliver their goods, explaining that “we” sofredoras123 have invested scarce resources in these provisions and made sacrifices to care for imprisoned intimates. The head of security, in response to visitors’ rather exceptional expression of a

male penitentiary, inaugurated a radically experimental regime. Farnham “instituted personal tuition, exhorted staff not to rely on punishment, and abolished the rule of silence” (Zedner 1995, 302). Under her leadership, female prisoners enjoyed better conditions than those experienced by male prisoners of Sing Sing. However, in response to fears that Farnham's reforms would produce discontent among male prisoners, she was obliged to resign and the brief interlude of “radical experimentation” gave way to declining conditions of imprisonment characterized by increasing overcrowding (Zedner 1995, 302). 122 At the prison compound, it is not uncommon for semi-secretive arrangements to be made between visitors and guards. At Feminina, in particular, staff-prison/visitor interactions tend to be guided more by discretion than direitos (rights). On numerous occasions, I witnessed guards grant requests upon hearing visitors’ individualized accounts of suffering, escassez (insufficient access to essential resources) and moral “deservingness.” 123 See Chapter 1 and Mayblin’s (2010) analysis of the socially productive discourse of suffering in the Brazilian Northeast.

112 collective, moral identity (we sofredoras), glibly retorts: “the cheese will keep if you refrigerate it!” Alas, many Feminina visitors are too poor to own refrigerators.

Visitors – exhibiting a degree of solidarity I had rarely witnessed – maintain their vigil outside of Feminina for approximately an hour, defying orders to depart. Eventually, the director of Feminina emerges to address the crowd. Her tone is conciliatory but her assurances are noncommittal: “I will do what I can to arrange a make-up visit later this week…” Gradually, visitors gather their undelivered packages and disperse (fig. 13). Unsurprisingly, no subsequent make-up visit was arranged.

Figure 13. Women, weighed down with the burden of undelivered goods, depart the compound after their visit was cancelled.

In addition to documenting the formulation of a critical insight – namely, that pessoal de Feminina are subjected to harsher treatment than the people of other (men’s) prisons in the compound – the scene of the strike highlights two missing carceral forms: a singular visit and a solidaristic lobby of female prisoners. Insofar as these foreclosed forms were, on some level, anticipated they represent present-absences.

In contemporary Brazil, the carceral forms of prison visit and commission (a solidaristic organization of prisoners capable of advocating on behalf of the collective interests of inmates/visitors) are taken-for-granted features of the landscape that play a crucial role in structuring sociality within the prison-neighbourhood nexus. Scheduled visits are expected to occur and prisoners are expected to organize themselves, forming a relatively united and powerful front contra their captors. Yet, my comparative research reveals these forms to be unevenly distributed and inconsistently present. While commissions operate out of most of the compound’s prisons, one is notably absent from Feminina. Nonetheless, the ‘normalization’ of

113 this form in the compound and throughout Brazil means that its non-appearance at Feminina is consequentially registered as an abnormal deficiency.

The issue of prisoner solidarity has received ample attention in the Brazilian context (Biondi 2010; Leeds 1996; Darke 2013a, 2013b), largely because of the perceived social problem of commissions, commandos (commandos) or “prison-based gangs.” However, the phenomenon of prisoner atomization – the virtual absence of an “inmate code” and a concomitant solidaristic prisoner “social system” (Sykes and Messinger 1960) – has received little to no attention.124 I address this gap in the literature (as well as the androcentrism and gender-blindness of extant prison scholarship on prison-based gangs) by drawing selectively on findings pertaining to presos’ experiences not to highlight what presas ‘lack,’ but to reveal, as masculinized, the unmarked norm against which presas are measured.125 Instead of making the masculinized commission my object of inquiry,126 I mobilize data on this topic to grasp conditions and implications of Feminina’s relative atomization without recourse to sex/gender essentialism. What emerges is a picture of a gendered and exceptionally harsh regime of imprisonment/visitation at Feminina. Ultimately, experiences of this regime – coloured by shared assumptions about what is normal and natural – both register and perpetuate atomization at the same time as they reflect, reinforce, and produce ideas about gender, specifically the notion that Brazilian women must be controlled.

I use the term “regime of imprisonment/visitation” to refer to the organization of structures and practices of punishment and control. I do not limit my investigation to officially mandated structures and practices; I also attend to ‘unintended’ elements which mediate experiences of incarceration. For example, I consider: decaying infrastructure and (un)available organizational

124 In North America and Western Europe, scholars have investigated the precarious status of the “society of captives” (Sykes 1971 [1958]) in the era of hyperincarceration (Simon 2000) and the era of hard drugs (Crewe 2005). 125 I am building on a tradition of comparison within the literature on women’s prisons. Early scholars (i.e. Giallombardo 1966 and Heffernan 1972) considered sex role socialization and different styles of coping in their studies of the “pains of imprisonment” (Sykes 1958). And, as McCorkel observes, “[l]ater studies contrasted resources, deprivations, and programming in men’s and women’s prisons” (2003, 42). These comparisons have yielded important critiques of conditions of confinement in women’s prisons. 126 The compound’s commissions (or “prison-based gangs”) have been analyzed elsewhere (e.g. Lourenço and Almeida 2013).

114 resources; national and international laws/guidelines that frame the administration of Bahian state prisons; commissions and “inmate governance” (the enlistment of prisoners in the oversight and administration of fellow prisoners – Darke 2013b); actual surveillance and visitation routines; as well as written and unwritten intra-institutional systems of rules, privileges, and punishments.

Officially, there is only one regime of imprisonment in Bahia – prison design, rational, and policy is formally generic (gender-neutral).127 That is, although women are confined separately from men, women’s prisons are not architecturally distinct and presas’ carceral trajectories are officially governed by the same set of laws, policies, objectives, and regulations as presos’. In fact, during the course of my fieldwork, presas were incarcerated in the former, unmodified site of a men’s prison. Brazil’s formally generic approach to imprisonment contrasts with explicitly woman-centered (Hannah-Moffat 2000) and gender-responsive models (Hannah-Moffat 2010).

Historically, the U.S. women’s reformatory movement (1860-1935 – see Rafter 1990; Freedman 1981), represented a departure from the ostensibly generic treatment of male and female prisoners.128 In terms of architecture and institutional authority, cottage-style reformatories were modeled on domestic environments, headed by “motherly” middle-class role models, and were not surrounded by walls. This reflected “their founders’ belief that women, because more tractable, required fewer constraints than men” (Rafter 1990, xxvii-xxviii). In terms of their guiding philosophy of reform, reformatories sought to impart sexual restraint and domesticity. The regime “was designed to induce a childlike submissiveness” (Rafter 1990, xxviii) and prepare “women to lead the ‘true good’ womanly life” (1990, 27). Upon release, paroled prisoners were to be placed as domestic servants in respectable homes.129

127 To at least some extent, the legally-mandated presence of a creche in women’s prisons (to accommodate the presence of infants 0-6 months of age) seems to represent an exception to this trend. However, it should be noted that, for the duration of my fieldwork (18 months), despite the presence of infants within the prison, there was no operative creche/berçário at Feminina. I discuss this matter in more detail in chapter 3. 128 For a discussion of historical trends in the imprisonment of women, See Zendner (1995) on Britain and Bosworth (2000) on France. 129 Historical studies of women’s imprisonment in Britain (Zedner 1995) and France (Bosworth 2000) reveal that these regimes were also organized around expectations of “true” womanhood and restoring criminal women to respectability – to their “proper” (or “natural”) subordinate place in society – even in contexts where prison structure was heavily constrained by existing architecture (Zedner 1995, 304).

115

In the contemporary period, in Britain (Heidensohn and Silvestri 2012, 351) and Canada (Hannah-Moffat 1995, 2000, 2010), there has been a significant shift towards developing a more gender-specific and responsive women’s prison system. Thus, Brazil’s formally gender-neutral approach to punishment more closely resembles the United States’ embrace, since the late 1970s, of the parity model of penality. In the name of ‘equal justice,’ this model emphasizes treating women offenders as if they were men, particularly when the outcome is punitive (Bloom and Chesney-Lind 2000). Importantly, however, the implementation of seemingly gender-neutral penal regimes does not mean that women’s prisons have ceased to operate as gendered organizations (Acker 1990; McCorkel 2003; Gartner and Kruttschnitt 2004; Owen 1998). Likewise, although Bahian prisons masquerade, in many respects, as gender neutral organizations, it will be shown that regimes of imprisonment/visitation within the Mata Escura Penal Compound are, in fact, gendered and do contribute to the perpetuation of unequal gender relations here and throughout Brazil.

Gendered Regimes of Visitation Bio-Sexual Needs, Commissions, and the Quantity of Visitation

The opening vignette featured a pre-empted visit suggestive of the devaluation of Feminina visitors’ labour. Beyond this ‘exceptional’ lost visit, Feminina’s ordinary visitation schedule is notably circumscribed vis-à-vis all other prisons in the compound (see table 2). As table 2 shows, presas are eligible to receive up to 5 hours of visitation per week compared to an approximate average of 16 hours per week for presos. In particular, note the extreme disparity in the organization of visitation at PLB and Feminina, the two prisons where I have conducted extensive fieldwork. By withdrawing their labour on Wednesday, guards significantly reduced presas’ already-limited opportunity to receive visitors.

116

Table 2: Visitation Schedules at the Mata Escura Penal Complex Hours # Prison Name Visitation Schedule per Week Presídio de Salvador 1a Thursday & Sunday (08:00 to 15:00) 14 hrs. (Principal) Presídio de Salvador 1b Wednesday & Saturday (08:00 to 15:00) 14 hrs. (Anexo) 2 PLB Friday*, Saturday & Sunday (8:30-16:30) 24 hrs. Unidade Especial 3 Monday & Tuesday ? Disciplinar Casa do Albergado e 5 Saturday & Sunday (13:00 to 17:00)** 8 hrs. Egressos Centro de 6 Thursday & Sunday (8:30 to 15:00) 13 hrs. Observação Penal 7 Cadeia Pública ? ? 8 FEMININA Wednesday & Saturday (09:00 to 11:30) 5 hrs. *Friday is restricted to “intimate visits” by esposas e Companheiras (wives and girlfriends) **This is an open-regime prison, meaning that prisoners are compelled to leave the institution each day. Thus, theoretically, they are able to meet with friends and family any day of the week.

In Brazil, assumptions about sexuality and gender – as well as the relative power wielded by commissions – shape ideas about the necessity, and even urgency, of regular visitation. This point is well illustrated by Beattie’s (2011) account of an ill-fated Brazilian prison rebellion. A journalist reporting on the 1990s incident – in which three presos were stabbed before order was restored – concluded that it was sparked by a suspension of conjugal visits. The journalist quoted a woman unable to visit her partner who said: “The convicts notified us in the afternoon by way of notes that they would fight again that night. I think that the lack of contact with their female companions leaves all of the men agitated” (as quoted in Beattie 2011, 180). During my own fieldwork, conducted twenty years after this story was reported, similar “socially-constructed interpretations of bio-sexual needs in relation to ‘natural’ gender proclivities, morality, and psychobiological health” (Beattie 2011, 181) were imbricated with policies and practical understandings of visitation. For example, I was repeatedly told that Brazilians had solved the problem of prison rape by providing (male) inmates with generous conjugal visits. The

117 development of regimes or imprisonment/visitation around assumptions about male sexuality and men’s capacity for violent aggression has deep historical roots. As Beattie has shown for nineteenth-century Brazil, powerful social actors disciplined subordinate men by regulating their heterosexuality and conjugality. The disciplinary potential of (intimate) visits is identified and exploited outside of Brazil as well (for evidence from the U.S. prison system see Tewksbury and De Michele 2005; Comfort 2008). However, in Brazil, the cultural link between male sexuality and violence is particularly strong. Among working-class people from Rio de Janeiro, “it is considered unhealthy for men to go too long without sex: it can provoke insanity” (Goldstein 2002 [2013], 243).

Whereas there is a perceived need to provide presos with regular opportunities for heterosexual encounters as a means of maintaining institutional order, the “deprivation of heterosexual relationships” is infrequently problematized vis-à-vis presas. Instead of their heterosexual celibacy, presas’ heterosexual (and homosexual) activity tends to by problematized. Managing presas’ sexuality is thought to require “extraordinary”130 outputs of human and material resources. Presas – many of whom are young, ‘unmarried’ women – are placed in the custody of prison staff. For staff to permit young, unmarried women under their authority to engage in “promiscuous” sexual behaviour (sex for its own sake outside of marriage) would chafe against a prevailing sense of propriety. Brazil’s sex/gender system designates women as in need of control and men as in need of freedom to act. Although both men and women are understood to embody powerful sexual forces and desires, “[w]omen’s bodily desires are to be restrained, their expression in sexual intercourse censured, their fertility suppressed” (McCallum 1999, 284). Moreover, there is a sense among staff, that many presas – given the prevalence of drug addiction and immiseration – are particularly vulnerable to sexual exploitation. In fact, staff at both Feminina and PLB express concern that transactional sex is often coercive and harmful to presas and female visitors respectively. Connected to this, is the widespread belief that many women are demoralized by criminogenic sexual/romantic relationships. Even absent involvement in prison prostitution or sex trafficking, women – presas and female visitors – are characterized

130 This may be viewed as a function of “gendered organizational logic” or the manner in which prisons operate as gendered organizations structured around a normative masculine subject (Acker 1992; Britton 1997; McCorkel 2003).

118 as susceptible to (further) criminalization via their intimate ties to men. Conversely, PLB social workers celebrate presos’ family ties as precious resources in the fight to rehabilitate. Beyond this bundle of anxieties surrounding presas’ sexual relationships, Feminina staff must also contend with the double ‘threat’ posed by reproductive sex. Unless contraceptives are provided (and required), sexual intercourse can result in pregnant presas and imprisoned infants. The figure of the pregnant prisoner is doubly problematic in the eyes of prison staff who a) are responsible for two lives instead of one; and b) fear the baby, raised by a criminal m(O)ther (Moore 2015a), will grow into a marginal who threatens the social order. In summary, while the conjugal visit is practically understood as a mechanism of order maintenance and discipline at PLB (and men’s prisons more generally), it appears as a source of disorder and demoralization in the context of Feminina.

Interestingly, the same set of ideas about women and their sexuality which limit visitation opportunities at Feminina, may serve as an additional inducement to a relatively permissive visitation regime at men’s prisons. Historically, “the idea of unprotected women’s vulnerability remained a powerful trope that complemented common interpretations of male sexuality” (Beattie 2011, 196) and affected what constituted appropriate visitation (or conjugal penal living) arrangements for male prisoners. The faith that many Brazilians had in the nuclear family as an element of social order is hard to exaggerate, and many authorities faced a dilemma when sentencing married men. Ideally, a poor male patriarch would provide for and protect his wife, dependents, and himself from the sexual aggressions of other males. By jailing husbands, authorities removed the natural male “protector,” and many evinced the fear that this would force a convict’s wife and daughters into prostitution… Authorities worried that convicts’ wives and children could unjustly be punished for the crimes of their household head and create new social burdens (Beattie 2011, 196).

Today, the worry that visitors’ ties to prisoners might be criminogenic coexists with the notion that prisoners (viz. presos) may have a pro-social role to play as family members and household providers/protectors. This possibility is crystalized in the Brazilian social insurance benefit, auxílio-reclusão (confinement aid). This benefit – which is sometimes disparagingly referred to as “bolsa bandido” (a play on the country’s major cash transfer program: “bolsa família”) – is intended to support families of prisoners, specifically those prisoners who contributed to the

119

INSS131 prior to their incarceration. The contribution-based nature of this assistance program means that it primarily benefits male prisoners and their families.132 Although I heard of some PLB families receiving this benefit, I was not aware of any Feminina beneficiaries (this is a question that I hope to systematically answer in the future). Certainly, it is far more plausible for a male to simultaneously occupy the positions of prisoner and provider/protector (responsible- adult-head-of-household) than a female.

Though the timing of the guards’ strike may not represent a deliberate attempt to restrict contact between presas and their visitors, guards eliminated this visit without warning and without compensation, in part, because there was little disincentive not to. Reduction of presas’ allocated visitation hours is not predicted to trigger a major uprising. The presumption of presas’ collective inaction combines with a dismissive attitude regarding what women might accomplish should they manage to mount any kind of collective resistance. Such preconceptions stem both from the observable atomization of Feminina’s population and socially-constructed interpretations of presas’ bio-sexual needs and womanly (in)capacity for serious violence. These interpretations, importantly, are not simply the purview of prison staff. Prisoners’ also interpret their own ‘natural’ needs, capabilities, and prerogatives in a manner that affects carceral forms such as the visit and the commission.

Incarceration does not erase Brazilian men’s prerogatives to penetrative sex and fortifying foods (see Goldstein 2003, 243); to a degree of autonomy (see McCallum 1999); and to be treated like “men” and shown a certain measure of ‘respect’ (see Drybread 2014). Male prisoners expect, and are expected, to defend these prerogatives with coordinated violence if they come under threat. During the guards’ strike, for example, Feminina visitors suspected that administrators of the single men’s prison afflicted would succumb to pressure applied by presos and either allow the scheduled visit to proceed; allow visitors to deliver goods; or reallocate the lost hours. Their

131 The Instituto Nacional do Seguro Nacional (National Institute of Social Security) collects contributions of formally employed (or autonomously registered) workers and administers retirement pensions, death benefits, sick leave, incident assistance, confinement assistance, and other benefits designated by law. 132 Gender gaps in access to formal employment persist in Brazil. “The proportion of women with formal jobs increased from 41.5 percent in 1999 to 48.8 percent in 2009, but it is still lower than that of employed men, which stood at 53.2 percent in 2009.” Moreover, women in formal sector employment tend to work less hours than men per week (36.5 versus 43.9 in 2009) and earn lower wages (Agénor and Canuto 2013, 2). Thus, female workers tend to contribute less, and less often, to the INSS.

120 suspicions were not unfounded. When I asked a striking PLB guard about how the labour stoppage would affect presos’ daily routines (e.g. the time their cells are unlocked in the morning), he responded: “O diretor vai dar um jeitinho [the director will find a way around the strike] … all will proceed normally, as if nothing were happening.” The guard was confident PLB’s director would ensure the strike did not reduce presos’ accustomed level of autonomy and freedom of mobility (within the prison). Additionally, guards have complained that a subsequent strike (also staged on a Wednesday) was undermined because Anexo “está sob o controle dos internos” (is under the control of prisoners). The director of this unit diminished the impact of the strike when he made a deal with the “frente” (commission) to reschedule the affected visit. He was, according to aggrieved guards, acting out of fear of the anticipated reaction of the “real ‘managers’” of the prison – organized presos.

Within the Mata Escura penal compound, most, if not all, prisons for men are under the authority of a commission (Lourenço and Almeida 2013; Almeida and Paes-Machado 2015), often referred to as the “frente” (front), “comissão” (commission), or commando (command) of the unit. Often, these unit-level commissions are integrated into larger organizations or facções (factions) that connect prisons and influence swathes of extra-carceral territory (i.e. particular affiliated neighborhoods). This situation is not unique; the literature suggests that commissions/factions are a common phenomenon throughout Brazil (Darke 2013a, 2013b, Dias and Darke 2016; Biondi 2010; Leeds 1996; Penglase 2008). In fact, the standardized document used by the federal body charged with inspecting Brazil’s prisons contain a question relating to the presence of factions (Ministry of Justice 2013). Sub-Section 4.26 directs inspectors to note whether there are “[i]ndicativos da atuação de facções no estabelecimento” (indications of the performance of factions in the establishment) and to identify which factions are present.133 At Feminina – although individual presas may be associated with factions encompassing, or synonymous with, commissions operating out of other prisons in the compound – the population is strikingly atomized; a presa-collectivity or commission does not direct the regime. In fact, it is rumoured that “involved” presas (those belonging to one of Salvador’s main factions) have to suppress this

133 Interestingly, sub-section 4.26 is not included in the data requested/reported for Feminina in the Ministry of Justice’s 2013 report.

121 dimension of their identity while imprisoned at Feminina if they hope to avoid additional punishments and repression.

Studies of U.S. women’s prisons conducted since the 1960s consistently show that “gangs” – along with interpersonal violence and overt racial tensions – are an unusual feature of women’s imprisonment (Gartner and Kruttschnitt 2004: Ward and Kassebaum 1965; Giallombardo 1966; Heffernan 1972; Owen 1998; Rierden 1997; Genders and Player 1990; Bosworth 1999; Girshick 1999).134 Within women’s prisons, it seems that institutional order and compliance are rarely threatened and resistance tends to be covert and individual, rather than collective (Bosworth 1996). Gartner and Kruttschnitt’s (2004) comparative study of a California women’s prison at two key moments in the recent history of penality – the 1960s when the maternal, therapeutic rehabilitative model dominated official penal discourse and the neoliberal ‘‘get tough’’ era of the 1990s – helps us to make sense of these tendencies. The authors find that women’s experiences of imprisonment are characterized by considerable continuity across these periods because of the persistence of certain realities of imprisonment and ideas about the nature and needs of (criminal) women. In particular, prison staff …in both periods shared the view that their charges were not, on the whole, dangerous or predatory, but disabled and deficient; and that female prisoners’ particular needs required a gender-specific regime. These views reflected and reinforced prisoners’ attitudes toward and relations with each other, which were often distrustful and suspicious, but also intimately affectionate at times (2004, 299).

Like the California women described by Gartner and Kruttschnitt, Feminina prisoners “sought individual and private solutions”; they buffered the pains of imprisonment by “distancing themselves from and negotiating their relations with others” (2004, 298). To grasp the significance of presas’ relatively individualistic orientation, it is helpful to reflect upon what a more unified response can do.135At PLB, prisoner solidarity in the form of commissions

134 Instead, intimate and consensual sexual relationships and prison families are common. Relatively cooperative relations with staff tend to predominate. 135 Of course, commissions and factions do a great deal. Yet, it is not within the scope of this chapter to provide a thorough accounting of their activities and accomplishments. In part this is because, for reasons outlined in my discussion of research design and methods, I did not set out to investigate these groups’ role in prison- and street- based drug markets. That said, it is widely acknowledged that these groups derive at least some of their power from controlling flows of illegal drugs into the prison (Leeds 1996; Lourenço and Almeida 2013; Oliveira 2012). For the

122 functions to alleviate pains of imprisonment for presos (and certain pains of visitation for their visitors).

The Comissão, the Protection of Visitors, and the Search for Respect

PLB’s population is divided between four stand-alone units: módulos I, II, III, and V (modules or cellblocks) (fig. 14). Each cellblock contains approximately 250 prisoners and a separate commission. The commissions, which grew and consolidated principally between 2000 and 2007, monopolize each cellblock’s drug economy and exert control over the regime of visitation/imprisonment. Rules and routines that direct prisoners’ and visitors’ comportment – which we would normally expect to be set by state agents – are largely determined and enforced by the commissions. Commission leaders make claims and negotiate with the administration on behalf of the cellblock. Although commissions can certainly operate in violent and predatory ways (Almeida and Paes-Machado 2015) here focus on how their presence, power, and projects enrich the experience of imprisonment/visitation at PLB.

Figure 14. PLB – The four rectangular cellblocks are operational; The large round module was recently deactivated.

When I first began conducting research at one of PLB’s cellblocks (Module II), it lacked a serviceable waiting area for visitors. Friday through Sunday, at peak arrival times (8:30 to 10:30am), visitors could end up waiting for an hour or more, without access to seating, shelter, storage, or tenable washroom facilities. Then, a few months into fieldwork, a relatively impressive waiting area suddenly materialized. The area features a sheltered seating area and a bank of storage lockers. When I began to investigate why Module II had been favoured (not all

purposes of the present discussion, I focus primarily on how these collectives improve experiences of visitation – and thus imprisonment – at PLB.

123 of PLB’s cellblocks have similar amenities – see fig. 15), I was surprised to learn the project had been initiated and funded by the cellblock’s commission.

Figure 15. A side-by-side comparison of visitor waiting areas at PLB Module V (left) and PLB Module II (right). Module II’s newly constructed visitor waiting area features a sheltered area surrounded by seating and a bank of lockers.

The commission coordinated with PLB administrators to arrange the purchase and delivery of building materials and the assignment of a fardo-azul (prisoner) work crew to the task. To raise the necessary funds, the commission ran a series of collections within the unit. Particularly generous donors became owners of the newly constructed lockers (i.e. their visitors were assigned a locker). Each locker is shared by a pair of visitors who respectively possess one of two keys to its padlock. Even with ‘formal’ locker-share arrangements in effect, there is an inadequate supply of lockers (< 50) to accommodate all visitors (ranging from 100-300 depending on the day). This system of uneven distribution of scarce resources, and the special rights of some, mirrors the stratified organization of Brazilian society. This is but one example of how the presence and accomplishments of commissions render PLB less a ‘world apart’ than Feminina.

The visitor waiting area project provided an opportunity for presos to set a meaningful goal and achieve it through cooperation (a prerequisite of consideration). Such undertakings also enhance the reputation of the commission and the larger faction it represents – namely, the Comando da Paz (CP) (see Lourenço and Almeida 2013 for an overview of the emergence and functioning of this organization). The waiting area is a declaration of the CP’s decency vis-à-vis its main rival, o groupo de Perna, and builds the resumé of the commission’s current leadership, establishing this small group’s legitimacy. That said, to many PLB guards, the waiting area serves as an embarrassing reminder of the inappropriate level of control exerted by the commission over institutional operations. Examples of other legitimacy-enhancing ventures authored by PLB’s

124 commissions abound. During my fieldwork, a community-based black rights (or “quilombo rights”) group began collaborating with the Module II commission to co-organize various events and projects.136 The partnership brought in musicians and staged a concert in the cellblock; instituted regular African drumming sessions on the patio; developed a “toy library” to benefit child-visitors; and coordinated a fundraiser to benefit a struggling “quilombo” (see fig. 16). Flows and stoppages of artists, political favours, toys, drums, charitable donations, etc. recede distinctions which mark prisons as separate from the broader community.

Figure 16. This image appeared on “Tumblr,” accompanied by the caption: “Penitenciária Lemos Brito, Módulo II – Salvador, Bahia. Os detentos doaram todo o “jumbo” para os Quilombolas do Quilombo Rio dos Macacos. Total: 1 137 tonelada de alimento” (Image and Caption by http://eniocesar88.tumblr.com/post/42455052569).

Research on Brazilian drug trafficking gangs has suggested that these groups emerge in contexts of “state abandonment,” and that state-like criminal networks gain power and legitimacy by providing resources and services in neighborhoods that have experienced the malign neglect of o poder público. But, the newly constructed waiting area does not only represent the benevolent efficacy of the comissão, it also has an ominous quality. It reminds visitors that “eles” or “os homens”138 exert influence beyond the walls of the module – they are present here, too. When I asked visitors, “Why does this unit have an area for visitors when the others don’t? Who built this?” they responded using subtle euphemisms – “eles” “os homens” – of the sort that I, initially, had difficulty registering. Visitors know it’s best not to speak of these matters directly. One never knows who is listening, or what words might be considered a betrayal. It was actually

136 To complicate matters, the leader of the quilombo-rights group was employed by a Vareador (the Brazilian equivalent of a city councillor). It was rumoured that his involvement with prisoners represented a form of political patronage – a strategy to gain the votes of prisoners’ visitors, residents of neighbourhoods under the influence of the CP faction, and denizens of the prison-neighbourhood nexus more generally. 137 I include this image because it illustrates both the kinds of benevolent activities in which the commission participates and the stylistic publicization of these efforts that occurs. 138 Translation: “them” (masculine plural pronoun) and “the men.”

125 the guards who eventually confirmed my suspicion: “Foi o commando dentro” (“It was the command inside”). Dripping with disdain they pointed to this as a brutal indictment of the state’s lack of control vis-à-vis organized crime. Penglase (2009), following Taussig (1999), has described the law of silence operative in Rio’s favelas in terms of “the public secret,” defined as what is generally known but, for one reason or another, cannot readily be articulated. The law of silence operates in and around Bahian men’s prisons as well. Long before passing through security and entering the cellblock – in neighbourhoods, on busses, and chatting with fellow visitors in the newly constructed waiting area outside of Module II – visitors must “know what not to know” (Taussig 1999) and vigilantly police their words and deeds as if the commission were omniscient.

In addition to consolidating the authority of the comissão, the collaborative erection of a visitation waiting area is constitutive of the gendered personhood of individual presos, helping them gain respect as ‘autonomous’ adult men. Respect is both a condition and a consequence of the successful execution of this project – a monument to prisoners’ masculinity. The waiting area embodies prisoners’ masculine capacity to provide for, and protect, the women in their lives. By coordinating efforts, pooling resources, and winning the recognition of the prison’s administration, the men of Module II are able to engage in a masculine kind of productive- labour-by-proxy. Presos are neither neutralized nor fully contained by their confinement. Rather than simply “kill time” in the Brazilian slammer (Goifman 2002) they engage in productive pursuits. Symbolically, they are able to reach beyond the walls of the module and transform the landscape of the penal compound. Mayblin (2010) has documented how, in the Brazilian Northeast, male adulthood involves a transfer of energy, time, and resources away from “bikes” (motorbikes – a symbol of male mobility and freedom) towards bricks. Respectable married men – trabalhadors, pais-de-família (workers, fathers or family men) – invest in family homes. The transformation of PLB territory into a comfortable and functional place for waiting kin can thus be interpreted as a performance of a valued form of adult masculinity. Additionally, presos “do (patriarchal) masculinity” – in a manner fairly consistent with extra-carceral audience expectations – by taking an active, controlling role in the government of their domain (Module II). The following scene illustrates how presos, empowered by the commission, police the cellblock’s threshold, managing guards’ interactions with visitors (as well as visitors’ conduct).

126

On bustling weekend visiting days, although PLB’s administrative wing is closed, the director of Bahia’s largest prison – “The Captain” – regularly makes a quick ‘surprise’ appearance. Wearing casual but chic street clothes instead of his usual suit he visits each cellblock, briskly checking-in with staff and visitors before departing. One Saturday, however, he spent an unusual amount of time at Module II when he was called on to participate in an impromptu meeting with a leader of the commission. The topic of the meeting was the visitor dress code. Although this meeting was prompted by a specific incident, tension had been mounting for some time.

To avoid an uprising, and maintain order within the unit, the director entered into dialogue with “the commission.” This conversation, which took about fifteen minutes (during which visitor processing was suspended), occurred across a threshold. The Captain stood at the edge of the guards’ security base, in the enclosed entrance tunnel, addressing his interlocutors from behind thick iron bars. Two key features of this meeting should be highlighted.

First, it centered around an exchange between two high-ranking male leaders who interacted not as individuals but as representatives of competing, yet occasionally complimentary, sets of interests. While charismatic authority is central to their respective enactments of power, this exchange is not best interpreted in terms of personalism. Nor does it adhere to the Brazilian logic of clientalism: neither man assumes the position of supplicant client or yields the position of patron to his adversary. Claims are not made in the idiom of conditions and carência (need) but of entitlement. This is a negotiation, if not among equals, then certainly among men – men vying to make gains, or prevent losses, on behalf of lesser others, in the name of the greater good as they see it. Crucially, these leaders are brokering a deal between mutually accountable – if not symmetrically powerful – parties. Second, the coherence of this negotiation rests, in part, upon a basis of shared assumptions about gender. Its catalyst was the length of a woman’s skirt.

In Bahia, it is widely agreed that men, especially imprisoned men, will react strongly to the sight of a woman’s body. Because such responses are understood to be inevitable and a potential source of conflict (e.g. a husband would be compelled to confront a man who ogled his wife), rules have been put in place by, or with the support of, the commission to prevent male arousal and its anticipated consequences. Namely, guards who process visitors are responsible for ensuring that women wear relatively modest attire and prisoners are responsible for ensuring adherence to relevant articles of the local “inmate code” (Sykes 1958). For instance, presos must

127 avert their eyes when unrelated women pass by; they must not circulate through the patio shirtless when visitors are present; and they must refrain from communicating with other men’s visitors unless explicitly permitted to do so (by the man). In addition to agreeing on the appropriateness of patriarchal authority, the commission leadership, rank-and-file prisoners, and prison staff typically hold a common objective: avoid confusão (confusion).139

The hemline incident occurred when a female guard140 ordered a high-status visitor to change her dress before entering the module. Initially, the visitor resisted. She only acquiesced after some time and, even then, she continued to vociferously convey her sense of injustice. She grudgingly borrowed a pair of men’s shorts and an over-sized t-shirt but was stopped in her tracks when she indicated her intent to efficiently don this new attire after being strip searched. Front-line guards instructed her to change ‘elsewhere’ before she could be processed, a requirement that seemed unreasonable given the dearth of nearby structures that could be repurposed as a change room. The situation was rapidly escalating. The aggrieved visitor somehow managed to swap her stylish dress for the frumpy, borrowed outfit; endure revista íntima, and make it inside the cellblock. However, by the time she met her husband she was distraught. Through tears she told her story. How dare a low-ranking female guard “disrespect” and “mistreat” her – the adult daughter of police officer, the distinguished wife of a high-ranking prisoner? Onlookers recognized this situation had the potential to compel a (violent) response.

To avoid “confusion,” the leader of the commission intervened and met with the prison’s director – face-to-face, as men – to peaceably resolve the dispute. The dress with the questionable hemline was retrieved from a locker and assessed by the congregation of male authority figures. It was determined that, although the dress was shorter than is ideal, female guards had been

139 Lourenço and Almeida 2013 note that, “[among] the principle words heard” inside the Bahian prison are: “a cadeia não deve sangrar” (the jail shouldn’t bleed) or “as coisas tem que ficar em ordem” (things have to stay in order) (5). 140 PLB’s modules contain three main areas: a cellblock/patio, a security base, and a reception foyer. The foyer contains a desk (where a guard records the names of arriving visitors in a ledger), a counter (where guards manually search visitors’ belongings), and two small rooms (where revista íntima occurs). The foyer is only staffed on visitation days whereas the security base is staffed at all times. Each module has its own designated team of all-male guards who “man” the base. Reception is covered by a rotating roster of female guards without ties to a particular cellblock who might never come into direct contact with a prisoner. Men from the base occasionally assist front-line workers when there are backlogs, staff shortages, or the occasional male visitor. However, for the most part, visitors are processed by female guards.

128 behaving in a problematically inconsistent and discourteous manner in their enforcement of the dress code. Moving forward, prisoners should remind their visitors of the agreed-upon standard of dress; front-line (female) guards should be directed to improve their work performance; and, in the future, rational and capable men should immediately be consulted at the first signs of trouble.

Through familiar gender relations, differences between presos and (male) prison staff are momentarily receded to reveal a form which, counterpoised with its (female, subordinate) other, corroborates the oneness and superiority of its members. When captors and confined are (re)differentiated, the organization of these complimentary forms is analogous to that of ethnicities, not castes. These dynamics nourish the working relationship that pertains between prison staff, especially those in command, and commissions. Of course, commissions also have leverage deriving from intra-cellblock solidarity; coordination between prison units (e.g Module II’s commission is integrated into the broader CP faction, which also “commands” Presídio Salvador); and the extent of factions’ influence beyond the prison system (Lourenço and Almeida 2013). Moreover, in contrast with prison staff fragmented along innumerable lines – i.e. male/female; management/union; guard/police; unionized/temporarily contracted; political appointee/career in corrections; etc. – presos’ cohesion is all the more daunting. To prevent catastrophe (professional and otherwise), administrators turn to the commission-faction, a carceral form that simultaneously threatens, and contains the threat of, both more and less coordinated violence. Violence might take the form of arbitrary or predatory attacks within the cellblock; a motim (minor uprising); a rebelião (major riot); vengeful targeting of particular guards; or even a highly orchestrated siege of the city. If “o estado” (the state) peels back established prerogatives, violates a compromisso (an agreement), or infringes upon prisoners’ perceived rights, collective resistance is expected. A masculinized body of prisoners girds the very conditions of solidarity which it depends upon for its continued existence. One key condition is, arguably, maintaining the prison as part of a shared lifeworld (not a world apart).

Preso Solidarity and the Gendered Quality of Visitation at PLB

As I have been establishing, PLB and Feminina’s regimes of visitation differ both quantitatively and qualitatively as a function of ideas about sex/gender and the uneven distribution of commissions throughout the penal compound. I now turn to a discussion of the “texture of

129 visitation” at PLB in which I consider how practices of visitation occasion valued gender performances and promote unity on two interrelated levels – intra-cellblock unity and unity of sociality within and without the prison. This discussion anchors a forthcoming, contrastive account of Feminina’s regime of imprisonment/visitation.

PLB visits do not occur in a designated visitation area. This means that visitors, theoretically, have access to all prisoners and spaces of the cellblock, including: cells; the patio with its sports facilities, chess boards, and seating areas; the church (which hosts weekend services run by a team of Evangelical visitor-volunteers); a barbershop; a canteen; an art gallery; a woodshop etc. They are also able to spend the entire day “dentro” (inside) (see table 2);141 there is plenty of time to nap, shower (sometimes with hot water), wash and air-dry a load of laundry, eat a relaxed mid-day meal, watch a (pirated) movie, etc. Unquestionably, visits are highly valued by prisoners. On Thursdays, the prison is a hive of activity as men bustle about preparing themselves and their spaces to receive visitors. Presos scrub floors; fetch buckets of water from the communal tap area; get a shave and haircut; do laundry; and hang clothing and bed sheets out to dry. Low-income prisoners sell their labour to more affluent fellows, eager to earn money or service their debts. I conducted fieldwork inside Module II on Thursday mornings and was consistently struck by the palpable sense of anticipation and common purpose that charged through the cellblock.

Unlike visitors, PLB guards generally do not circulate among prisoners dentro (inside). Guards are stationed at a base overlooking the patio and its surrounding cells. They only go inside to unlock a single cell in the morning and lock it in the evening. A commission-designated inhabitant of this cell is charged with (un)locking the remaining cells once the guards have returned safely to their station. Guards’ exert minimal effort on surveillance; their primary objective is to secure the entrance/exit. In contrast, as outlined above, adherence to the “inmate code” (Sykes 1958) is monitored and enforced by the commission. Oversight of both prisoners and visitors is particularly intense during visits.

141 Historically, visitors were able to spend the full weekend inside. However, this institution – the multi-day, overnight visit – had been eliminated before I commenced fieldwork. Nonetheless, under the current visitation system (Friday to Sunday, 8:30 am to 4:30 pm), visitors are able to spend full, back-to-back days with their imprisoned relations.

130

At PLB, visitors tend to be well-fed. At worst, they have access to rampa (prison argot for institutional rations). Rampa is not scarce at PLB; at mealtimes, employees of a privately contracted food-service company liberally scoop – rather than carefully apportion – rations onto consumers’ plates. While there are certainly complaints about the quality of institutional meals, quantity does not seem to be an issue. There is plenty for both presos who ‘deign’ to depend on the state and hungry visitors who are not otherwise provided for. Crucially, at PLB, institutional rations are supplemented by personal food supplies delivered by visitors.142 Visitors bring an endless array of processed snacks, home-cooked meals, and uncooked ingredients such as meat, vegetables, rice, and beans (fig. 17). The circulation of privately owned foodstuffs into the prison entails considerable work for visitors143 as well as the (female) guards charged with manually inspecting bodies and belongings. While some of the food provided by visitors is consumed with visitors during visits, food deliveries also sustain presos throughout the week, between visits. A significant number of prisoners are able to regularly skip rampa meals or, in some cases, decline it altogether.

Figure 17. PLB visitor carrying bags of goods. Such packages typically contain food (both pre-prepared and raw ingredients), hygiene products, cleaning supplies, clothing, and other miscellaneous items (e.g. photographs, DVDs, reading materials).

Permitting visitors to transport raw ingredients into the prison amounts to a tacit acceptance that presos have ‘unsupervised’ access to cooking implements, including paring knives and makeshift

142 PLB’s modules also feature an array of commission-sanctioned food vendors who run, for example, a hotdog cart; a convenience store; a snack shop specializing in sun-dried beef jerky; etc. The merchandise for these businesses is, again, delivered by visitors. 143 Accessing cash, shopping for food, preparing meals, transporting heavy shopping bags, and repackaging items that require it (to meet security criteria) involve significant outputs of time, energy, and sometimes money on the part of visitors. Visitors experiences are documented and analysed in chapter 4.

131 stoves (see fig. 18).144 Indeed, prisoners’ cells contain numerous domestic amenities. In addition to burners, pots and pans, dishes, and cutlery, many cells contain small appliances (viz. blenders) and electronics equipment (i.e. televisions, radios, DVD/CD players). Most PLB presos have at least some degree of access to these items, which facilitate conviviality, commensality, and exchanges of care. Some elite prisoners even possess refrigerators.

145 Figure 18. Improvised Stove – brick in which a channel is carved out to act as a resistor, which is connected to the electric current from the cell’s wall.

PLB prisoners seek to avoid institutional rations. The ideal is to be, nutritionally at least, independent of the institution. Rejection of a rampa may be interpreted as a strategy to mitigate or resist prisonization (Clemmer 1940). Eating one’s own food demonstrates self-sufficiency (vis-à-vis “the state”) and is a sign of status (vis-à-vis other prisoners). Perhaps the best illustration of this differentiation function was the weekly delivery of a still-warm McDonald’s meal to a commission leader by his attractive, stylishly dressed young wife. On visitation days, whenever she arrived with her precious cargo, she was permitted – by waiting visitors and guards – to jump to the front of the queue.146

But food consumption practices at PLB are not simply about enhancing autonomy and realizing hierarchical differentiation, they are also enabled by – and nourishing of – intimate, horizontal ties among prisoners and between prisoners and visitors. Avoiding rampa is possible because of prisoner-visitor relatedness and visitors’ labour, which is often though not always unpaid. Visitors not only facilitate meaningful consumption, they also participate in consequential

144 Stoves are crafted by prisoners using resources gleaned from the institution (a process which can involve damaging the physical plant of the prison). The most popular model involves a clay brick, topped with an indented squiggle shape. A wire pilfered from the institution (or smuggled into it) runs through the clay channel. When attached to electrical wiring that has been illicitly exposed, the resistor heats up and the brick becomes a burner on which pots can be placed. 145 http://www.vice.com/read/mexican-rashes-137-v15n6 146 The practice of expediting the entry of the highest-ranking visitors is actually a limitation of my research. I was unable to build rapport with the most powerful visitors because they did not spend time waiting outside the module.

132 commensality with imprisoned relations. And, because of the availability of extra ‘external’ food, even the poorest prisoners and visitors are able to eat rampa together. Anthropologists and sociologists have documented how commensality is constitutive of personhood, identity, and relatedness (Carsten 2000; Goody 1982). In the context of the prison, men band together to share the cost of food and the labour of preparation. They cooperate to ensure that required goods will be delivered on time by available visitors and, as a group, they enjoy tasty, nutritious, carefully- prepared meals. Together, presos (and visitors) are able to produce something of value. I suggest this routine coordination of efforts supports the emergence and persistence of solidarity. At the same time, powerful commissions (a corollary of solidarity) help to sustain the flow of ‘external’ food dentro by defending ‘traditional’ ‘privileges’ against the incursions of bureaucratic rationalization. Through the combination of rampa and comida caseira,147 prisoners and visitors of PLB express and experience care; participate in forms of reciprocity constitutive of obligations and entitlements; and produce both connectedness and differentiation.

Sex is another practice through which substance is shared and differentiation/relatedness is constituted, drawn out, and enacted in the context of the prison. At PLB, Fridays are dedicated to “visitas íntimas” (conjugal visits) and only visitors registered as “companheiras” (partners – viz. wives and girlfriends)148 are permitted to enter the prison. Frequent conjugal visitation is a legacy of gendered interpretations of bio-sexual needs as discussed above. On Saturdays and Sundays, visitation is opened up to other kinds of relations as well – namely, parentes da primeira grau (first degree relations – parents, children, siblings). Although the presence of these relations might complicate sexual intimacy between partners, it certainly does not foreclose this possibility.

Officially, each prisoner is only permitted one registered conjugal visitor at any given time. 149 This state-imposed regulation has given rise to a vigorous underground economy of “names.” A single, poor, or indebted prisoner can sell (or rent) his name-allocation by registering another

147 Lit. home-style or home-cooked food. The category of food that is conceptually opposed to rampa. 148 It is possible for same-sex male partners to visit and, in fact, I observed this happen on a couple of occasions. 149 Of course, in practice, it is possible for a woman registered in one capacity (e.g. as the daughter or sister of a prisoner) to engage in sexual relations with another prisoner. However, in this case, she would not be permitted to visit the prison on Fridays because only those registered as intimate visitors are eligible to enter.

133 man’s visitor as if she were his companheira. This “secondary adjustment” (Goffman 1961) – which enables some presos to earn resources and others to accumulate a second (or third) conjugal visitor – is prohibited but relatively widespread.150 The viability of this name market rests upon extremely meagre state surveillance of visitor-prisoner interactions. Nonetheless, name-exchange arrangements must be relatively long-lasting because the frequent registration and removal of companheira names can rouse staff suspicions and lead to increased monitoring (from the barred passageway connecting the security base to the patio).

With the exception of a handful of elite prisoners, cells are shared by multiple men. For privacy, cellmates hang sheets around their bunk beds (prison argot: “comarcas”) and negotiate cell timeshare agreements. Relatively privileged prisoners may also rent or ‘borrow’ cells from people, without visitors, eager to earn an income or relieve debts. I know of at least one prisoner who juggled three women on visitation days. He kept his wife in his cell and his outras in other cells, exploiting the article of the inmate code that prevents unaccompanied women from circulating freely throughout the prison. After offering his wife an excuse (e.g. “I’ll go out and get us cold drinks”), he would visit one of his other two women. Intimate partner violence (IPV) could result if any of these women dared to question his actions – his “freedom to act.” On several occasions, I observed upset women cut visits short and flee the prison because of IPV. When one research participant emerged, shaken, from the module, I asked if she was alright. She began to cry: “He’s never hit me in the face before! He’s hit me, but never in the face.” I sat next to her as she touched-up her smeared eye make-up and lightly pressed her hurt cheek, pensively squinting into her powder compact.151 In Brazil, striking a wife constitutes a performance of masculinity. Even if the legitimacy of the act itself is called into question, the exercise of violent control over unruly related dependants is a recognizable practice integral to patriarchal authority (see Hautzinger 2007).

150 In one version of this practice, prisoners register sex workers who are able to service multiple clients over the course of the weekend. This ostensibly non-coercive practice should not be conflated with the practice of compelling visitors – i.e. wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, etc. – to perform sex acts with other prisoners to, for example, relieve an endangered relative’s debt. 151 Make-up is prohibited from entering the prison. During visits, women stash their cosmetics kits in lockers or in unprotected nooks and crannies around the reception foyer (if they don’t have access to a locker).

134

Rather than provide an exhaustive account of visitation at PLB (I return to this topic in chapter 4), I have highlighted aspects of the regime that seem to encourage solidarity among presos and the unification of intra- and extra-carceral sociality. These forms of oneness have been shown to be deeply connected to commissions and gender performances/relations. Analysis of these phenomena has yielded the main points of comparison around which I structure the following discussion of Feminina. Examining Feminina and PLB within the same analytic frame is not only analytically fruitful but ethnographically grounded. A significant flow of bodies runs between these prisons, illuminating important qualities of each.

The Texture of Visitation at Feminina

At Feminina, visits take place on a desolate concrete patio in full view of prison staff. Rain or scorching shine, visitors are prohibited from entering cells. The only exception to this rule is in the case of specially approved conjugal visits.

After careful scrutiny of individual presas’ requests, fortnightly conjugal visits may be approved by Feminina’s security team. First, approved presas must consent to receive injections of birth control hormones. After 18 months of fieldwork, I was only aware of two presas who had received conjugal visits. During the conjugal visit itself, presas and their partners are locked into a cell together for a few hours. The prospect of being locked into a small cell and made entirely dependent on the institution does not appeal to many (male) intimate partners. Beyond this disincentive, and the gatekeeping effects of the authorization process, there are at least two other reasons why so few presas have the opportunity to enjoy (hetero-)sexual intimacy.

First, visitors are required to submit to strip and body cavity searches each time they enter one of the Mata Escura penal compound’s prisons. Elsewhere, I suggest that ideas about masculinity and femininity as well as cultural notions about the permeable body (Caldeira 2001) discourage men, in general, from “submitting” to this degrading form of penetration by the state. Certainly, the vast majority of visitors to Feminina are female. Second, as the feminist pathways approach to the aetiology of women’s offending anticipates, many presas’ law-breaking behaviour is connected to their family and/or intimate relationships. This has implications for visitation. For instance, if a woman and her husband are both involved in the drug trade, but only she is arrested, it is unlikely that he would be willing or able to enter a domain of intensive state

135 surveillance. In short, criminal kin (who are disproportionately male) are often excluded from visitation because they are either in prison or “on the run” (Goffman 2014).

Interestingly, the imprisonment of a presa’s male partner can actually increase her visitation opportunities and otherwise alleviate pains of imprisonment. Approximately 10% of Feminina presas are authorized to have weekly conjugal visits with presos imprisoned elsewhere in the compound (fig. 19). One such presa, the wife of a powerful fugitive, is illicitly registered as the companheira of a current PLB inmate (using the “name trade” system) so that, every Friday, she can temporarily escape Feminina’s restrictive environment. As a PLB visitor, she has access to a contraband cell phone which allows her to have long conversations with her fugitive-husband. She is also able to enjoy comida caseira and other luxuries (e.g. drugs) that she is deprived of at Feminina.

Feminina Presas

152 Figure 19. The prisoners of Module 1 staged an impressive Passion Play for an audience of high-ranking dignitaries. Although the performance occurred on a non-visitation day, Feminina presa conjugal visitors (two of whom are visible in the image above), were permitted to play the roles of Mary, Veronica, and the Women of Jerusalem.

Mid-morning on Fridays, a prisoner transfer van picks up presa conjugal visitors at Feminina and drives them across the compound to PLB. At each module, a few presas awkwardly exit the back

152 This is the only module that prison staff, politicians, and members of the general public could safely enter. Its commission is uniquely “independent” (unaffiliated with either of the main factions operating in Salvador’s prison- neighbourhood nexus) and has sought to establish itself as a non-criminal organization. It distinguishes itself through the emphasis it places on creating a humane, non-violent carceral environment. Its leader – who once dominated Salvador’s drug trade (before the rise of violent competing factions) – competes with PLB staff to be recognized as the better prison administrator.

136 of the van, handcuffed and uniformed – their immaculate hair, nails, and makeup at odds with shabby and ill-fitting institutionally-issued scrubs (fig. 20). As they file into the module, other conjugal visitors waiting to be strip and cavity searched, avert their eyes, shake their heads, and tsk tsk: “poor girls, just look at them…”

Whereas Feminina prisoners are required to wear uniforms, PLB prisoners are permitted to wear street clothes (fig. 20). Most presos are young and muscular.153 They don trendy board shorts and authentic or knock-off name-brand t-shirts and tank-tops that display their fit bodies. A particularly popular brand is Cyclone. Cyclone has become the unofficial trademark of Bahia’s oppositional youth culture. The brand’s identity is so strongly associated with crime that, when I told a child I was going shopping for athletic clothes, she earnestly warned me against purchasing anything with the Cyclone logo because this could lead police to mistake me for a bandit. And, being identified as a bandit by Brazilian police can be lethal. Not all PLB prisoners use clothing to communicate an oppositional street-culture identity. For example, evangelical presos, a discrete and significant sub-group within PLB, wear pressed slacks and long-sleeved button-down shirts (see Oliveira 2012). This distinctive attire indexes their acceptance of Jesus. Importantly, both starched collars as well as t-shirts emblazoned with the recognizable cyclone wave, are a means through which men can convey self-respect and the expectation they be respected by others (see Bourgois 1995). Clothing is an important means of communicating one’s identity – PLB presos’ appearances firmly locate them within Bahia’s social landscape.

Figure 20. Left – The men of PLB Module II. Right – The uniformed prisoners of Feminina.

153 PLB presos are able to participate in physique-enhancing athletics on a daily basis. Most modules contain a soccer pitch and goal posts. Module II also contains a regulation boxing ring. Other activities include capoeira and lifting soda-bottle water weights.

137

In contrast, female prisoners are required to wear ugly, often threadbare scrubs at all times. These uniforms sabotage women’s efforts to be attractive or accomplish even the most qualified version of respectable femininity; their status, as imprisoned marginals, is inescapable. Canary- yellow costumes chafe against presas’ sense of self and undermine their ability to distinguish themselves either as individuals or as members of culturally valued (sub-)groups (fig. 20). Ironically, the homogenizing and dehumanizing qualities of the uniform may contribute to processes of disaggregation and fragmentation.

Presas’ experiences of ordinary (non-conjugal) visits do little to counteract this “assault on the self” (Goffman 1961). As mentioned above, these occur on an empty patio utterly devoid of amenities. Families tend to cluster along one side of the small patio where a narrow overhang offers some protection from the elements and a low curb serves as seating. Feminina visits are easily observable by guards stationed inside their security base. And, in contrast to PLB, guards regularly come dentro, undeterred by the presence of presas and visitors on the patio.

At Feminina, visits occur only twice a week and often last for less than two hours by the time visitors are admitted. Guards do not begin to process visitors until 9am, when the visitation period formally begins. This means that most visitors spend more time commuting to/from the prison than visiting. In light of this calculus, time spent waiting to enter the prison (approximately 30-60 minutes during peak entry times) is particularly frustrating. Prison staff offered an explanation for Feminina’s strikingly short visits, telling me visitors cannot be present at lunchtime because they would not receive a sufficient meal (in Brazil, lunch is traditionally the primary meal of the day). Awareness of food dynamics at PLB encourages us to probe beyond this account and denaturalize scarcity at Feminina. How is insufficiency produced and what effects does it have?

Feminina rules governing the entry of food brought by visitors are quite restrictive and became all the more so during the course of my fieldwork. Raw ingredients are not permitted, largely, because presas have lost the ability to cook for themselves. This traditional ‘privilege’ was revoked when growing concerns about infrastructural deficiencies and fire hazards led to the ban on in-cell stoves (see introduction). Significantly, in the wake of this ban, the duration of visits

138 was reduced from 6 to 2.5 hours.154 Moreover, without an institutionally tolerated means to cook and reheat items, some presas resort to burning plastic pop bottles to warm their coffee. Prison staff express their disgust that “the girls” would be so foolish and self-destructive as to release these toxic chemicals within an enclosed space. Although staff would like to put an end to this practice, repurposed plastic pop bottles fulfill an essential water-storage function as long as there is no running water in cells. The peculiarities of Feminina’s regime operate to reinforce ideas about the irrationality and incompetence of (imprisoned) “girls” while at the same time commensality, and the relatedness this inspires, is circumscribed by reducing flows of food and opportunities for prisoners and visitors to share meals.

When the stove ban was first implemented, visitors were still permitted to bring containers of home-cooked food. Then, mid-way through my fieldwork, this ‘privilege’ was indefinitely withdrawn and visitors were left with the option to bring in pre-packaged processed snack foods. According to prison staff, the unexpected prohibition of homemade meals was prompted by a case of poisoning. Although the measure was initially framed as a temporary precaution, it dragged on for months, with no end in sight, and was still in place when I left the field. The suspension of this well-established practice was much bemoaned by visitors and prisoners alike (though they did not mount a collective resistance before my departure). Frustrated pessoal de Feminina complained that “it doesn’t cost anything” to take a portion of rice and beans from the family-pan on the stovetop whereas store-bought snacks require cash which is in short supply. The restriction of admissible foodstuffs to pre-packaged foods effectively prevents some visitors from engaging in the meaningful labour of feeding their imprisoned kin and families from co- consuming food from a single pot, even if this act of commensality were separated by space and time.

Intense concern about the quality and quantity of institutional rations compounds the impact of the diet deprivations described above. Inability to supplement rations fuels anxiety that prisoners are not properly nourished. At Feminina, mealtimes are rife with tension. Rations arrive on a wagon with most meal-components – i.e. a few scoops of rice and some variety of bean and meat

154 Previously, before the Feminina organization was relocated to a new building, visits occurred on the same two days (Wednesday and Sunday) but started at 9 am and terminated at 3 pm (de Beer 2010, 39).

139 stew – pre-apportioned into individually owned re-sealable plastic containers. Other items – i.e. buns, bananas, and coffee – arrive in bulk bags, bunches, and large thermoses respectively. Presas must be vigilant to ensure they receive their fair share (which is generally perceived to be inadequate to begin with). A common expression captures the keyed-up atmosphere: “Quem vai ao mar, perde o lugar” (this aphorism is roughly equivalent to the saying, “if you snooze you lose”). Individual plastic containers and bulk items are distributed by the prisoners themselves. On a number of occasions, I witnessed mini-conflicts erupt over a missing piece of bread; the divvying up of ripe, unripe, and bruised bananas; or insufficient coffee. Because presas do not come face to face with representatives of the company sub-contracted to provide meals, their fellow prisoners become the face of scarcity, dissatisfaction, and competition.

The distribution of rations is fraught, in part, because Feminina’s food budget does not appear to be indexed to fluctuations in the prison population. For example, Feminina received a sudden transfer of approximately 20 presas after a deadly case of Meningitis caused state actors to relieve overcrowding at a police lockup (see chapter 3). At the time, Feminina had an official capacity of only 96 presas. Thus, the sudden influx of inmates represented a significant proportional influx of bodies in need of sustenance and exacerbated pre-existing overcrowding. As Feminina’s population explodes, it seems that the same already-tight food budget is simply stretched a little farther by cutting portion sizes and scrimping on the cost of ingredients.

Talk of the poor quality of rations abounds at Feminina. There are incessant complaints about meatless stew, raw chicken, and an absence of fruit. I was warned not to drink coffee destined for the prisoners which is rumoured to be laced with a sedative. Indeed, reclamations about food were one of the primary topics of conversation and critique among prisoners and visitors. In an analysis of everyday forms of peasant resistance Scott (2008) outlines obstacles to open, collective resistance that may be applicable to prison populations who also struggle against “the loss of access to the means of production (proletarianisation), the loss of work (marginalisation) and income, and the loss of what little respect and recognised social claims went with their previous status” (Scott 2008, 12). In particular, presas, like peasants in Sedaka, experience “duress of the quotidian” (2008, 14) which, arguably, militates against collective resistance. Marx described this process as “the dull compulsion of economic relations” – compulsion which involves an expectation of repression (Marx 1970, 737 as quoted by Scott 2008, 15). Presas’

140 pressing material needs necessitate a grudging, pragmatic daily accommodation to conditions of imprisonment.

Of course, an absence of overt resistance does not mean that prisoners accept the regime’s legitimacy (Bosworth and Carrabine 2001). As I have shown, the production of food scarcity – the outcome of a confluence of forces (e.g. a decrepit physical plant, an ambitious new diretora, compliance with a vengeance, the rising rate of women’s imprisonment, ideas about gender, and the prevalence of individualized responses to the pains of imprisonment, etc.) – has a number of unintended, yet instrumental, effects. At least for the period of time that I observed Feminina, these effects seemed to be depoliticizing (Ferguson 1990). In the following, final, section of this chapter, I expand this archaeology of atomization. Specifically, I discuss conditions of confinement I have not already covered, selective and punitive compliance with Brazilian law and international standards, and attributes of the prison population that are conducive to high levels of staff control. How do these elements intersect with ideas about gender and the present absence of the commission-faction carceral form?

Feminina’s Gendered Regime of Imprisonment

Following the 2010 interdiction of the physical plant that had housed Feminina since 1990, the whole organization – presas and all – was transplanted to an adjacent facility (the former site of COP). Though the relocation was supposed to be temporary, renovations dragged on indefinitely. Crucially, Feminina’s ‘new’ building – only two years younger than the condemned facility – does not represent a significant infrastructural improvement. Its state-of-repair is poor and its design is worse from the perspective of prisoners and their allies. Figure 19, an image captured from news coverage of a minor rebellion that erupted shortly after my departure from the field, shows an overhead view of the ‘new’ Feminina (heretofore “Feminina”).

141

(B)

(A)

Figure 21. Image of a rebellion by presas 'temporarily' confined in COP which shows the patio and narrow overhang (under which prisoners and visitors congregate to escape the elements). The Portico (B) runs in front of the galleries’ entrances. The Patio (A) may only be accessed by one of two Feminina groups – “condenadas” (sentenced convicts) and “processadas” (women who have been preventatively detained pending trial – at a time.

Feminina is a two-story building that contains four connected yet relatively distinct areas: the main entrance and reception foyer; an administrative hallway; a security base; and “dentro” (the cellblock/patio area where presas spend the vast majority of their time). To enter or exit dentro, a guard stationed in the security base must unlock a heavy barred gate. Just beyond this gate is the open-air patio (fig. 21 – A). The side of the patio featuring the portico (fig. 21 – B) abuts two tiers of galleries. Each structurally identical gallery is accessed by a single, lockable door. Through this door is a small common area dominated by an immoveable concrete table with attached benches. Two passages, branching from opposite ends of the common area, lead to cells and shower rooms. Cells are locked overnight. Each one contains a built-in concrete bunk bed and a bucket-toilet. Although cells are designed to accommodate two prisoners they are frequently occupied by three or four; ‘extra’ presas sleep on the floor, preferably but not always on a mattress.

Feminina, like other Brazilian prisons, is characterized by a notable dearth of human and material resources (Darke 2013a, 2013b; Human Rights Watch 1998). The institution provides an inadequate and unreliable supply of mattresses, uniforms, water, hygiene products, food, etc. and does not permit visitors to bridge these shortages to the extent observed at PLB. Whereas Brazilian prisoners generally endure conditions of confinement that are poor by international standards, these hardships often give rise to ameliorative solidarities, compromises, compensations, and improvisations. Resultant regimes are crafted by both state agents and prisoners and tend to be negotiable. Feminina represents a notable exception to these patterns; its inmates essentially endure an unmitigated version of the criminal justice system’s shortcomings.

142

Feminina’s harsh regime can be partially accounted for by the absence of a commission that would negotiate with state actors and secure certain compensatory prerogatives. At the same time, its especially harsh regime is an obstacle to solidarity. This vicious circle leaves presas in a worsening bind.

Related to the absence of a commission, is the relative weakness of Feminina’s economy. In addition to their more laudable pursuits, commissions tend to traffic drugs. Perhaps, then, it is unsurprising that there is no real drug market within Feminina. Although some illegal drugs (e.g. crack-cocaine) inevitably trickle inside, these occasions stand out and elicit a stern reaction from prison staff. For at least a year (2011), Feminina staff managed to prevent the establishment of a steady supply of contraband – including crack and cell phones.155 Notwithstanding problems associated with the drug trade (i.e. indebtedness, addiction, and violence), without the influx of cash it brings, the whole prison economy suffers. Low levels of capital circulation mean there are few opportunities for destitute presas to earn money that would allow them to supplement meager institutional provisions. One of the few opportunities imprisoned women have to make a pittance is by selling their allocated time on the pay phone to others.

Feminina’s floundering economy also suffers from the fact that a significant proportion of its prisoners are “extremely poor.” In many cases, presas’ families are indigent or their ties to family have been strained/severed leaving them without a source of support. In contrast, at PLB, a sizeable faction of relatively affluent presos can afford to hire others to perform services such as cooking, cleaning, and laundry (as well as illicit tasks). The weakness of Feminina’s economy, and the immiseration of presas, is captured by the palpable excitement surrounding the arrival of estrangeiras (foreigners). Foreign prisoners are generally international drug mules who have been arrested at the airport with luggage. The prisoner and her belongings are then delivered to Feminina. Although foreigners’ belongings are stored in the administrative wing of the prison, select items may be requested. Foreigners’ suitcases are usually brimming with things that desperate presas covet (e.g. shoes, underwear, bras, cosmetic and hygiene products, as well as clothing that could be donned for trial or upon release). Moreover, new foreign presas – who

155 Crack-cocaine is the main drug of concern at Feminina. Rumours circulate that staff strategically permit some marijuana consumption by prisoners.

143 may or may not speak Portuguese – tend to be disoriented, alone, and in-the-market for assistance.156 Thus, the arrival of a foreigner represents a rare influx of value and opens up exchange possibilities which, otherwise, are quite rare. An exceptional yet revealing instance of this dynamic has become a favorite story told and retold by pessoal de Feminina. The protagonists of this story are a Brasileira and an estrangeira who forged a special bond during their time in prison. After their respective releases, the Brasileira migrated to Spain to become the live-in employee of her relatively affluent friend. The Brasileira was also joined by her daughter (who had become the god-daughter of the Spanish woman). This trio is said to have lived happily ever after.

The relocation of Feminina has meant everyone involved has to contend with a new architecture and arrangement of bodies in space. Notably, the new site – originally designed to operate as a liminal sorting bay where sentenced presos entering the prison system would be held pending evaluation and the creation of an individualized sentence plan – offers little in the way of common activity areas. The fact that this building was meant to function as a support institution confining a transient population at a liminal phase of their carceral trajectory may explain why, with the exception of an empty concrete patio, there are no spaces for people to congregate near the galleries. In order to reach classrooms, workshops, and a large auditorium, presas must be released from dentro, handcuffed,157 and then escorted a considerable distance (approx. 100 meters), through the administrative corridor. In fact, these ‘programming’ spaces are mainly located within the partially-condemned former site of Feminina. Before the relocation, without rigmarole, guards could open a couple of gates to grant unescorted presas access to these spaces (de Beer 2010, 24). In contrast, Feminina’s new bricolage form necessitates an additional expenditure of effort on the part of guards who had already perceived the organization to be understaffed. Another important factor contributing to the production of scarcity (of human resources) is the present absence of commissions at Feminina.

156 Sometimes exchanges between foreign and national presas resemble extortion (negative reciprocity). 157 A regulation requiring that all presas be handcuffed when outside “dentro” was implemented during my fieldwork. The typed memo appeared in the guards’ base at the entrance to dentro. Initially, this policy encountered some resistance from staff and volunteers who felt that it was neither realistic, given the scarcity of human and material resources, nor necessary in all cases, given their understandings and expectations of this (female) prison population.

144

State actors tasked with maintaining order in overcrowded, understaffed Brazilian prisons have increasingly come to count on “inmate governance” (Darke 2013a, 2013b). In Bahia, the challenge of dealing with conflicts among prisoners is largely passed on to commissions and their leaders (Lourenço and Almeida 2013, 6). In the 1990s, the emergence and consolidation of Bahia’s first major commission-faction – now known as the Comando da Paz (CP) – ushered in a phase of relative calm that mutually benefited state agents and prisoners. Prison staff encountered an institutional actor that controlled rivalries and violence within the prison environment and prisoners were able to do time in a more predictable, less violent milieu (throughout much of the twentieth century it had been common for prisoners to be exposed to the violence of their peers as well as torture at the hands of staff) (Lourenço and Almeida 2013, 4). Moreover, like its predecessors (viz. Rio’s Comando Vermelho and São Paulo’s Primeiro Comando da Capital), the CP lobbied for improved conditions of confinement. At PLB, it is hard to imagine how the current system – characterized by minimal guard oversight of, and interference with, prisoners’ daily affairs – could be sustained without the governance contributions of commissions. Arguably, high-level decisions regarding the allocation of state resources to Bahia’s prison system are shaped by the thinkable possibility of inmate governance (and the presumption that commissions exist). How then is Feminina’s regime operable in this context?

At Feminina, there is very little reliance upon inmate governors. Standard guarding duties are not outsourced to prisoners, a practice that has been well documented in Rio (Darke 2013a, 2013b). Nor does a commission enforce an “inmate code” that maintains order within the unit. Instead, presas are primarily governed by staff. This is facilitated by a relatively high staff-to-inmate ratio (see table 3) which is more an artifact of the sex/gender gap in criminal offending than an attempt to subject female prisoners to greater oversight than their male counterparts. After all, the male prison population is assumed to be more violent and capable of fomenting opposition to the reigning order (of the prison as well as the urban landscape). The relatively small size and unintentional, cobbled-together quality of Feminina’s physical plant is also inadvertently compatible with a model of “staff governance” even in the face of ostensible understaffing. At Feminina, the offices of the diretora, vice-diretora, and heads of security are located close enough to the reception foyer and the patio/cellblock area that these figures – the vast majority of whom have risen through the ranks of guards – are privy to any incidents that might occur. They

145 regularly join rank-and-file guards on the frontlines, dealing directly with prisoners and visitors. Within the compound, it is unusual for top administrators/managers to take such an active role in the daily affairs of the prison, personally handling even minor issues and meeting one-on-one with prisoners. Particular configurations of actors/actants create a scenario in which staff are able to maintain order without governing through a unified inmate social system.

Across the compound PLB’s sprawling collection of stand-alone modules and separate support buildings disaggregates staff and reinforces a fairly rigid division of labour. Even ordinary guards who work in a single, assigned module have little-to-no direct contact with prisoners. Throughout the day, presos have independent access to numerous common areas located dentro which are totally invisible to guards. Their incredible level of intra-carceral mobility and capacity to ‘freely’ associate, has implications for intramural and extramural relatedness. And, as outlined above, these conditions of confinement – premised upon inmate governance – enable presos to accomplish a desirable form of masculinity.

Table 3: Prison Population, Overcrowding, and Staffing Data

Prison Number of Ratio of Inmates Name of Prison Capacity Population Guards to Guards

PLB 1342 1030 74 18.1:1

Feminina 214 128 28 7.6:1 Source: Sindicato dos Servidores Penitenciários do estado da Bahia 2013

Conversely, presas’ relative immobility and lack of unmediated access to differentiated and dignified spaces of congregation, combined with other factors examined in this chapter, constrain their ability to perform respectable femininity and build unity. Religious volunteers who visited presas before and after the organization’s relocation, lament the loss of a quiet spot for group discussion and prayer. Instead, haphazard religious encounters occur on the bustling, uncomfortable patio. On both rainy and sunny days, we sought limited shelter under the portico. Some of us stood, others sat on concrete stairs ascending to the second tier of galleries. Presa- participants drifted in and out; songs and conversations were regularly disrupted by quotidian

146 comings and goings.158 Religious visitation was also undermined in a further respect: only half of presas were able to fully participate at any given time. Although the various religious groups visited on a weekly basis, their congregants could only attend fortnightly gatherings. This relatively recent deprivation and its raison d’être exemplify “compliance with a vengeance.”159

Feminina, as I discuss in more detail below, contains a consequential mixture of provisional (remand) and sentenced prisoners. Such mixture is problematized on the grounds that it exposes people whose guilt has not yet been confirmed in the eyes of the law to a supposedly hardened criminal element. The United Nations’ Minimum Rules for Treatment of Inmates states:

Inmates that fall into different categories shall be lodged in different facilities or in separate sections within the facilities, subdivided by sex and age, background, reasons for imprisonment and the treatment that is to be given to them. In other words, a) men and women shall be confined, wherever possible, in different facilities. Any facility that takes both men and women shall have a completely separate section for women; b) persons held on preventive detention shall be kept separate from those who are serving sentences…

Separation has long been an obsession of penal reformers. The “separate system” was introduced in the nineteenth-century to purify the prison environment by housing inmates in individual, separate cells (Rothman 1971). Historically, penal separation was understood as a technology through which criminals could be reformed.160 Cellular design was understood to create opportunities for reflection while reducing the possibility of moral contagion. Consistent with this logic, mixture of remand and sentenced prisoners is widely condemned as both

158 On special occasions (e.g. Christmas Mass; an evangelical baptism) chairs, a tent, an inflatable baptismal pool, etc. were brought in and set up on the patio. 159 As stated in the introduction to this dissertation, “compliance with a vengeance” builds on a term used by critics of the parity model of penality: “equality with a vengeance” (Daly and Chesney-Lind 1988, 525). Similar to how the parity model of justice emphasizes treating women offenders as if they were men, particularly when the outcome is punitive, at Feminina, I observed a pattern of highly selective (and strategic) compliance with broader state, national, and international penal regulations. For the most part, the reforms that effected (uneven and partial) compliance tended to increase the power of staff and the repression of prisoners. 160 Today, in keeping with the general decline of rehabilitation as a primary objective of imprisonment, separation serves mainly to stem further criminalization and to achieve narrowly-defined managerial objectives such as order maintenance and legal compliance.

147

“criminogenic” and unjust. Separation of these “distinct” classes is required by Brazilian law.161 Although this requirement frequently goes unmet, separation is idealized as a progressive reform which would improve conditions of confinement and carceral outcomes.

Extralegality and illegality are institutionalized within the Brazilian criminal justice system, including its prisons. Feminina is no exception; many of its perpetual practices violate the law. Yet, mixture of provisional and sentenced presas did become a target of reform in the wake of the relocation. This fraught period in the organization’s history happened to coincide with a federal election. Prison directors are political appointees whose jobs are threatened by institutional crises, bad press, and election cycles. A group of guards discussing their relationship with PLB’s director summed up the situation: “He is the train and we are the tracks.” This metaphor captures the fact that directors come and go while unionized guards remain. Heading into the federal election, the then diretora of Feminina – a former member of the Civil Police force – found herself in an incredibly precarious position. The upheaval of indictment and relocation presented a number of challenges but also provided her with an opportunity to establish a different order within a new carceral environment. She began instituting a number of reforms with which she claimed the legitimacy of Feminina as well as her tenure as its director. By bringing certain Feminina practices in line with the letter of the law she was demonstrating her desire and capacity to implement and direct a modern, rationalized, and legal regime of imprisonment – an exception within Brazil’s carceral landscape.

Successfully implemented reforms chipped away at presas’ entrenched prerogatives and helped Feminina’s administration achieve narrow managerial objectives. Whether or not these reforms furthered official goals of “resocialization” and protecting society, or represented a substantive improvement in terms of recognizing prisoners’ rights, it is certain they enhanced repression. In Brazil, the state’s consistent failure to meet its legal obligations toward its prisoners; the insufficiency of institutional resources including staff, infrastructure, and supplies; as well as the incompleteness of bureaucratic rationalization and consolidation of legal authority has traditionally left space for prisoners to secure certain compensatory prerogatives. At Feminina,

161 The Lei executiva penal (Lei n. 7.210/84) states that “O preso provisório ficará separado do condenado por sentença transitada em julgado”.

148 however, the prohibition of customary practices within a regime characterized by extralegality, scarcity, and infrastructural inadequacies amounts to an increasingly punitive regime. This is illustrated by the reform that separated provisional and sentenced presas.

To redress the ‘problem’ of mixture, these classes of prisoner were separated by gallery and permitted to access the patio at different times of the day. Prior to the reform, cell doors remained open from 8am to 5pm and presas were ‘free’ to spend time “sunbathing” on the patio. The separation of groups has meant that presas now spend half of the day locked-up in their own segregated galleries. It also means that staff do not have to contend with the whole prison population congregating together in one place. Approximately half of the population remains locked-up and incapacitated at all times. The day is divided into two shifts: morning and afternoon. When sentenced women have access to the patio, provisórias remain confined and vice versa. Each day, shift assignments are reversed so that women alternate between morning and afternoon shifts. It is this new ‘reformed’ system that has halved presas’ opportunities to participate in religious visits. Presas may only join volunteers if it is their group’s turn on the patio. Despite numerous requests from volunteers and presas, prison staff refuse to individually release presas to attend weekly services and other gatherings. Chronic understaffing is cited as an explanation for this refusal.

This new “compliant” mode of separating presas and organizing their time/mobility has had a significant impact of Feminina’s regime. For the purposes of this chapter, I identify three consequential implications. Firstly, this reform constrains presas’ agency and compounds the gendered effects of coercive separation entailed by imprisonment. Although a key contention of this thesis is that prisons ought not be conceptualized as “worlds apart,” Feminina’s regime separates presas from extra-carceral actors/actants far more than PLB’s regime. Assessing rather than assuming this dimension of confinement reveals gendered difference. When presas are confined to their galleries – for half of each day – they do not have access to Feminina’s single pay phone. This deprivation has clear implications for performances of respectable femininity. It is very difficult to mother from a distance without the means to reliably communicate with children and their caregivers. Inability to participate in children’s’ quotidian lives and contribute to their criação (upbringing) and educação (education – understood broadly) means that imprisonment is more likely to entail effective unrelatedness. Notably, it is also difficult for presas confined within galleries to communicate with staff and make requests in a timely

149 fashion. For example, a provisória scheduled to be in court can be ‘forgotten’ in her gallery.162

Secondly, although separation of provisional and sentenced presas is not absolute (gallery doors have small openings through which prisoners can communicate and pass items) this reform hardens boundaries between groups thereby undermining solidarity. Sentenced prisoners often characterize provisórias as disruptive degenerates – desperate drug addicts who cause problems and who cannot be trusted. Solidarity is further undermined within groups whose members spend most of their waking and sleeping hours sharing cramped and dismal quarters. With few windows – small holes in thick concrete walls – galleries are dimly lit with little air circulation. The sound of slamming dominos echoes for hours. When trancada (barred, locked), a presa has little else to do but “kill time” (Goifman 2002) and wait. Boredom, frustration, and disappointment breed tension – exacerbated by overcrowding – which occasionally erupts in outright conflict. And, in the absence of prisoner solidarity and a leader endorsed by a large segment of the population, the task of dispute resolution and order maintenance falls largely to prison staff.163

This brings me to my third and final point. Crucially, the reform in question and the discord it generates increases presas’ level of direct interaction with and dependence upon guards which, in turn, enhances institutional control over inmates. Guards circulate dentro at least three times per day, releasing and confining groups of presas. Presas who fail to conform to institutional demands can be punitively left locked up when other cell and gallery mates are released. While

162 Gallery interiors are distant from and invisible to prison staff charged with overseeing the population. Most of the time, guards remain in the security base. This disconnect is exemplified by a conjugal visit experienced by one of Feminina’s few male visitors. When I asked him about his first visita íntima he raised his eyebrows, let out a dramatic sigh, and informed me that he’d been forgotten dentro. At the beginning of his visit he was locked into his companheira’s cell and guards did not return until much later than expected to release him. He explained that this was his first time being confined to a cell and that he felt anxious as he powerlessly awaited the guards’ return. 163 Women struggling within their cell or gallery may request a transfer. Reportedly, however, for such requests to be honoured, the person making the request must be willing to disclose information about rule violations. This deters some from turning to the institution for support. For example, one woman was bothered by the dynamics of her gallery. These dynamics stemmed, in part, from drug use by her gallery-mates. She told me that the security team would not authorize her transfer unless she made a complaint that detailed her gallery-mates’ acquisition and consumption of contraband illegal substances. She refused to do so because she assumed she would face repercussions. All women are not equally deterred. Provisional prisoners, it seems, are especially motivated to curry favour with staff, exchange information, and engage in a form of “embodied surveillance” (McCorkel 2003). At Feminina, personalism is pervasive; the reception a request receives is shaped by the relationship between the specific people involved.

150 this immediate punishment is theoretically available at PLB it is not utilized.164 At Feminina, where time outside the cell/gallery is more limited and actively administered by guards, being “unlocked” comes to be regarded less as an automatic entitlement and more as a parsimoniously meted out “privilege” (Goffman 1961). In this way, presas become habituated to the possibility of “extra” constraint as their ability to resist such repression is progressively undermined with increasing atomization. At Feminina, doors must be manually locked and unlocked. Irregular happenings – a common feature of prison environments (Waldram 2012) – can disrupt established routines leading to the delay or cancellation of scheduled gallery openings. In this context, disruption and uncertainty become routine, fueling stress among women who are already coping with a great deal of emotional strain.

In sum, the separation reform reduced personal autonomy and group solidarity causing presas to experience greater repression and hardship. Of course, the separation reform is but one element within a mutually constitutive assemblage of forces and factors that, together, have disadvantaged pessoal de Feminina. I conclude this section by exploring the significance of a few distinctive attributes of Feminina’s population – namely, it is relatively small; it includes a mixture of different classes of prisoner; and is composed of females. These characteristics, I argue, are connected to a gendered process of discipline through atomization.

In Brazil, there are far fewer women’s prisons than prisons for men. Moreover, women’s prisons are typically smaller in scale, with lower capacities. However, the female incarceration rate is increasing. Between 2000 and 2005, the number of women in Brazilian prisons increased from 10,112 to 20,264; that is, from 4.3 to 5.6% of the total prison population (Walmsley 2006, 3). The limited capacity of extant women’s prisons combined with the rapid growth of the women’s prison population has resulted in overcrowding.

Although overcrowding is an issue affecting prisons throughout all of Brazil, negative effects of overcrowding were particularly pronounced at Feminina. In November 2011, Feminina had a capacity of 96 and imprisoned 119 presas (Conselho Nacional de Justiça 2011). This translates to

164 In rare and extreme circumstances, individual presos are sent, for a period of time, to o seguro, a secure area within the module close to the guards’ base. Prisoners confined to this internal cage are easily observed by guards as well as their fellow prisoners; they are not permitted visitors or granted access to common areas of the module.

151 a superlotação (overcrowding) rate of 23.95% which may be compared to the PLB Module II overcrowding rate of 9.19%.165 Although Feminina’s numbers fluctuate, overcrowding levels are consistently high and often higher than rates at PLB.166 At the level of experience, Feminina’s overcrowding manifests in densely occupied cells/galleries; smaller portion sizes at meal time; and extremely limited access to the single pay phone. Not only are the “pains of overcrowding” markedly severe here, they are not mitigated by a conciliatory, relatively lenient regime.

A few hundred meters across the compound, however, PLB’s negotiated regime ameliorates such pains. In striking contrast to Feminina, at PLB cell doors are unlocked all day (7am to 5pm), every day. After 5pm, a “faxina” (cleaner – see Darke 2014) authorized by the commission is permitted to remain outside of his cell, ostensibly to clean common spaces. In addition to tidying up the patio, the faxina is able to run errands and make deliveries between cells. And crucially, when presos are trancados, illicit cell phones are widely available. Ultimately, PLB presos spend less time confined in their cells than presas and are generally able to engage in more meaningful, convivial activities when they are locked in (i.e. participating in inter-cell exchanges facilitated by the cleaner; cooking and sharing food; and using contraband cell phones to communicate by call, text message, and online social media platforms).167

Overcrowding at Feminina is related to the aforementioned fact that this prison, designated as a “conjunto,” confines both sentenced and provisional prisoners. In Brazil, while the absolute number of prisoners is increasing rapidly, the proportion of pre-trial detainees (provisórios) is also growing. Between 1995 and 2009, the total number of prisoners more than doubled and the number of pre-trial detainees more than quadrupled; by 2009 44% of Brazil’s prison population was being held in pre-trial custody (IBA 2010). Today, in Brazil, there is widespread agreement that the current criminal justice and penal systems are dysfunctional (IBA 2010). In particular,

165 As of December 21, 2010. In general, PLB’s overcrowding rate tends to hover at around 10%. 166 For example, in 2010, I estimate an overcrowding rate of 67.18%; in 2013 an overcrowding rate of 40.19% (SINSPEB 2013); and, in 2014, a rate of 46.96%.

167 The short vignette with which I open this dissertation – featuring Barbara and Sandro’s efforts to recede the carceral/non-carceral threshold through perpetual telephonic connectivity – conveys the significance of presos’ virtual (telephonically mediated) connectedness to people “on the street” and demonstrates why I conceptualize cell phones, primarily, as ‘vectors of relatedness’ (Hutchinson 2000) rather than criminogenic contraband.

152 the situation of pre-trial detainees has been described as a “crisis” (IBA 2010). A huge backlog of cases has developed in the court system. In this context, detainees can wait for months, or even years, before their case comes to trial.

Many remand prisoners have been arrested and subjected to preventative detention for relatively minor offences. Although Brazil’s 1988 Constitution specifies that the judiciary is duty-bound to treat unsentenced defendants (réus) as innocent and thus employ preventative detention as a last resort, courts systematically violate the presumption of innocence. Judges routinely detain people accused of minor offences such as petty theft. In some jurisdictions over a third of those detained on this charge spend more than 100 days in custody. Moreover, time spent on remand for this charge often exceeds the length of custodial sentences that are eventually handed down (Barreto 2007 as cited by IBA 2010, 8). 168

The crisis of pre-trial detention bears down intensely upon presas of Feminina. As of August 2014, Feminina confined 155 provisional and 39 sentenced presas (PLB’s population is composed, exclusively, of sentenced prisoners). Whereas the state of Bahia has expanded the Mata Escura penal compound to absorb the influx of male provisórios – viz. by constructing the Cadeia Pública (the new prison which received COP after the Feminina relocation) – the Bahian

168 While I was conducting field research, a new law was enacted (12.403/2011 – July, 2011) with the clear objective of reducing the provisional penal population. The legislation changes several provisions of the Penal Procedure Code (CPP) (Viz. Title IX relating to prisons and precautionary (cautelare) measures), bringing it more in line with the Federal Constitution of 1988. This legal event generated a great deal of buzz among my informants and Brazilians in general. According to the new law, prisão provisória (preventative detention) should only occur in exceptional cases. It gives judges new options – called medidas cautelares (precautionary measures) – to supplement and substitute for preventative detention (i.e. house arrest, electronic monitoring, and a travel ban). The law also states that individuals arrested for crimes that carry a custodial penalty of less than four years can be released on bail for the duration of the investigation and trial. The vast majority of crimes have become “bailable”, with the notable exceptions of crimes of racism; “ação de grupos armados”; and “crimes hediondos” (including drug-related offences). Unfortunately, reports from Brazil suggest that these reforms have not been particularly effective and that a “lógica do encarceramento” prevails in the country (IAB). Most judges have not embraced the use of alternatives to preventative detention (O Correio). According to Flávio Caetano, the Secretário de Reforma do Judiciário do Ministério da Justiça, often judges do not apply precautionary measures because they do not feel confident about their effectiveness, due to lack of necessary infrastructure to implement the measures (O Correio). This feeds a vicious cycle whereby the lengthy and drawn-out nature of Brazil’s trial and appeals process leads to mounting public demand for immediate imprisonment and certain punishment (IAB 2010, 8). In response to societal prejudices and anxieties about certain types of crime, judges then use their broad discretionary powers to order the preventative detention of particular categories of people who also tend to have limited access to a strong legal defence.

153 prison system does not feature separate prisons for sentenced and unsentenced prisoners.169 Importantly I am not advocating for an increase in the state’s carceral capacity vis-à-vis women. Rather, I am highlighting an asymmetry in the mode of incarcerating men and women that, I will show, contributes to the foreclosure of a commission-faction carceral form at Feminina and the concomitant consolidation of a particularly harsh and repressive regime.

At Feminina, the presence of a significant number of provisional prisoners contributes to, and compounds, processes of atomization that are already at play. In part, this is because provisional prisoners are in a liminal phase of a carceral rite of passage. They have not been sentenced so there is a great deal of uncertainty (and some optimism) surrounding the duration of their incarceration. Provisional prisoners tend to focus intently upon the status of their case as it slowly creeps through the dysfunctional criminal justice system. This focus is part of a broader extra-mural orientation characteristic of betwixt-and-between provisórias, many of whom are in the throes of navigating the fallout from their relatively recent arrests. Disrupted routines, relationships, and life projects are top of mind and, accordingly, a great deal of energy is expended on deciphering the situation, opposing the criminal label (Becker 1963), and mourning or seeking to mitigate the losses entailed by arrest/ imprisonment (see Fleetwood 2014; and Marchetti 2002).

Generally speaking, there is not a system of plea-bargaining in Brazil170 so most cases are resolved through trials. The trial process – from indictment to sentencing – involves a number of

169 Notably, even prior to prior to Cadeia Pública’s opening (in 2010), three other prisons in the compound had already confined male provisional prisoners. Presidio Salvador (est. 1976), has been dedicated to the confinement of male provisional prisoners for decades. The Unidade Especial Disciplinar (est. 2005), was built to contain male prisoners deemed to pose a special security threat. Its population includes both sentenced and provisional prisoners. The Centro de Observação Penal (COP), discussed above, evolved beyond its official mandate to incarcerate male provisional and sentenced prisoners that would be especially vulnerable within the general prison population (i.e. ex- police and ex-prison guards). 170 However, there are two possibilities that run counter to the general rule. First, for crimes punishable by custodial sentences of less than 2 years, the prosecutor and the suspect may reach an agreement whereby the suspect accepts the proposition of a restriction and the case is dismissed (transaction). Second, the prosecutor may offer a “suspension of the process” when the statutory minimum penalty is not more than 1 year and the defendant is not accused of another crime. The prosecutor also considers the defendant’s character and the circumstances under which the offence was committed. If the defendant and his/her lawyer accept, the judge will suspend the process, and, for a period of 2-4 years, the defendant, on a form of probation, will submit to some conditions. In the end, the procedure may be dismissed. Except in these cases, the Brazilian criminal code does not allow summary procedure even when the defendant pleads guilty (Mendonça 2013).

154 steps. First, a judge assesses whether the accusation has probable cause. If it is found to, the trial will begin with a summons for the defendant to present an initial reply written by his/her lawyer. On the basis of the defence’s response, the judge can summarily acquit. Without an acquittal, a hearing is scheduled in which victims, witnesses, and expert witnesses will testify. Testimony is followed by judicial interrogation. Then, the prosecutor and defence make their closing arguments. At the end of the hearing(s) the judge should pass the sentence (Mendonça 2013). Although the hearing is supposed to occur in a continuous and unified manner, this rarely occurs (Mendonça 2013, 69). Instead hearings are usually fragmented into a series of separate audiences with the judge – for the prosecution’s witnesses, for the defence’s witnesses, for the judicial interrogation, and for final sentencing. These audiences can be delayed and rescheduled for any number of reasons (e.g. difficulty locating witnesses). At Feminina, I habitually asked research participants how scheduled audiences/hearings had gone. All too often, they reported that these had been rescheduled. And, with alarming frequency, provisórias said they were unsure of the outcome because they had not actually attended the proceedings (though the defendant’s presence is mandated by law). They often ‘failed’ to attend because “a escolta/bonde nunca chegou” (the escort/transportation never arrived”). The cumulative result of this system is a trial that drags on for months and a sense of confusion and impotence among provisórias. At Feminina, this translates into an (interrupted) orbit of anxious remand presas back-and-forth between the prison and the Forum (courthouse).

This experience of coercive mobility, to and from the Forum (located in Salvador’s busy city center), arguably contributes to the extra-mural orientation of many remand prisoners. Trips bring presas – who have shed their detested uniforms and momentarily donned coveted street clothes – into proximity of familiar places and people. Defendants’ families set up vigils at the Forum even though only those slated to testify are permitted to enter the judge’s chamber. Multiple generations wait awkwardly in officious corridors, straining to interpret happenings and snippets of overheard conversations. When the defendant exits the judge’s chamber, relatives spring forward, desperate to connect. Often, however, these moments are fleeting and frustrating when defendant-prisoners are quickly escorted away. Subjects of incarceration familiar with this routine hurry out of the courthouse to a corner of the building overlooking the underground parking garage. Pressed up against metallic slats of a high fence, they watch as the prison transport van departs, returning their relative to Feminina. I accompanied several families to

155 audiences. In each case, there was a prevailing sense of possibility that maybe the hearing would come to a favourable conclusion and the defendant would be released. Although these hopes were rarely, if ever, realized, people’s sense of optimism is not entirely misguided.

The Brazilian criminal justice system grants formal rights to criminal suspects that “provide extensive opportunities for those who can afford private lawyers to challenge the system” (IBA 2010, 9). Unfortunately, over 80 per cent of prisoners cannot afford to hire a private lawyer and “the constitutional guarantee that everyone accused of a crime has a right to legal assistance is routinely violated” (IBA 2010). Even when the assistance of a defence lawyer is secured, many defence lawyers offer only a cursory defence due, in part, to time limitations (IBA 2010).171 These injustices are acutely felt by research participants who recoil at lawyer fees – exorbitant by the standards of the urban periphery – and complain incessantly about lawyers’ negligence and ineffectiveness (sometimes framed as outright fraud).

Feminina’s repressive regime – and the lack of collective resistance to it – cannot be understood without reference to these broader dynamics. The judicial issues described above render many of Feminina’s operations extralegal, in violation of official policies, and potentially appealable on legal grounds. Insofar as Feminina’s regime rests on a precarious foundation of predictable constitutional violation, many practices of imprisonment enacted in this context represent discretionary and informal responses to a perpetual state of exception. And, this gap between the legal and the actual is a crucial component of Feminina’s distinctive model of governance.

The diretora of FEMININA, charged with maintaining institutional order in the face of rampant irregularity and mounting overcrowding, has the ability to intervene in individual presas’ cases, expediting their release. She can personally call the judge overseeing a case and provide details about a presas’ good conduct and unique circumstances in order to elicit a judicial decision that would result in release. In 2004, an amendment to article 5 of the Federal Constitution (45/2004, inciso LXXVIII) established the fundamental right to a “duração razoável do processo”

171 Research examining 6,500 cases of robbery in São Paulo (1999-2000) reveals that, in approximately 98% of cases, defense lawyers did not file for the provisional release of clients arrested em flagrante (in the act) and held in pre-indictment detention (IBA 2010, 9). Moreover, in 21.8% of cases, defence lawyers were not present for defendants’ first appearance before a judge (though, technically, this absence should render all subsequent proceedings null and void). In 96% of the cases analysed, the defendants were convicted (IBA 2010, 9).

156

(reasonable duration of legal proceedings). Although this amendment has been criticized as “vague and imprecise” – the exact length of time (prazo) a remand prisoner may “reasonably” be confined has not been specified – it can be successfully mobilized to decarcerate. Through the course of my research at Feminina, I became accustomed to the sudden “disappearance” of provisórias who were released, unexpectedly, before their trial concluded. When I asked after these women I invariably heard they were gone because of “relaxamento de pena” or “excesso de prazo.”172 The diretora took pride in the role she played in these releases. She worked with the public defender assigned to Feminina (who is supposed to work there two days per week) and local judges presiding over her prisoners’ cases to (selectively) encourage, support, and expedite “excesso de prazo” appeals. Because no official remand time limit exists, a prazo’s reasonableness or excess is determined on a case-by-case basis. The diretora was tremendously influential in this regard.

The diretora’s capacity to intervene in legal proceedings and effect the release of provisional prisoners is just one example of the power this figure holds as a function of the irregularities that reign at Feminina. She can also ensure that transportation and escorts are actually available to transfer a particular prisoner to a hearing on time. Within this centralized, personalistic173 regime, prisoners’ rights become gift-like and imbued with the identity of the diretora. To curry favour with the director, presas must comport themselves according to her preferences which includes engaging in “embodied surveillance” (McCorkel 2003).

In contrast to panoptic surveillance (Foucault 1977)174 or the minimal state monitoring that occurs in a “nonopticon,”175 embodied surveillance is continuous (ever present); verifiable

172 These phrases refer to a recognized ground for release, namely “relaxamento de prisão preventativa por excesso de prazo.” 173 Personalism, put forward as an explanation for Brazil’s “democracy without equity,” is characterized by hierarchical networks based on particularistic exchange and affective ties (Weyland 1996, 33; see Hess 1995; Rebhun 1999; Banck 1998; Wagley 1960). 174 Surveillance, at both Feminina and PLB, differs from the model of surveillance Foucault identified in his analysis of the eighteenth-century penitentiary system. Bentham’s Panopticon represented a style of surveillance that was continuous, visible, and yet unverifiable (1977, 201). Through this style of surveillance, Foucault argued, bodies are made docile as the institution of the prison is inserted into the mind of each prisoner. 175 In a paper, “What would it matter if everything Foucault said about prison were wrong,” Alford (2000) juxtaposes Foucault’s (1977) account of how carceral power works with his own findings on the operations of a maximum-security prison in the U.S., which he characterizes as a “nonopticon.” In a “nonopticon,” guards do not

157

(though verification may occur after the fact); intrusive (it has access to public behavior as well as more intimate exchanges); and, crucially, is conducted by an observer who is known to the observed (McCorkel 2003, 64). In order for surveillance to be continuous and intrusive in the architectural and organizational context of Feminina, presas must monitor one another and report rule violations to staff. The physical layout of Feminina, the nonexistence of cameras, and guard shortages mean that goings-on within galleries/cells are not constantly monitored by staff. Nonetheless, staff tend to discover – and react swiftly and severely – when rule violations do occur. For example, when one presa obtained a contraband cell phone it was rapidly confiscated and she was punished. Punitive responses by staff verify not only the effectiveness of the surveillance system but also the involvement of other prisoners in the work of observation and denunciation. This dynamic breeds distrust and resentment among prisoners. Although the identity of “caguetes” (snitches) might be deduced, and such a revelation has the potential to disrupt the order of the prison, the kinds of confusion that manifest tend to solidify the power of staff over prisoners by undermining prisoner solidarity. Confrontations between presas – who are expected to be less violent than presos – are not of major concern to staff charged with ensuring the “jail doesn’t bleed.”176 In short, the kinds of conflicts that manifested at Feminina mainly destabilized order at the bottom, not the top, of the organizational hierarchy. And, if anyone threatened to truly challenge the authority of the director (e.g. by fomenting collective resistance), they were summarily transferred to a prison located in the interior of the state.

Extralegalities and irregularities of confinement endemic to Feminina empower the director to selectively extend support, privileges, and even rights to individual presas.177 Irregularity thus incentivizes presas’ participation in a system of interpersonal, embodied surveillance while, at the same time, lending imprisonment an air of unpredictability and arbitrariness which helps shield informants from retribution. Prisoners can only speculate why Fulana (so and so) was

spend much time observing prisoners because, as long as they control the entrances, they don’t have to. This characterization could be applied to PLB where, as long as there is no “confusion,” guards do not closely monitor or seek to control how presos pass time. 176 As mentioned in note 121, among the leading slogans of Bahian penal procedure is the recurring saying: “a cadeia não deve sangrar” (the jail shouldn’t bleed). This saying reflects the vision of order aspired to by many state agents – not one based on visibility, classification, regimentation, and discipline but prevention of attention-grabbing violence. 177 I have described how the director gains influence vis-à-vis provisional prisoners. A parallel process occurs with sentenced prisoners hoping to move through Brazil’s dynamic system of progressive security-classifications.

158 released and Fulana was transferred. Additionally, high levels of participation in this (informal) system combine with the absence of a strong countervailing force – namely, a commission enforcing a “law of silence” (Penglase 2009) – to contribute to its normalization. By the end of my fieldwork, Feminina security personnel were holding regular one-on-one “drop-in” sessions outside of the patio/cellblock area – an ideal opportunity for information to be shared and individual deals to be brokered. I was shocked to see presas queue – in full view of fellow prisoners – for an opportunity to pass through the guards’ base and meet privately with high ranking staff to discuss “anything” of concern.

The easy institutionalization of this regular confab stands in glaring contrast to the “staff-inmate divide” (Goffman 1961) that structures sociality and the regime of imprisonment at PLB. At PLB, it is not safe for guards to go dentro when prisoners are out of their cells. This clearly restricts their ability to monitor day-to-day activities. At the same time, the commission prevents ordinary prisoners from mixing with staff. Presos generally keep their distance from the security base and do not exit and re-enter the module except, for example, in the case of medical emergency. I was unable to interview prisoners outside the patio/cellblock area because this put them at risk.178 When a preso crosses the inside/outside boundary and moves beyond the reaches of the commission’s own system of embodied surveillance,179 he attracts unwanted attention and might be (wrongfully) identified as a snitch (caguete or X9). The axiom that snitches will be seriously harmed shores up the law of silence and reinforces the strict us-them binary cultivated by the commission.

This comparison suggests that the atomization of female prisoners is both a condition and an effect of the embodied surveillance system that reigns at Feminina. For, it is not simply that commissions have organically failed to take root at Feminina. At the first sign of growth they have been systematically weeded out. Staff actively discourage the consolidation of a commission – and maintain a high level of control over the prison population – by cultivating vertical ties with prisoners and insisting upon embodied surveillance. Feminina’s unique brand of

178 In the end, I conducted interviews with PLB prisoners dentro (inside the patio/cellblock area). 179 Arguably, an interpersonal, embodied surveillance system operates at both PLB and Feminina. However, at PLB, intelligence is funnelled to the linha da frente (leadership of the commission) and functions to enhance the power of prisoner organizations and their ability to make claims and defend group interests vis-à-vis the institution.

159 discipline through atomization leaves presas with little choice but to engage in small, highly- individualized struggles to cope with the pains of imprisonment. Presas vie for barely-adequate food rations; attentively await their short, once-a-day turn to use the pay phone; do whatever they can to secure or expedite release; and contribute to the cause of order maintenance to eke out any individual privileges staff might confer to compliant favorites (e.g. a “licence” to sell pastries or do nails during visits).

Importantly, female presas’ responses to Feminina’s regime appear abnormal in light of ideas about how typical prisoners do and should act. Of course, these ideas are based on men’s prisons like PLB. And, although PLB’s regime is particular, it masquerades as universal. In turn, presas’ deviation from the norm is naturalized as a reflection of their ostensibly inferior sex/gender. Feminina’s current director discusses the challenges of running a prison for women: The woman is a being that has some peculiarities, different than men, hormones, premenstrual syndrome, a heightened sensitivity, therefore it is more difficult to deal with [females]. This labour causes much stress, interfering with the psychological wellbeing of staff…

Perhaps Feminina staff are unwilling to entertain the possibility of governing through a unified inmate social system because the notion of female-inmate governance is, on some level, incongruous.

Conclusion: Feminina’s Triple Deviants

Female prisoners, like other prisoners in Brazil, experience considerable deprivation and degradation. However, unlike presos confined within the same penal compound, presas’ ability to collectively mitigate pains of imprisonment is effectively circumscribed. Presas are disciplined – as prisoners and as women – through atomization and the present-absent carceral form of the commission-faction.

Although the regimes of both Feminina and PLB are based on systems of pervasive surveillance, these systems differ in significant ways. At Feminina, presas organize their behaviors on the assumption that they are being observed by staff as well as peers likely to report to staff. They know that cell phones and drugs are readily available at other prisons but not where they are confined. The paucity of these forms of contraband – which also function as vectors of relatedness – is a powerful symbol of the security team’s institutional omniscience and female

160 prisoners’ impotence. Ultimately, presas’ experiences of imprisonment and surveillance at Feminina encourage them to conform to institutional rules; adopt the role of the other (i.e. staff) by monitoring/reporting rule violations; and begin to view themselves – and one another – from the perspective of the institution. That is, the penal regime at Feminina aligns prisoners’ objectives and perceptions with those of the institution, effectively undermining solidarity and collective resistance.180 To navigate (out of) the regime, many presas attempt to position themselves as decent women who “don’t belong here” by differentiating themselves from, and reporting the misdeeds of, fellow prisoners.

As I have shown, ideas about gender shape regimes of visitation/imprisonment in complex ways. Crucially, the distinctive manner in which Feminina operates – and the experiences of pessoal de Feminina (including prison staff) – also reinforce and produce ideas about gender. Patterns peculiar to the penal compound’s only women’s prison seem to reflect the inherent weakness of females and bear out the profound deviance of criminal women. Whereas presos are organized, reliable, self-sufficient, effective, calculating and powerful – running profitable and influential criminal networks from behind bars – presas are disorganized, disloyal, dependent, and degraded. Their disunity, complicity with guards, willingness to snitch, and inability to resist outright repression (and the innumerable indignities this entails), elicit pity, not respect. Impressions of female prisoners’ incompetence, irrationality, and immorality (vis-à-vis the normative inmate code/law of silence) seem to confirm the assumption that women in general, and criminal women in particular, must be controlled in order to avoid confusion and disorder.

In Brazil, the idea that females must control themselves and be controlled by others is central to sex-gender ideology. Insufficient control is attributed to poor socialization and deeply flawed subjects. In this context, the figure of the female prisoner – always already a biological mother or a prospective biological mother – ominously anticipates societal degeneration. Presas are not only deviant citizens (who have broken the law). As criminals (suspected or confirmed), they are also deviant women who have failed to accomplish respectable femininity. Simply put, decent women don’t “do crime” (Fleetwood 2014). And, once already deviant criminalized women end up imprisoned at Feminina, as I have shown, opportunities to (re)establish their respectability are

180 McCorkel (2003) reports similar findings in her study of a U.S. women’s prison.

161 severely circumscribed. Indeed, we might think of presas as “triple deviants” in the sense that, in addition to being regarded as deviant citizens, and gender deviants, they also appear as “deviant criminals” (McCorkel 2003) – or deviant prisoners – in relation to the norm (based on a masculine subject). That is, Feminina’s female prison population ‘fails’ to measure up to the normative baseline model of the Brazilian “society of captives” (Sykes 1958) – characterized, increasingly, by the presence of commission-factions and the capacity to “command” they represent. And, without this carceral form, “compliance with a vengeance” proceeds unopposed, feeding depoliticization and further limiting performances of respectable femininity.

In the following chapter, I consider the case of one particular “triple deviant” – or m(O)ther (Moore 2015a) – preventively detained at Feminina. Through an examination of this woman’s case, I explore connections between gendered practices of imprisonment, unrelatedness, and social expendability.

162

Chapter 3 The penal-welfare complex and the production of expendability Introduction

Together, systems of penality and welfare compose a network of social regulation which, following Garland (1985), I refer to as “the penal-welfare complex.” I surface the sedimented relations expressed by this carceral form through the extended case method (Evens and Handelman 2005; Burawoy 1998; Turner 1957; Gluckman 1958). In light of my role in the social drama analyzed – viz. the ‘disappearance’ of Robison, the toddler-son of Ivete, a presa on remand – this method is appropriate because it “embraces not detachment but engagement as the road to knowledge” taking “as its premise the intersubjectivity of scientist and subject of study” (Burawoy 1998, 4, 5). The extended case method is also well suited to a reflexive probing of the complex, and sometimes subtle, imbrication of penality and welfare. From its beginnings with the Manchester School, this method has “been cognate with complexity in social ordering, with the non-linearity of open-ended social fields, and with recursivity among levels of social ordering” (Evens and Handelman 2005, 185). Indeed, recursivity is a key theme of the following analysis. Finally, the extended case method shifts focus from collecting data about what “ought” to happen, according to official discourses (i.e. policies/laws, reports, formal statements, etc.), to the messy, murky, perpetually unfolding, and inconclusive domain of what “actually” happens (i.e. policy pragmatics).181

The central question explored in this chapter is: how do people become expendable?182 I answer this question by tracing Ivete’s emergent disposability. Her trajectory reveals expendability to be the culmination of two processes: social abandonment and de-kinning. Thus, expendability is not equivalent to “social abandonment”; those who have been socially abandoned must also be effectively de-kinned, or vice versa, before it is appropriate to think of their position in terms of

181 Here, I am adapting Waldram’s helpful notion of “therapeutic pragmatics” which refers to the manner in which “a treatment theory is put into practice in context with actual therapists and inmates, and how the inmates in turn learn, accept or reject, manipulate, and otherwise engage with the therapeutic lessons derived from that theory” (2012, 9). 182 I employ the term “expendability” to allow for a more nuanced understanding of the processes through which people are subjected to social death (see Králová 2015).

163 expendability. Although these processes of differentiation, disconnection, and exclusion are pervasive features of contemporary life, they are particularly acute in the context of intersecting penal and welfare policy pragmatics.

Is expendability, in the final analysis, not primarily a matter of current political-economic arrangements? Social class and the economic field are certainly of paramount importance. However, structures of power and the productive forces of history “have no immediate visibility” (Bourgois and Schonberg 2009, 17) and, consequently, can be hard to grasp ethnographically. Moreover, it is important to avoid economic determinism. Therefore, I have chosen to concentrate on observable processes of social abandonment and de-kinning, considering the links between people in action and structural forces (political, economic, institutional, cultural) without reducing micro-level dynamics to epiphenomena of a ‘true’ object of study.

Expendability: Creating space between lumpenization and social death

By deconstructing expendability, I contribute to the literature on lumpenization – or the human costs of punitive neoliberalization. What becomes of members of the vulnerable, surplus population produced at the interstices of transitioning modes of production? How do some of these members become surplus not only to capitalistic production but to social reproduction at the level of the household?

The neoliberal political-economic model of capitalism has spread, unevenly, across the globe in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, producing growing numbers of seemingly ungovernable indigents (Biehl 2005; Bourgois and Schonberg 2009; Davis 2006; De Giorgi 2006; Ferguson 2006, 39-40; Gledhill 2005; Müller 2012; Wacquant 2003; 2008; 2009; 2010a). Many anthropologists of contemporary Brazil (e.g. Caldeira 2001, 2002; Goldstein 2003; Hecht 1998) have drawn attention to deepening “divisions between the ‘market-able’ and the socially excluded” (Biehl 2005, 21). However, less attention has been paid to household level processes “of valuing and deciding which life is worth living” (Biehl 2005, 22). One notable exception to this lacuna is Scheper-Hughes’ (1993) fine-grained account of mother love, “lifeboat ethics,” and child death in Northeast Brazil. She employs the concept of “everyday violence” to emphasize “the amoral economies and political frameworks that define expendable and dispensable lives

164 versus lives worth saving” (Scheper-Hughes 2015, 268 – emphasis my own). More recently, Biehl has explored similar terrain, employing a notion of “social abandonment.”

Biehl’s ethnography focuses on Vita, an institution in Porto Alegre, Brazil that houses the “abandoned” in exchange for their welfare pensions and, often, funding from the state and/or philanthropic donations. Specifically, he looks at the case of one abandoned resident, Catarina. Although Vita is, ostensibly, a site of rehabilitation, Biehl reveals it to be a “dead end” where people are brought, left, and allowed to die (2005, 36). Biehl characterizes Vita as a zone of social abandonment and provocatively argues that such zones are “emerging everywhere in Brazil’s big cities” (2005, 4). In his reading, “[s]tate and medical institutions as well as families” are complicit in the existence of such zones (36); indeed, the family figures as “a key ‘means and material’ of sociopolitical operations and a central bearer of what emerges as reality” (2005, 141).183 According to Biehl, [t]he family…is increasingly the medical agent of the state, providing and at some times triaging care, and medication has become a key instrument for such deliberate action…Illness becomes the ground on which experimentation and breaks in intimate household relations can occur. Families can dispose of their unwanted and unproductive members, sometimes without sanction, on the basis of individuals’ noncompliance with their treatment protocols. Psychopharmaceuticals are central to the story of how personal lives are recast in this particular moment of socioeconomic transformation and of how people create life chances vis- à-vis what is bureaucratically and medically available to them (2005, 22).

Although mental health and psychopharmaceuticals are key elements in the story (or stories) of Catarina’s disposal, this ethnography suggests that pharmaceutically mediated withdrawals of care are part of a larger gendered pattern of impoverishment, abandonment, and social death. Biehl observes that, by the early 1990s, there were “more mentally ill people on the urban streets than ever, undistinguishable form other leftovers of the country’s unequal and exclusionary social project” (2005, 138-9 – emphasis my own). Expanding beyond the domain of health care, he asserts that social dying

183 The sociopolitical operations emphasized by Biehl include: neoliberalization; democratization (and a concomitant acceleration of claims to human rights and citizenship); mental health reform and deinstitutionalization; the marketization of medicine and the (over)use of psychotropic drugs. In his account, these processes coincide with and condition “a destructuring of kinship ties” (140) and the “local production of social death” (23).

165

…is inseparable from the development of programmed and ideal forms of government and citizenship, community and family life, as well as different modes of structuring subjectivity… the Other’s death is linked to people’s ways of imagining and practicing their lives—if not according to the principle, then guided by priorities of cost effectiveness (142).

Social abandonment, in other words, is a corollary of “neoliberal agency” (Gershon 2011) or “neoliberal subjectivity” (Dent 2012; Moodie 2010, 108).

The idea of a harmful shared subjectivity is also present in Bourgois and Schonberg’s (2009) analysis of homeless heroin injectors in the U.S. The authors draw on a Foucauldian notion of subjectivity184 to construct a theory of “lumpen abuse” whereby “structurally imposed everyday suffering generates violent and destructive subjectivities” (19). The authors redefine “the class category of lumpen as a subjectivity that emerges among population groups upon whom the effects of biopower have become destructive” noting that “…[t]he lumpen subjectivity of righteous dopefiend that is shared by all the Edgewater homeless embodies the abusive dynamics that permeate all their relationships, including their interactions which individuals, families, institutions, economic forces, labor markets, cultural-ideological values, and ultimately their own selves” (19).

The gradual unfolding of expendability that I document in this chapter is not best explained as an outcome of subjectification – neither neoliberal, lumpen, nor carceral.185 While the Other’s social death might be linked to the way subjects of incarceration imagine and practice their lives, it would be misleading to overstate the causal force of their practical understandings. To explain Ivete’s torturous experiences of expendability I turn to the concept of structural violence. The suffering that results from this form of violence is “‘structured’ by historically given (and often economically driven) processes and forces that conspire—whether through routine, ritual, or, as is more commonly the case, the hard surfaces of life—to constrain agency” (Farmer 2004, 40). That is, this a story of agentive constraint and severely structured choices on the part of both the

184 A Foucauldian notion of subjectivity implies a “process of becoming subjected to a power” (Deleuze 1995, 81- 118 as quoted by Bourgois and Schonberg 2009, 19). 185 In part, this is because it is difficult to both grasp and confirm the subjective sensibilities of research participants.

166 abandoned and those who have withdrawn care.186 It is also a story of “masterless” actants (Latour 1996) that engender repression, coercion, incapacitation, and unfreedom. In summary, this contribution to the literature on transforming economies, states, and sociality in the context of democratization and stark inequality shifts attention from subjectivity as a “soul that imprisons the body” (Butler 1997: 86 citing Foucault 1977) to material prisons, disabling policy pragmatics (c.f. Foucault 1981, 136), and “[t]he dull compulsion of economic relations” (Marx 1867, n.p.).

In emphasizing negative effects of power, without denying its productive, positive qualities (Foucault 1991, 194), I employ Biehl’s (2005) notion of abandonment with some modification. Both social abandonment and lumpen abuse importantly illuminate “the ‘letting die,’ the cut between those whose life is to be enhanced and those who are not worth saving as the two sides of biopower” (Das 2008, 345). I build on this scholarship, and Das’ critique of it, by parsing the authorship of this cut. In a review of Vita, Das identifies limitations inherent in Biehl’s notion of abandonment: …though we might use the term ‘abandonment’ for all kinds of processes…it seems to me that the use of a single word obscures the differences between these processes… the way that the state might be said to ‘abandon’ its citizens is not the same as the way in which a family might abandon its unwanted members. The affective forces which must be brought into play to bridge the gap between the classification of someone as ‘unproductive’ and the action that must follow are completely different for the institutions of the state in the form of the welfare bureaucracy or the public hospital (2008, 345 – emphasis my own).

To grasp important differences in the role state actors/actants and families have in effecting exclusion, I propose conceptualizing this outcome as the cumulative result of two connected but analytically distinct processes. The first, “public abandonment,” is defined as a consequence of state approaches to “hopeless cases” – members of the population who appear so far from acquiring the capacity for autonomous conduct that they cannot be effectively governed through the maintenance and promotion of certain forms of individual liberty given the current

186 Wesely, a feminist criminologist employing a “pathways” approach to the theorization of women’s crimes, employs the idea of structured choices to refer to decisions made in a context in which life options are severely constrained, on multiple levels. This notion locates agency firmly within larger structures of inequality and disadvantage (2006, 313).

167

(in)availability of suitable instruments of government (Hindess 2001).187 The second, de- kinning, involves the exclusionary actions of families toward its (once-)members. I have deliberately removed the adjective “unwanted” from this familial equation. While it is possible that some effective unrelatedness might be triggered by family members’ feelings about one another (or an absence of an inclusive impulse), not all de-kinning (Fonseca 2011) takes the form of agentive abandonment. Other catalysts and affective states are certainly at play. In particular, this chapter focuses attention on the role of intersecting penal and welfare policy pragmatics, highlighting instances of effective relatedness that are more compulsory than ‘voluntary’ (even if voluntariness is already limited by subjectification, heavily structured choices, and “bitter compromises”). The domain of the family – like the subjects who people this domain – does not simply register the effects of neoliberalization (Das 2015, 2008; Han 2012, 2008), abusive dynamics, or the carceral.188 My approach to expendability recognizes that relationships – and relatives (subjects) – have some autonomy even if they are not immune to the effects of such structural forces. Penal-welfare interventions mediate relatedness and can function to segregate people from both the public and their families. The role of coercion in de-kinning must be

187 My conceptualization of social abandonment draws on Hindess’ (2001) discussion of the government of unfreedom, in which he suggests that social abandonment is a predictable and perhaps inevitable outcome of the (neo)liberal government of freedom. Hindess’ discussion represents an important rejoinder to the work of governmentality scholars who have adapted Foucault’s account of liberal political reason to analyze neoliberal attempts to conduct the conduct of autonomous individuals. According to Hindess, this “focus on governmental uses of liberty gives liberal political reason far too good a press” because “authoritarian rule… has always played an important part in the government of states committed to the maintenance and defense of individual liberty” (94). He asserts that recourse to authoritarian rule, in certain cases, is a necessary consequence of a liberal view of liberty predicated on the transformation of human sciences and a developmental understanding of both individuals and populations. This scientifically informed developmental understanding means that many people will be seen as not — or not yet — ready for freedom. State agents must then grapple with the problem of governing this remainder. This problem gives rise to at least two strands of authoritarian rule. First, on the basis of certain kinds of expertise, this remainder is sorted into different categories enumerated by Hindess: hopeless cases; subjects to be improved through more or less extended periods of compulsory institutionally administered discipline; and beneficiaries of welfare (members of an already improved population whose condition has been set back and might be improved through minimally invasive measures). Second, these categories are subjected to different modes of rule based on the advice of experts and the availability of resources and suitable technologies. We might think of this allocation in terms of the government-discipline-coercion triangle. Hopeless cases, for example, tend to be violently coerced or malignly neglected. They might be driven off territory they inhabit, exterminated, enslaved, worked to death, or “allowed to die out” (101). 188 In fact, although this chapter focuses on the production of unrelatedness and, ultimately, expendability, this is but one possible outcome. My dissertation, as a whole, shows that lumpenization and social abandonment do not necessarily cause families to expel unproductive and even dangerous members. Throughout the dissertation (viz. chapters 1, 4, and 5) I document what it means for poor families – subjects of incarceration – to care for criminal kin.

168 admitted to disrupt longstanding problematizations of familial and moral breakdown among the poor. These problematizations perform “symbolic violence” (Bourdieu 2000), implying that familial breakdown is both a cause and consequence of individual deficiency, even if, analytically, we insist on the salience of subjectification. Han189 resists adopting Biehl’s notion of abandonment because it “is elaborated as an effect of ‘market values’ and as the outcome of an ethics in which prevailing definitions of ‘the good’ hinge upon these values…In contrast to these values, relational practices or an ethics of consubstantiality manifest accountabilities and obligations to concrete others that, from Biehl’s vantage point, are today in decline… (2013, 235).

Public Abandonment

The penal-welfare management of dispossession shapes, but does not determine, expendability. David Garland’s (1985) work — a genealogy of the British “Welfare state” — definitively establishes the deep historical connection between punishment and welfare, documenting their co-evolution vis-à-vis the management of urban marginality. Central to this relationship, he suggests, is a principle of exclusion. Garland offers a compelling alternative to Foucault’s discipline-centric account of “modern penality,” improving our understanding of an important function of the contemporary prison – namely, the authoritarian segregation of hopeless cases (or public abandonment).

Foucault (1977) has influentially argued that modern penality originated around the end of the 18th century, with the ‘birth of the prison’ and the beginnings of industrialized urban society. In contrast, Garland convincingly argues that, in Britain, the basic structure of modern penality emerged as a distinctive entity a century later (between 1895 and 1914). Whereas Foucault insists that individualizing discipline and normalization were, from the start, defining features of the prison (i.e. the prison was always already a technique of transformation directed at the criminal’s nature), Garland enables a different sort of prison to come into focus, a prison that is

189 Han (2012), in her ethnography of care and violence in neoliberal Chile, explores harmful effects on poor families not of direct repression but of the reorganization of labor regimes, availability of credit, and cultivation of consumer aspirations. By attending to “the tactics people deploy to share or absorb, divert or refuse the hardship of others” (Allison 2013, 222), Han seeks to “expand our perceptive range on the subtleties of relationships and material pressures that may not be perceptible under a notion of abandonment” (2013, 235).

169 not concerned with improving deficient individuals. Although this form of confinement, which prioritizes segregation over reform, is present in both Victorian (1865-95) and modern penality, it occupies a different position within these consecutive systems.

In the late Victorian era, incarceration emerged as the central penal sanction for adults. Victorian prisons were characterized by an intensive mode of ‘discipline’ (directed towards maintaining order within the institution) that is distinguishable from the individually transformative mode of power Foucault has labeled “discipline” or “Panopticism” (1977, 195-228). This raises the question of whether all prisons ought to be approached as disciplinary institutions, in the Foucauldian sense.

“Discipline,” writes Foucault, “increases the forces of the body (in terms of economic utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience)” (1995 [1977], 138). Rather than the massive exclusion of one set of people from the rest, disciplinary projects premised on panopticism entail a multitude of separations and “individualizing distributions” realized through extensive surveillance. Those subjected to panopticism are not left to their “doom in a mass among which it [is] useless to differentiate,” they are “caught up in a meticulous… partitioning in which individual differentiations were the constricting effects of a power that multiplied, articulated and subdivided itself” (1995 [1977], 198).

In Victorian Britain, institutions — rather than individuals — were the primary targets of inspection and reform. During this period, dispersed and heterogeneous sites of confinement (featuring enormous regime variation) were subjected to a dramatic process of centralization and rationalization. The goal was to create a standardized and more economical prison network through which uniform, measurable punishment could be precisely meted out. In order to repress crime through deterrence, institutional and administrative conditions had to be improved.

Although the fundamental condition of the orderly Victorian penal regime — the cellular prison building — connotes panoptic power as theorized by Foucault, the cell in this case, “does not manifest a concern with individualisation” (Garland 1985, 14). Rather, the Victorian penal system operated “a mass regime” in which each prisoner “was treated ‘exactly alike,’ with no reference being made to his or her criminal type or individual character” (Garland 1985, 13-14). The cellular regime enabled staff to rigorously regulate each element of prisoners’ carceral existences (viz. sleep, diet, and activity) to ensure compliance with the principles of uniformity

170 and “less eligibility”190 (see McConville 1995, McGowen 1998, and Piven and Cloward 1971). For example, prisoner labour activities (i.e. the treadwheel and the crank) were not designed to teach skills or produce commodities but “to exact a precisely measured quantity of labour, thereby promoting the goal of uniformity in this aspect of the prison regime as in all others” (Garland 1985, 13).

The organization, techniques, discourses, and objectives of Victorian penality reflect a particular view of human nature and corresponding theory of action consistent with the concepts of economic liberalism. The Victorian prison regime presupposes a free and calculating actor engaged in the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain (Garland 1985, 14). In this view, the criminal differs from the non-criminal only on the basis of their law-breaking act which, like any other action, is viewed as an outcome of rational choice. Properly calibrated punishments were intended to shape calculations, communicating to offenders and the general public that crime does not pay. This penal rational, “ensured the absence of any detailed investigation of the criminal, precluding any mental, moral or familial inquiry” (15). Replicating and supporting broader ideologies of economic liberalism, Victorian practices of penality constituted the criminal as “the carrier of responsibility, reason and liberty” (17).

The particulars of Victorian penal regulation related to the general field of laissez-faire government in patterned ways. Forces and institutions ‘external’ to penality (e.g. poor laws and the economy) “were supported and, in part, reproduced by penality’s own practices and vice versa” (37). Poverty, like illegality, was understood as “an effect of individual choice” (17) and, accordingly, responses to it emphasized deterrence. The major thrust of the overall strategy towards the poor was one of coercion, Together, the agencies of penality and the poor law operated to enforce a line of repression and exclusion against the lower sectors of the working class. These sectors became ‘outcasts’, a ‘dangerous class’ excluded from the political community… a social danger posing a problem of management and domination. As far as this group was concerned, the relation of state to individual was one of force and not

190 According to this principle, formally declared in 1834, a relief recipient’s situation must not be more eligible (or desirable) than the situation of the lowest paid worker. Otherwise, which rational calculating actor would choose work over relief?

171

authority, a relation of coercion, typified and symbolised by the workhouse and the prison (Garland 1985, 52).

Ultimately, the Victorian state’s social and penal policies were transformed in the context of a “crisis of social regulation.” In the 1980s and 1990s there were a number of developments that undermined “the stratification and divisions amongst the working classes that had been so crucial to the strategies of Victorian rule” (55). These included: the political-economic transition from liberal, free-market capitalism to a new epoch of monopoly capital; rapid mechanization, Britain’s declining economic position in the world market, and the Great Depression (1873-96); the influence of socialist ideas; and a growth of unionization among previously disorganized ‘unskilled’ workers. The ensuing crisis ruptured the dominant ideology of laissez-faire individualism and the strategy of social regulation animated by these ideals. The strategy that gradually emerged in its place displays a distinctive pattern of objectives, techniques, and representations united by a novel logic of penal-welfarism. Garland traces the key elements of this logic to four disparate programmes which each addressed the late nineteenth-century ‘social question’ and concomitant penal crisis (viz. criminology, social work, eugenics, and social security). These programmes yielded a repertoire of discursive and technical resources which were, eventually, assembled into a relatively coherent penal-welfare strategy of social regulation.

The organization and institutions of Britain’s penal and social fields were transformed at the same historical moment but are “interrelated in more than a temporal sense” (226). Garland points to a number of homologies (deriving from common programmatic origins) that facilitate the strategic articulation of these fields, the core of the penal-welfare complex. In both realms, there was: (1) an extension of state intervention and engineering; (2) the development of an extensive regulatory knowledge of populations and individuals; (3) an attempt to address the questions of ‘degeneration’ and ‘inefficiency’, either by building up the physical forces of the population or else segregating defective elements and prohibiting their procreation; and (4) the establishment of a depoliticized administrative mode of action which claimed legitimacy in terms of its efficacy, its ‘scientific’ basis and its ‘humane’ qualities (1985, 226 — emphasis my own).

An important shared element surfaced through Garland’s genealogy of the penal-welfare complex is an “eliminative principle of exclusion and segregation” (1985, 227). In Victorian penal imaginaries, this principle was apparent. Victorian prisons confined, punished, and

172 repressed the lowest sectors of the working classes, forging a definite social division between the ‘criminal classes’ and other sectors, namely, skilled workers and a large middle stratum (or ‘perishing class’) thought to be especially vulnerable to contamination by the residuum (39). But a polarizing form of “public abandonment” is also an important, if less obvious, function of the penal-welfarism of the modern era with its emphasis on improving deficient subjects.

Within the new field of social and penal regulation of the modern era, social policies were implemented to mitigate the effects of the labour market (while maintaining its basic capitalistic structure) and, thereby, improve the security and integration of the population without thoroughgoing social transformation (231). However, not all ‘citizens’ were encompassed by, and thus regulated through, the various welfare schemes that proliferated. A “recalcitrant minority of deviant and marginal cases,” that were not absorbed into the new “apparatus of provision and state-induced self-control,” were confronted with a back-up mechanism of regulation: “the newly assembled range of penal practices and institutions” (1985, 233). That is, institutions of penality supported, complimented, and extended social welfare institutions, which were conditional. When deficient subjects failed to exhibit certain norms of conduct (not all of which are specified in regulations; many norms are implied or assumed), they could be managed coercively. The new penal complex relieved the social realm of its ‘failures,’ without appearing unduly statist or repressive. The basic axiom of penal-welfarism is that “…penal measures ought, where possible, to be rehabilitative interventions rather than negative, retributive punishments” (Garland 2001b: 34). Penal-welfarist phenomena, many of which are evident in Brazil, include: …sentencing laws that allowed indeterminate sentences linked to early release and parole supervision; the juvenile court with its child welfare philosophy; the use of social inquiry and psychiatric reports; the individualization of treatment based upon expert assessment and classification; criminological research focusing on etiological issues and treatment effectiveness; social work with offenders and their families; and custodial regimes that stressed the re-educative purposes of imprisonment and the importance of re-integrative support upon release (2001b:34).

Notwithstanding modern penality’s commitment to correction, care, normalization, and improvement, just as the welfare network had the penal network as a backup, the penal network had its own, internal, coercive state-run terminus. Central to the penal-welfare complex is a mechanism of promotion and demotion through which people are sorted and, potentially, subjected to increasing measures of control, separation, and containment. Promotions/demotions

173 are, often, determined through various extralegal or expert-discretionary means derived from the repertoire of charity and social work (237). That is, definitions of and responses to deviance ceased to be formulated according to the liberal legalism of the Victorian era. Rather, in the modern era, the ‘norm’ comes to supplement the law (also see Foucault 1995 [1977]).191 And, this “new system of normalization, with its capacity to prise open and enter into the intimate details of the individual’s life, allows a measure of penetration and subtlety, which was altogether new to the forces of the criminal law” (Garland 1985, 237).

Segregative prisons are state-run sites of public abandonment which contain deficient subjects for the protection of society.192 Segregative prisons also serve to erase any trace of rationality that might have clung to those who end up here. Deficient subjects who end up in segregative prisons have failed in two senses. First, they have failed to benefit from the social welfare provision of education, security, and support. They have also failed to be deterred by a threat of increasing unfreedom. Within the normalizing penal-welfare complex, such failures become signs of individual pathology. The bearers of these signs appear irrational and ungovernable (except by exceptional means). As Garland notes, “the existence of the milder institutions ensures that the existence of repressive ones appears justified and necessary” (1985, 243). People either become “responsible, conforming subjects” through improving institutions, “or they are supervised and segregated from the normal social realm in a manner that minimises (and individualises) any ‘damage’ they can do” (249). Thus, penal-welfare complexes segregate and inflict symbolic violence.

In previous chapters I have described PLB and Feminina as prisons in which rehabilitative aspirations are seldom evident in practice. When prisons serve, primarily, to confine, incapacitate, and control rather than improve and integrate they may be though of as sites of public abandonment. But, punitive segregation is not limited to the penal field. Both ‘the norm’

191 The work of normalization involves extensive discretion regarding: who ought to be promoted or demoted within the spectrum of available institutions as well as which claims for support and special provision are signs of irredeemable individual pathology and which might serve as points of entry for improvement agencies. 192 People who are unable/unwilling to submit to the disciplines of the dominant social order; the welfare network; normalizing institutions of confinement; or corrective carceral facilities are expelled into the segregative sector based on the judgements of members of the judiciary and/or normalization experts. Garland argues that the segregative sector includes prisons even though, at the level of official rhetoric, prisons were rarely presented in primarily negative, segregative terms.

174 and an eliminative principle of exclusion and segregation unite penal and welfare domains into a single system of social regulation. This carceral form is integral to the processes of public abandonment and de-kinning that cumulate in Ivete’s expendability.

Feminina: As a Site of Problematization and Mediated Relatedness

In this section, through a descriptive account of the circumstances of my passage from prison exterior to interior, I establish Feminina as a predominately segregative node within a broader penal-welfare complex. Although many presas are regarded as hopeless cases, the will to improve does inflect this environment. I show how intersecting, and sometimes colliding, penal- and welfare-policy pragmatics engender Feminina as a site of mediated relatedness and heightened scrutiny. Feminina brings struggling subjects (viz. prisoners and visitors) and their relationships into the view and purview of state agents and their proxies (i.e. guards, social workers, program deliverers, religious volunteers, etc.). These experts engage in normalization insofar as their work requires them to assess levels of deficiency and determine appropriate interventions in light of available resources.

On Thursday afternoons, I accompanied a small team of religious volunteers, from the Catholic prison pastoral, on their weekly visits to Feminina. The team is led by an elderly white nun; all members of the team are middle-class women, the majority of whom are white. I, myself, am a white woman. The Pastoral team meets at Feminina’s entrance at 2 pm. Once our names have been logged in the ledger, an Afro-descendant guard manually searches through the items we hope to bring with us. She flips through the volunteers’ bibles and my notebook (I’ve learned to avoid the prohibited spiral-ring variety). The guard partially unfolds a set of donated bed sheets, giving them a half-hearted shake before returning them to a plastic shopping bag. She doesn’t bother investigating a stack of photocopied newsletters. Once the guard returns our items, we pass through an open doorway into the main artery of the prison, an administrative hallway. We turn right, passing a walk-through metal detector and an conveyor-belt-fed x-ray machine. Neither of these expensive-looking devices were operational during my fieldwork. Instead, each time ‘ordinary’ visitors enter the prison they must endure manual searches of their

175 belongings/bodies.193 The latter are known as revista íntima, and involve strip and body cavity searches.194

Invasive manual searches of prospective visitors are a powerful instantiation of mediated relatedness. These intimate, power-laden interactions between guards and prisoners’ kin also index the problematization of visitors as potential threats to institutional security and order. Visitors become the violable focus of a penetrating gaze.195 But this is a gaze that primarily seeks to reduce immediate risks to institutional security, not normalize deficient subjects. This reflects a broader pattern in regards to who – or what – tends to be targeted for improvement by penal and welfare practices enacted in and around Feminina. Yet, partially as a function of dysfunctional technology and limited human resources, this practice of surveillance becomes deeply (inter-)personal. Visitors are subjected to revista íntima as a class, but particular visitors are subjected to more or less intensive scrutiny depending on guards’ subjective assessments. Ultimately, many obstacles (concomitants of problematization) – i.e. restrictions on categories of people permitted to visit, the complicated process of obtaining authorization, the inconvenient location of the prison on Salvador’s urban periphery, degrading entry rituals, etc. – limit but do not foreclose the possibility of physically accessing prisoners. This act – of visitation – constitutes an means of extending care and a performing of relatedness through an intervening agency which, in this case, is literally an agency of intervention: a prison.

At one end of Feminina’s main administrative artery is a freshly painted nursery. Although the recent grand opening of the nursery was a highly publicized affair, the room remains pristine and unused. Ostensibly, this is due to staff shortages. The outcome of the nursery’s disuse is that infants – up to six months of age – stay with their mothers in ordinary cells, among the general prison population. In 1999, the Childhood and Youth Court of Bahia, prohibited children over six months of age from staying with their imprisoned mothers; the court also ruled that infants

193 Religious visitors are subjected to less-intensive searches across the compound (though, actual search procedures vary from prison to prison). 194 It is visitors, rather than prisoners receiving visitors, who are searched because bi-weekly visits do not occur in a designated visitation room but on the main patio of the cell-block. 195 It is possible that intimate search requirements partially account for the relatively small number of men who visit prisons. Direct submission to authority, and participation in a ritual that (re)produces the visitor’s body as “permeable” (Caldeira 2001), represent “masculinity challenges” (Messerschmitt, 2010, 1999, 1996, 1993).

176 remaining in the prison must be sheltered in a separate area. Though the institution does not comply with the latter regulation, the statute limiting children’s presence in the prison is strictly enforced. Evidently, children’s welfare is an area of concern and a target of institutional reform efforts. The impetus for these reforms has stemmed, largely, from actors/actants located outside of the criminal justice system itself. A concrete effect of resultant measures has been the physical separation of mothers from their infants. And, because this separation occurs in the context of a state bureaucracy (the prison), where both mother and child are wards of the state, it is prone to formalization. Minimally, prison staff (viz. administrators and social workers) tend to exert some influence over the child’s destination. That is, agents of the state’s penal and welfare branches come to mediate mother-child relations in more and less directs ways.

For example, when presa Erica’s infant daughter reached 6-months of age, a fellow-presa’s mother, Jandiraci, contemplated informally fostering the baby. Jandiraci is familiar with Erica from prison visits as well as the street (both women frequent the Baixa de Sapateiros commercial district of the old city center). Part of the appeal this fosterage option, to Erica and Jandiraci, was that it would bypass the official child welfare system and therefore keep the possibility of easy mother-daughter reunification open. These savvy women predicted that Erica, a known viciada (addict) and recidivist who cycles between homelessness and prison, would struggle to meet official (and implicit) child welfare criteria and thus be prevented from regaining custody of her daughter. However, prison staff and their associates did not support Erica and Jandiraci’s plan. Rumours circulated between guards and pastoral volunteers that Erica was continuing to use drugs in prison, that she would sell any donated items she received (“even diapers and formula!”), and that she was capable of selling her attractive light-skinned baby to the highest bidder. Jandiraci’s motives and suitability as a (temporary) caregiver were also called into question: perhaps, it was whispered, she would help Erica ‘traffic’ this child. In the context of the prison, suspicions and accusations such as these could well have led to the coercive seizure of the baby by child welfare authorities and a permanent “de-kinning” (Fonseca 2011). Instead, a compromise of sorts was struck. Erica ‘voluntarily’ sent her daughter to the nearby shelter for children of prisoners. This arrangement allowed for weekly visits, ongoing and official recognition of her status as mother, and the possibility of post-release reunification (pending a

177 favourable judgement by the Childhood and Youth court)196. The point I wish to make here is that, in the context of the prison, institutional mediation of relatedness and heightened scrutiny of conduct and character can and does result in strained and severed mother-child ties.

Returning to the Pastoral team’s incremental passage into Feminina’s interior, I pick up where we left off, in the administrative corridor. At one end is the nursery, at the opposite end a pathway branches off, leading towards the main cellblock area of the prison. We take this path, passing through an open-air courtyard where I sometimes see presas from Feminina’s special segregation cells hand-washing and hang-drying uniforms. From there, we enter the “base.” This dark echoey room is the last staffed checkpoint before we reach dentro. A couple of bored- looking guards sit behind a battered metal desk. Both are light-skinned. One, an older man, reads the paper; the other just relaxes in her chair, waiting for her overnight shift to end. The male guard, puts down his paper, stands, and wordlessly unlocks a metal gate, allowing us to pass through into the “patio” and adjacent cell-block area where presas spend their time. Guards only enter this space a few times per day in order to lock and unlock cells. Guards are primarily concerned with controlling entrances/exit and maintaining a relatively orderly regime. This means that presas’ contact with non-prisoners is tightly regulated, severely mediated by guards tasked with the twin mandates of custody and control. Other personnel working in the prison – administrators, social workers, doctors, teachers, lawyers – never enter the cellblock area. Prisoners must request appointments, depend on guards to deliver requests, and hope that professionals will arrange to see them in the administrative wing. This rarely occurs in a timely fashion (if it happens at all).

The inaccessibility of support services is a major complaint voiced by Feminina presas, many of whom feel abandoned by the state that confines them. Repeated requests for individual attention and the assistance of helping professionals are regularly ignored. On two separate occasions, I witnessed pallbearer-esq groups of presas hurry through the courtyard carrying women who had intentionally harmed themselves. At Feminina, the custodial mandate – and efforts to bring the

196 After Erica’s daughter was institutionalized at the Center, I brought her regular reports and photographs which she eagerly received. When I attempted to conduct a standard recorded interview with her – approx. 3 months after her baby’s removal from the prison – Erica became very agitated. My association with the Center made it impossible for us to avoid the issue of her daughter, which she clearly found very upsetting. After about 10 minutes, I decided to terminate the interview and offer to help Erica access counselling services. She declined this offer.

178 institution into compliance with select legal requirements – unmistakably takes precedent over individualised treatment, assistance, and imprisoned women’s wellbeing. A staff of social workers operates out of an adjacent building, processing visitation applications and occasionally meeting with select prisoners. But, while the findings of these non-judicial personnel are allowed to enter into circulation, there is almost no connection between evaluation and treatment. Moreover, at Feminina, social workers’ efforts primarily meet bureaucratic requirements rather than serve prisoners’ needs.

Immediately inside the cellblock area, mounted next to the metal gate leading into the base and within earshot of guards stationed there, is a single pay phone – the only phone that presas have access to. This phone is almost always in use and, typically, there is a long line of presas awaiting their daily 3-minute turn. I understand phones, especially in the prison context, as ‘vectors of relatedness’ (Hutchinson 2000) in that they allow prisoners to build and maintain relationships and, crucially, parent from a distance. Within the context of Feminina, contraband cell phones do not exist. If one enters the prison, it will be discovered and removed. In contrast, at the neighbouring men’s prison where I also conducted fieldwork, many if not most presos had regular access to cell phones. While it is not within the scope of the present chapter to theorize the complex causes and implications of uneven gendered access to this crucial vector of relatedness, it is worth noting that, at Feminina, imprisoned mothers’ opportunities to communicate with and about their children are highly circumscribed and unequally distributed depending on each presas’ differential – and differentiating – level of access to money and other resources. Both physical and virtual contact with relations is heavily mediated in Feminina.

During my visits to this prison with the Pastoral team, presas regularly asked me to deliver messages to the people beyond their limited reach: children and their caregivers; social workers; the director of the prison; parents; men imprisoned elsewhere in the compound; etc. I did what I could to honour these requests, even when it means bending the rules and smuggling a hand- written letter out of Feminina and into PLB. While conducting fieldwork, I became a vector of prison-mediated relatedness.

On today’s visit, the patio is busier than usual owing to the recent arrival of approximately 30 women transferred from a police lockup in the wake of a suspicious death. In low, anxious voices, visitors and prisoners say “the girl” died of Meningitis. They, along with visitors I spoke

179 to yesterday, are concerned the situation has not been adequately addressed or contained and that others will die. There is a sense that the people in charge don’t really care about the lives of their wards. One visitor contemplated contacting the press in hopes that public pressure would influence the director to handle the situation differently. As I circulate through the courtyard, I am approached by a young Afro-descendent woman whom I have not met before. She is short and plump with smooth, clear dark skin (she would almost certainly be identified as “negra” rather than “morena”). She has an eyebrow ring and most, if not all, of her teeth. Her eyes are bright and alert; her gaze is intense. The young woman – Ivete – places her hand on my forearm and asks: “You work there at that shelter, right? Do you have my son?”.

Ivete proceeds to explain that her son, Robison, is a baby – just over a year old. Before arriving at Feminina she had been imprisoned at the aforementioned police lockup where the death occurred. In fact, Ivete had shared an overcrowded cell with the “girl that died.” They slept next to one another on the floor, only a thin sheet separating them from the concrete. Then, one night, the girl got sick. Her cellmates’ repeated calls for assistance were ignored. The girl died on the floor, next to Ivete.197 This was the first time that Ivete has directly witnessed a death. Since her cellmate’s death, she has heard that at least one male prisoner already died in that same lockup cell – before it was used to confine women. The message – fortified by knowledge of extrajudicial police killings and other abuses – is that the lives of “marginals” (a category that commonly encompass prisoners) are neither valued nor protected by state actors. But this condition of (public) abandonment does not guarantee full expendability as long as one is still meaningfully included within a social unit such as the family. While imprisonment mediates familial relatedness, it does not automatically sever ties. Prisoners’ experiences of relatedness – their meaningful participation in social exchanges that cross-cut prison boundaries – keep their superfluity at bay. However, as I continue to explore in the following section, criminalization, and carceral-mediation of relatedness can certainly strain intimate ties and sometimes result in their severance.

197 Note, Feminina is relatively more comfortable and less overcrowded than police lockups. At Feminina, each cell confines approximately three presas. Cells have a bunk bed and, typically, a mattress for the person who sleeps on the floor.

180

A Life History of Emergent Expendability Ivete’s Only Visitor

In this section I discuss changes in Brazil’s child welfare system and how these can produce unrelatedness between children and their families of origin. This is especially true when the child welfare system’s new emphasis on deinstitutionalization intersects with practices of imprisonment. Ultimately, this intersection renders imprisoned mothers particularly vulnerable to de-kinning. Across the prison-neighbourhood nexus, differently positioned actors – from parents to professionals – are engaged in childcare and childrearing projects. Often, this range of projects exhibits a lack of consensus regarding which course of action is in the best interests of the child. When these projects play out, or are retroactively interpreted, within the power-laden context of the prison – a site of heightened problematization and mediated relatedness – the result can be coercively severed ties and, ultimately, expendability.

While imprisoned at the police lockup, the only visit Ivete received was from a man she recognized as state agent. He came to inform her that Robison had been left at the entrance of a day care but was now in the custody of the state. The man interviewed Ivete, reassured her that Robison was safe, and promised to be in touch. Ivete recognized the man as a state representative by his uniform – a black vest. Black vests are the basic uniform of several different categories of relatively low-ranking state agents, including prison guards as well as public servants working in the field of child welfare. Across the back of these black vests is written, in white block letters, the name of the wearer’s organization or position. Ivete can’t remember the man’s name but she tells me: “he was from FUNDAC” (the state agency responsible for delivery of “socio-educative measures” – including detention – to youth in conflict with the law).

Ivete’s visit from the man in the black vest and the way she makes sense of this encounter evoke a number of central themes explored in this chapter. First, throughout her imprisonment, Ivete’s only personal visitor was a state agent operating in the field of child welfare. The extent of Ivete’s isolation from kin (effective unrelatedness), is evinced by the fact that she did not receive any family visitors and by the nature of the professional visit she did receive. At the same time, her public abandonment (at the level of social programs and policies) is momentarily mitigated when, as a mother of an “at-risk” child, she becomes relevant to agencies concerned with social development. Soon, however, she is excised from the equation; Ivete (like her relationship with

181

Robison) comes to be practically understood, by many intervenors, as irrelevant, if not detrimental, to the objective of ensuring this child’s protection.

Second, it is notable that Ivete seems to have been mistaken about the institutional affiliation of the state agent who paid her a visit (I unpack this telling error below). Her mistake – that he represented FUNDAC, the agency responsible for delivering programming to youth-in-conflict- with-the-law – is consistent with widespread incomprehension of the (dis)organization of the current system of social protection for children and adolescents. Well-founded confusion surrounding this system stems, in part, from the many tensions and contradictions between historical and experiential knowledge of the system; current “policy pragmatics;” ongoing/recent reforms to the system, and official representations. The complexity of the system in conjunction with the level of uncertainty surrounding it may facilitate legal and extralegal interventions that coercively sever ties between children and their families of origin. I now turn to a discussion of how, in the immediate wake of the dictatorship, this system was transformed, particularly in terms of its orientation toward internment.

From 1927 until 1990, under Brazil’s “Minors’ Code,” it was legally possible to indefinitely institutionalize Brazilian children and adolescents, regardless of whether or not they had broken the law (Drybread 2009a, 335). Distinctions were rarely made between courts’ treatment of orphans (or ‘abandoned’ children) and children involved in criminal activity (Drybread 2009a, 336). In 1990, in full knowledge of principles enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), Brazil adopted the Statute of the Child and Adolescent (SCA), incorporating a rights-based understanding of childhood into the nation’s new democratic constitution (Rizzini and Rizzini 2012, 3). The statute defines the rights of children and the obligations that the state and families have towards all people under the age of eighteen (Drybread 2009a, 332). This legal shift reflects and (re)produces a new approach to child welfare in which children are conceptualized as rights bearing subjects rather than objects of intervention. Central to this new vision is a rejection of policies and practices that deprive youth of their liberty or separate them from their families and communities (Rizzini and Rizzini 2012, 7). Institutionalization (framed in terms of “resocialization” rather than “punishment” by the juvenile justice system) is forbidden except for adolescents who have committed criminal acts. Otherwise, the provision of shelter must constitute an exceptional and temporary measure.

182

Although laws and dominant logics regarding the use of custodial institutions in the name of child welfare have certainly changed, it is unclear how much – or in what specific ways – policy pragmatics have transformed (Rizzini and Rizzini 2012, 2). Likewise, there appear to be notable continuities in ordinary people’s engagements with the child protection system under changing conditions. To wit, in contemporary Brazil, as in the past, a significant number of marginalized youth end up in institutions neither because they have committed criminal acts nor because they have been orphaned or abandoned (Rizzini and Rizzini 2012, 14-15).198 Fonseca observes that among poor urban Brazilian mothers, institutions for the welfare of minors are often viewed as sites where children may be (temporarily) placed without resulting in a loss of legal parental rights (1986, 16; 2006, 26). According to Rizzini and Rizzini, loving parents “seek out the courts and institutions to get their children placed either because of poverty or because they have difficulty disciplining them” (2012, 14). My research supports these claims, revealing a number of mothers and other caregivers (e.g. presa Erika from the previous section) who have considered or made the structured choice to institutionalize a child in the face of ‘exceptional’ circumstances (i.e. inadequate housing or loss of lodgings; resource scarcity; hospitalization; imprisonment; an acute risk of violence; etc.). Most often, the institutionalization of a child is practically understood by those who resort to it as a temporary measure. Furthermore, institutionalization, as experienced by many of my research participants, must not be equated with full (if temporary) suspension of parental obligations and practices. Mothers and other caregivers often continue to interact with and extend care to their child throughout the period of institutionalization.

Even as marginalized mothers and other caregivers turn, however reluctantly, to institutionalization as a means of distributing the labour of child rearing (educação) and providing the necessities of life in situations of familial strain, a strong association persists in the public imagination between institutions for the custody of youth and crime. Ivete’s (mis)recognition of her visitor in the black vest as a representative of FUNDAC epitomizes this widespread association. Historically, facilities for the custody of children and youth contained

198 The majority of non-criminal children cared for and sheltered in institutions (87.6%) have families; over half (58.2%) receive visits from their families; and only 5.8% are legally prohibited from contacting or being contacted by their families. The percentage of children and adolescents “without families” or with “missing families” is 11.3% (Garcia and Fernandez 2009).

183 those who were “carentes, abandonados, ou em ‘erro social’” (“needy, abandoned, or in ‘social error’”) (FUNDAC). For example, in contemporary Salvador, FUNDAC operates three Comunidades de Atendimento Socioeducativo (CASEs) for the internment of youth in conflict with the law. The flagship facility – CASE Salvador – was opened in 1978 as o Centro de Recepção e Triagem da Bahia (CRT) and held children/youth from the three aforementioned categories in custody. At the time, the CRT was administered by FUNDAC’s predecessor: Fundação de Assistência ao Menor do Estado da Bahia (FAMEB). With the enactment of the SCA in 1990, and the transformation of FAMEB into FUNDAC in 1991, the CRT became CASE Salvador, a facility for the delivery socio-educational measures to interred youth. This history, and its complex layering of acronyms, underlies a persistent usage of “FUNDAC” to refer to agencies and organizations working in the field of child protective services. It also situates Ivete’s misperception that a needy, abandoned toddler might be in the care of FUNDAC. Importantly, this history fuels popular concern that residential institutions for children and youth function as “schools for criminals” (Drybread 2009a, 335-338; Goldstein 2003, 146). My research suggests that subjects of incarceration often think of CASES, and similar residential institutions for chidren/youth, as a blend of juvenile detention centre and shelter for needy or orphaned children that function to produce, as well as contain, criminal/criminalized youth. Yet, despite a strong sense that these spaces may function as “breeding grounds for criminals” (Goldstein 2003, 154; Fonseca 1986, 22), in situations of crisis affecting the household or broader support network, caregivers may have little choice but to turn their child (temporarily) over to the juvenile authorities.

Policy makers, like members of the public, have expressed concern that sites of child/youth institutionalization are criminogentic. Indeed, this characterization has contributed to experts’ problematization of internment as a strategy of child protection and, by extension, the overhaul of Brazil’s child welfare system which began in the 1990s. Unfortunately, as I describe below, this reform has had the unintended effect of making strategies of temporary institutionalization increasingly hazardous from the point of view of mothers and caregivers anticipating eventual reunification with an interred child. Where incarcerated mothers are concerned, this reform seems to have exacerbated the strain on mother-child ties.

With the ascendancy of the SCA and its logic, the notion that “children raised in confinement generally grow up to be criminals” (Drybread 2009a, 337) has gained credence among policy

184 makers, implementers, and members of public. This theory impacts the design and operations of residential facilities for children/youth and engenders negative interpretations of the situation of babies/children living behind bars with their incarcerated mothers. According to these negative interpretations, babies/children that remain with their mothers are not only being raised in confinement, they are being raised in a determinately criminal milieu. Where children are concerned, there is growing distaste for closed institutions and prolonged institutionalization even in the absence of a clear criminal presence: “the watchword [is] that the segregation of the child should always be avoided” (Rizzini and Rizzini 2012, 7 – emphasis my own).

Perversely, this conceptualization of ‘closed’ institutions as antithetical to the best interests of the child contributes to the separation (and de-kinning) of institutionalized children from their families of origin. This occurs despite the fact that the new approach to child welfare involves a twofold rejection of policies and practices that: a) deprive youth of their liberty; and b) separate them from their families and communities. In practice, the goal of deinstitutionalization often takes precedence over the mandate to maintain a child’s ties to family and community. This ordering of priorities is enshrined in the aforementioned policy prohibiting children over six months of age from remaining at Feminina with their imprisoned mothers. It is also manifest in debates and decisions regarding children of prisoners sheltered at Centro Nova Semente (“New Seed Centre” heretofore “the Centre”).

The Centre is located just 200 meters from the prison compound on land donated by the state of Bahia. It emerged as a somewhat improvised response to a crisis caused by an intersection of welfare and penal practices. In 1999, as mentioned in my previous discussion of Feminina’s unused nursery, the judge overseeing the execution of penal sentences prohibited children of prisoners from living with their imprisoned mothers beyond the age of 6 months. At the time of the judge's decision, there were several children living within the ordinary cells of Feminina – the oldest was 5 years old. The Centre was founded, in the immediate wake of this decision, to accommodate these expelled children and, more generally, provide care and shelter to children of prisoners in a manner conducive to the maintenance of family ties. An implication of the Center’s very existence is that, if these children had been expelled into the general system of shelter-orphanages, the continuation (and cultivation) of their relatedness to imprisoned mothers would have been an unlikely outcome. Although rupturing ties between criminalized mothers and their children may not have been an official state policy or objective, it seems to have been

185 recognized as an unsurprising – if not inevitable – consequence of the simultaneous but separate institutionalization of women and their children, except where the Center is concerned.

Since 1999, the Centre's operations have been gradually formalized. However, this process of regularization remains incomplete. Approximately 35 children and adolescents (between 6 months and 18 years of age) live at the Centre. These wards are brought to visit their imprisoned mothers on a regular basis.

While living at the Center for over a year, I took note of a diffuse pressure to expel children from the institution in a ‘timely fashion’ through processes of: permanent “closed” adoption; fosterage by individuals/families otherwise unknown to the child’s family of origin; and familial reunification (where non-prisoner or ex-prisoner blood relations are insistent, persistent, and compliant). To maintain legitimacy within the overarching child welfare system, leaders of the Center are compelled, largely by state regulations and oversight, to ensure that: a) their young wards are perpetually positioned in a state of transition out of residential care;199 and b) the shelter does not appear to operate as a ‘closed’ institution. New wards, such as presa Erika’s baby, are routinely paired with friends-of-the-center as quickly as these ‘upstanding’ members of the broader community become available. On weekends and holidays, children leave the center to spend time “at home” with institutionally-dictated “godparents.” In some cases, the godchild- godparent relation is formalized through, for instance, a baptism. I was present during one such ritual when a large group of Center children, accompanied by institutionally designated adults, were baptized. These adults – performing the culturally recognized role of “madrinha/padrinho de batismo” – pledged to assist with and help to raise their godchild as “additional parents.” Shortly after the baptism, during one of my regular visits to Feminina, I brought photographs of the event to a presa. I wrongly assumed that she would be pleased to see her two young children in their baptism finery. Instead, she was furious and called the authenticity of the accompanying madrinha de batismo into question. How could her children possibly have an “additional” mother that she knew nothing of? The presa worried about what this development might mean

199 In several cases, the strong (and widely supported) emphasis placed on deinstitutionalization of children (as a uniformly applied rule) was resisted and/or resented by Center staff and leaders who tend to assess what is in a child’s best interests on a case-by-case basis and who are inclined (given the mandate of the Center) to recognize the contingent value of maintaining ties between children and their (ex-)prisoner parents.

186 for her ongoing relationship with her children. After all, intersecting penal and welfare policy pragmatics had already deprived her of her maternal duty/prerogative to select a co-parent.

This particular presa-mother was certainly not alone in thinking the common practice of cultivating relatedness between friends-of-the-center and center wards might ultimately result in undermining the mother-child tie rather than simply multiplying the child’s relationships to caring adults. Parents of children sheltered at the Center point to innumerable ways this might occur. For example, if ‘godparents’ are relatively affluent, which they almost certainly are, children may come to prefer life with them (“where there is always yogurt to eat”). These relatively affluent and powerful adults may also grow attached to their ‘godchildren’ and use their considerable resources to bring about a permanent adoption (I was suspected of attempting this on at least one occasion). Beyond the threats posed by possible emotional entanglements and the machinations of god-children and/or intervening adults, the very fact of this cultivated relationship between wards and members of the community permits authorities to reconcile the sometimes-contradictory objectives of minimizing both institutionalization and separation of children from ‘their’ families and communities. If children are deinstitutionalized into the custody of their new god-parent(s), a case can be made that both objectives have been met. Of course, such an interpretation involves a certain instrumental imaginary of what constitutes a child’s community and what counts as a (re)construction of familial ties.

In short, more formalized processes of fosterage and adoption are potentially facilitated by wards’ institutionally mediated relatedness with upstanding members of the community. When these options are available, the alternative of deferred family reunification – in cases where mothers (or other caregivers of origin) are imprisoned or have been released but lack the necessary material resources to ‘adequately’ care for a child – appears less and less viable/desirable to those officially responsible for determining what is in the best interests of the child. Even in the absence of biases against criminalized m(O)thers, family reunification is problematized to the extent that this possibility would entail an (indefinite) extension of the child’s institutionalization. Such an eventuality is a source of concern for those attempting to comply with legislation and those who conceptualize prolonged institutionalization as a cause of (future) problems (i.e. criminality). In this view, institutionalization not only poses a risk to the child but also produces a social threat. To many decision makers, the cost of a child’s protracted institutionalization does not seem worth the benefit of possible reunification, especially when the

187

(prospective) parent is, herself, viewed as either “social junk” or “social dynamite” (Spitzer 1975).

Legally, in order for a child to be eligible for adoption, the child must be declared “abandoned” or parents must give consent.200 In practice, however, such procedures are highly discretionary and involve prejudicial value judgments (Fonseca 2006, 26). The legal definition of “abandonment,” already vague in the European context, is even more problematic within Brazil’s prison-neighbourhood nexus because: (a) poor mothers are descendants of families in which child circulation201 (including institutional placement) has been an integral part of basic socialization for generations; (b) children ‘abandoned’ in state institutions tend to be the third or fourth-born children of poor women who cannot afford the extra burden rather than the out-of- wedlock offspring of adolescent mothers; and (c) although legislation explicitly states that poverty does not provide adequate motive to strip parents of their rights (art. 23 of the Children’s code) social workers have been observed to equate extreme poverty with abandonment and neglect (Fonseca 2002, 211-212). In a carceral context of heightened problematization and mediated relatedness, where social workers are dealing with poor and criminalized women, experts’ determinations of “abandonment” are especially fraught. Discourses that operate to criminalize poor parents, especially poor mothers, conceal the role of poverty in shaping the state of parent-child relations as they construct parents as criminally responsible and morally depraved. Thus, the figure of the criminal (m)Other can operate to legitimize experts’ assessments that the “best interests of the child” (and overall social development) are to be furthered through a process of de- and re-kinning.

200 These concepts – “consent” and “abandonment” – are quite problematic when the circumstances and perspectives of the Brazilian poor are taken into account. However, discourses that construct poor women as criminal (m)Others delegitimize their actions, claims, and understandings (Moore 2015a) and, therefore, discourage a critical accounting by policy practitioners of the way in which power privileges some knowledges over others. 201 Child circulation, like carceral habilitation (chapter 1), is a “kinship strategy” (Leinaweaver 2007, 60) whereby changes in social geography or, in my terms, reworkings of relatedness are mobilized to accomplish social reproduction. Reworking the composition of a child or a prisoner’s primary relationships can be consequential in both pragmatic and ethical terms. The movement of children between houses (or care providers) is a common method of accessing resources and opportunities in order to achieve individual/familial survival and betterment in the context of social and economic inequality. Crucially, child circulation is not only a means to improve situations but selves and the moral status of whole families (e.g. Leinaweaver 2007). Likewise, exploiting a carceral change in social geography to elicit consideration in dangerous/endangered relations is an ethical endeavor.

188

By the time of my first encounter with Ivete (documented above), roughly three months had passed since her first and only meeting with the state agent in the black vest. And, Ivete had received no further news of her son’s whereabouts or wellbeing. When Ivete arrived at Feminina, following her emergency transfer from the police lockup, she learned from her fellow presas of the Center: “a nearby shelter where an old Italian nun takes care of our children until we are released.” Quite logically, Ivete and others assumed that her son must be there. Well aware of my affiliation with the Center, Feminina presas directed Ivete to speak with me during my regular Thursday visit. And so she did.

Unfortunately, as soon as Ivete shared Robison's age with me, I knew that we did not have him. I did, however, think that he might be on his way. There tends to be a consistent but low-intensity trickle of children arriving at (and departing from) the centre. I assured Ivete that I would look into the situation. That evening, as soon as I returned to the Centre, I sought out the Sister Adele and discovered that she was not expecting any new arrivals. She knew nothing of Ivete or Robison until I brought the matter to her. It seemed that Robison was missing. Somehow, although mother and son were both wards of the state, and this exigency is precisely the raison d’être of the Center (a well known local institution), Robinson’s location and status were unknown to us all. At the time, it seemed inconceivable to me that Ivete had been imprisoned for four months and had only received a single update about her son. Clearly, at one point at least, the state agent in the black vest had known both Ivete and Robison’s locations and statuses. Why had he not returned? Where was Robison?

Before proceeding with an account of our search for Robison through a tangle of Salvador's penal and welfare institutions, I first describe and analyze Ivete's life history. Her experiences reveal how criminalized women care for their children (and are cared for as children), helping us grasp the complex assemblage of processes that influence their mothering. Through a focus on Ivete’s crisis of care I highlight conditions that give rise to ‘disappearable’ children.

Ivete’s Motherhood

In this section I describe Ivete’s maternal situation at the time of her arrest. Although her parental practices are not unusual within the context of Salvador’s prison-neighbourhood nexus, Ivete’s imprisonment affects the meaning and effects of these practices. Here, I explain how, as a consequence of Ivete’s imprisonment, these practices come to be problematized in a manner that

189 gives rise to unrelatedness. Specifically, I show how intersecting penal and welfare policy pragmatics construct her as a ‘bad’ mother and her son, Robison, as a ‘disappearable’ child. These constructions underlie Ivete’s emergent expendability.

Born and raised in Salvador, Ivete is 21 years old and the mother of five children by four different men.202 Ivete’s oldest child, Felipe (6), lives with his madrinha (godmother). Brothers (of the same father), Vitor (5) and Mateus (2), are being raised by their paternal grandmother. Robison Junior (1 year and 6 months) is currently missing. Ivete’s only daughter (an infant) is in the care of a godmother. Ivete tells me that she doesn’t plan to have more children. She always wanted a little girl and now her daughter has arrived. Ivete plans to resume taking monthly birth control injections which, in the past, she has stopped taking when she wanted children. Although these injections are theoretically available at Feminina – any presas who receive male visitors (companheiras) or who visit men imprisoned elsewhere in the penal compound are required to take this form of long-acting hormonal contraceptive drug – it is doubtful that Ivete, a remand prisoner without visitors, will be granted access.

Ivete’s maternal situation, at the time of her arrest, is not anomalous compared to that of other prisoner and non-prisoner women of Salvador’s prison-neighbourhood nexus. Ivete’s number of children; their distribution across several households and the diffuse division of child rearing labour this reflects; the relatively early age at which Ivete first gave birth (15/16 years old); and her serial marriages (represented by the children’s various fathers) are very typical features of research participants’ lives. Anthropological studies of urban poverty in Brazil suggest that these practices of relatedness and patterns of care are relatively common among marginalized groups more generally (Heilborn and Cabral 2011; Fonseca 1986, 2003, 2006, 2011; Goldstein 2003; Hayes 2011; Gregg 2003; Rebhun 1999).203 Yet, while she is confined in a site of heightened

202 Ivete and I recorded our interview at Feminina, in the courtyard (patio) between the administrative wing and the base, approximately a week after I first began helping her search for Robison. We sat across from one another at a little school desk, just out of earshot of the guards. Against my wishes, the majority of presas I interviewed were handcuffed. I administered tailored semi-structured interview schedules designed to elicit topical life-history narratives. Interview data is shaped and supplemented by participant observation research conducted before and after each interview. My research design represents a great deal of critical reflection on the ethics and politics of conducting research with members of “captured” populations (Waldram 1998). I am responsible for all transcriptions and translations. 203 According to McCallum, gender norms embedded and generated in kinship systems, marriage arrangements, political organisation and the labour market condemn low-income Brazilian women to a life of struggle at the bottom of the social hierarchy (1999, 288). The following gendered patterns are common among precariat and working-class groups: men’s

190 problematization and mediated relatedness, these dimensions of Ivete’s experience of motherhood are consistently interpreted by authorities as signs of her irresponsibility and personal failure to be a good, caring mother. As such, she is understood by many (e.g. prison social workers) as undeserving of sustained assistance to locate her son and, thus, undeserving of motherhood. Ivete interprets the situation quite differently: Vitor and Mateus always lived with their [paternal] grandmother because I separated from their dad... But I always went to see them, always worked as a domestic employee… always brought money. I never let my sons go hungry, I always brought things for them and their grandmother. I never let them go without.

Filipe always lived with [his] godmother. He lived with me and then... As I was in the really horrible situation of not having anything to give him… Eu peguei e dei [I took and gave204] him to her instead of abandoning him…She’s still with him and she is a person that can’t have kids. She became very attached to Filipe. She always suffered a great deal and I took and gave him to her... I already knew her; I’d already lived with her and I saw that she is a person that doesn’t mistreat children… I took and gave [him to her and her husband] this one time I was living there in her house with Filipe. I always went to see him there…He played with me— nunca mudou [our relationship or his attitude towards me never changed].

My children [note shift to plural] nunca mudou comigo. It’s not because I lived with them that they didn’t me-estranham [estrange from or desert me]... I always treat my children well...

Note how Ivete insists that she chose to circulate her children – that she did not abandon them. She emphasizes her role as a provider of ongoing support and care not only to her children but to their (other) caregivers as well. In her conversations with me, Ivete consistently presents herself as a concerned and caring mother.

earning potential, however meager, is superior to that of women; there is a high level of conjugal instability and serial co- residential monogamy (so-called ‘female-headed households’ typically do not remain husbandless for long); in accordance with the sexual division of labour, mothers receive recognition for nurturing children while, ‘good’ fathers are supposed to (but often don’t, especially in the case of separation) provide materially for their children; women of childbearing age often depend, for their livelihood, upon men who are not the fathers of their older children; and, finally, children tend to be circulated and (informally) fostered out in great numbers. When finding (co-)caregivers for their children, mothers tend to give preference to their own blood relatives (in which case children maintain contact with their biological mother and may even come to straddle two homes). If, however, a mother’s own network is already saturated with children she may look to the child’s paternal kin, neighbors, acquaintances, and even employers or other patrons (Fonseca 2006, 20-21). 204 Utterances i.e. “eu peguei e saí” (lit.: “I took and left.”) place an emphasis on the second verb.

191

Ivete’s account of her pre-prison maternal situation foregrounds an inclusive expansion, rather than an exclusive retraction, of relatedness. In Brazil, especially among precariat and working- class groups, it is not uncommon for children to speak of two, three or more women as “my mother” (Fonseca 2003). Practices of child circulation (including temporary and more long-term placements as well as informal and formal adoptions) and co-parenting are crucial strategies of social reproduction in the prison-neighbourhood nexus. Fonseca helps us to think about this set of practices in relation to processes of criminalization: In Brazil, a mother’s (or father’s) separating from her child is not a criminal act. The penal code condemns anyone who “exposes” a child, that is, leaves it unassisted in circumstances that might be harmful or life- threatening (article 134). Also, at least since the 1990 Children’s Code, Brazilian law expressly prohibits the “sale” of children… As long as the parents avoid these classifications of illegality (“exposure” or “sale”), they are technically free to give their child into the care of any responsible adult – whether a court-appointed caretaker or an adoptive parent they themselves have chosen. The question in this latter form of transaction (direct adoption) is where to draw the line between the legal giving and the criminal selling of a child (2011, 319).

While parents are “technically free to give their child into the care of any responsible adult”, how and by whom is ‘responsible adulthood’ defined? In the power-laden context of the prison, as we might expect, state agents are in a position to apply strict legal definitions when they are disposed to do so. For example, when presa Erika was contemplating giving her daughter into the care of Jandiraci, a woman in her 40s with three grown children of her own, disparaging talk about Jandiraci swirled about. I suspect this might have represented an inchoate case against her “responsibility;” Jandiraci ceased to be the topic of conversation as soon as Erika agreed to send her daughter to the Center. Were Erika out of prison and on the street, her selection of Jandiraci as a (temporary) caretaker would almost certainly have been unopposed. However, when ordinary practices of relatedness such as child circulation are conducted within/through the carceral context, or otherwise come to be mediated by state agents in control of those involved, are they constructed as a problem about which “something must be done.”205

205 In the carceral context, even where child circulation arrangements are not problematized, relatedness resulting from care provision and cohabitation – as opposed to blood ties or legal contract – is generally not recognized as a valid ground for prison visitation. That is, for example, a mãe de criação (an informal foster mother) would not be entitled to visit her imprisoned filho de criação (informal foster son) even if she had raised him since he was an infant. Prison administrators have the discretion to authorize such requests on a case-by-case basis. The verb criar in

192

Before Ivete’s arrest, she left Robison in the temporary care of her infant daughter’s godmother. This action is then problematized by prison staff and other authorities on the basis of the godmother’s age. Ivete insists that the godmother is “de maior.” This designation has a legalistic meaning – “age of majority” – which, in Brazil, is 18 years of age and above. However, throughout our interviews, Ivete seems to use the term differently – to indicate de facto adult status based on position in the life cycle rather than de jure adult status based on age. In fact, it eventually emerges that the godmother in question is below the age of 18. Nevertheless, Ivete categorizes her as a ‘true’ adult based on a variety of relatively fluid and contextual indicators (e.g. the godmother has her own children and lives independently). Ultimately, the forensic fact that Ivete has left at least two of her children with a legal minor (“not more than a child herself”) is raised by various middle-class experts, including prison social workers. The implication is that, as a mother, Ivete is irresponsible, if not criminal. Her action, according to the law as it is interpreted by agents working in the penal and welfare branches of the state, constitutes exposure or abandonment. This framing of Ivete’s conduct and character is compounded by two additional forensic facts. First, Ivete’s (bad) choice to ‘abandon’ Robison with this non-adult eventually resulted in his more explicit abandonment at the doorstep of a local pre-school. State agents, in conversations with me, imply that Ivete is accountable for this outcome (the role of her arrest and pre-trial detention in producing this outcome is totally ignored). Second, Ivete’s persistent insistence upon the godmother’s adulthood is categorized as an outright lie. This categorization of Ivete’s official statements reinforces and produces an understanding of Ivete as dishonest, immoral, and, thus, unworthy of state agents’ assistance and, by extension, reunification with Robison.

To understand the production of effects such as these, we must look beyond Ivete’s experiences of imprisonment and motherhood to her formative years as a child. Processes of public abandonment and unrelatedness are already salient at this early stage, arguably conditioning Ivete’s subsequent imprisonment and bourgeoning expendability. The following section demonstrates that processes of public abandonment and unrelatedness were not instigated by Ivete’s imprisonment. Rather, these extant processes seem to have been exacerbated by

Portuguese means both ‘to raise’ and ‘to create.’ Kin ties formed by caring for one another are labeled ‘de criação.’ Following Fonseca (2006, 32), I have translated the term here as ‘foster’ relatives.

193 criminalization, penal confinement, and concomitant (extra)legal interventions of the child welfare system.

Ivete’s Childhood

Ivete came of age in the 1990s, the decade in which Brazil’s child welfare system began the transformation outlined above. More broadly, democratization seems to have brought about a change in official discourse and popular representations of marginalized children in Brazil (Scheper-Hughes and Hoffman 1998, 377). By the early 1990s, despite new legislation asserting the rights of children, “poor children in the wrong place” (in the main streets and plazas of the city) had been problematized and come to be referred to “either as ‘abandoned’ children or, alternatively, as ‘marginals’” (Scheper-Hughes and Hoffman 1998, 358). The first category implies unrelatedness and evokes pity for the child (and blame for the negligent mother). The second category is feared – its dangerous members widely perceived to be both uncontrollable and irredeemable. As such, these young ‘marginals’ experienced a high degree of public abandonment in the sense that they are excluded from programs seeking to achieve social development and (re)integration.206 At the turn of the 20th century, these “hopeless cases” were all-too-regularly removed from the public sphere, either through their confinement in so-called reform schools like the CRT in Salvador207 or brutal elimination by “death squads” (see Huggins 2000). The Candelára massacre of 1993 – when eight young ‘street children’ were shot to death as they slept near the Candelára Church in Rio de Janeiro – drew attention to the violent lives and deaths of poor urban children throughout Brazil. Writing about “the problem of ‘street children’” in in the early 1990s, Scheper-Hughes and Hoffman observe: the contemporary plight and the problem of thousands of loose and “dangerous” street children has become the center of attention both

206 According to Scheper-Hughes and Hoffman: “Street children—typically barefoot, shirtless and seemingly untied to a home or a family—are separated from all the statuses and roles that confer propriety, rights and citizenship. In the context of family-driven Brazil, the street child is barely a ‘person,’ and is vulnerable to the worst forms of exploitation, abuse and manipulation” (1998, 360). 207 Until the enactment of the new SCA (1990), which recognized the legal rights of minors incarcerated without due process, almost 700,000 Brazilian children and adolescents were locked up in government-run reform schools (often referred to as FEBEMs after the state executive bodies established in the wake of the National Foundation for Minor’s Welfare was formed in 1964) (Scheper-Hughes and Hoffman 1994: n.p.). Héctor Babenco’s 1980 cinema verité film, Pixote: a lei do mais fraco, dramatized children’s experiences in a FEBEM facility, revealing violent conditions of confinement “where criminalization, rather than reform or education, were the only possible outcomes” (Scheper-Hughes and Hoffman 1998, 353).

194

within and beyond Brazil. Underlying the current formulation of the street children’s crisis is a deep preoccupation with the future of Brazil, and with the increase in public violence that seems to have accompanied the economic crisis and transition to democracy. With the demise of the former police state, the structures that had kept the social classes safely apart and the "hordes" of disenfranchised, hungry and "dangerous" favela—shantytown—children at bay also disintegrated. Suddenly, street children seemed to be everywhere (1998, 353).

As I discuss in the remainder of this section, Ivete, born in 1989, grew up to become one of these children out of place. I have begun by framing Ivete’s early years vis-à-vis concurrent developments in discourses on marginalized children in order to de-individualize her trajectory, grasp its broader cultural meaning at the time, and demonstrate that processes of unrelatedness and public abandonment were shaping her life long before she found herself in prison.

Ivete was raised by her step-mother in the Pelourinho, the colonial jewel of Salvador’s historic centre. The Pelourinho (literally ‘whipping post’) is an area where slaves were once bought, sold, and subjected to corporal punishment. In 1985, this historic district composed of crumbling colonial buildings was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In the 1990s, the “regeneration” of the Pelourinho and its development into a tourist attraction led to the more and less coercive expulsion of thousands of residents as their homes were transformed into boutiques, museums, and NGO headquarters (Collins 2008; Butler 1998; Nobre 2002). Prior to redevelopment, the area was a renowned red-light district – known as the Maciel – largely populated by low-income Afro-Brazilian families. Some of these residents received government pay-outs and re-located to urban peripheral neighbourhoods. Many others were arrested (rumour has it, so the government could avoid pay-outs). Fatima, an HIV-positive ex-prisoner who currently visits her imprisoned daughter, recalls her own past period of confinement at Feminina: “I looked around the patio and thought, ‘Hey! The whole Maciel is here!’” Of course, some people (like Fatima and her family) have managed to stay or return to the Pelourinho. Others, not originally from the area, have been attracted to the historic centre of the city by, for example, its relatively intense circulation of capital – including a concentration of tourists who willingly (and unwillingly) part with money and other items of value (Carvalho 2010).

Ivete was still a child (she estimates that she was around 10 or 11 years old) when she went to live with her father and step-mother in the historic centre. Before the move, she had lived with her mother, father, and brother in a low-income neighbourhood of the urban periphery (Arenoso).

195

She describes her family: “On my father’s side there is me and my brother. On my mother’s side there is me and the others who live in [another neighbourhood], there’s a bunch there – my mom has a pile of kids.” When Ivete’s father left her mother (for her step-mother), she and her brother accompanied her father. Spousal abandonment is a common permutation of practices of unrelatedness that, nonetheless, may be implicated in the production of expendability.

Ivete was living with her brother, father, and step-mother in the Pelourinho when she and her brother began to sleep on the streets. Ivete’s experience is consistent with the fact that, in the 1990s, most ‘street children’ were, “as they were in the 1960s, ‘supernumerary’ or ‘excess’ kids, the children of impoverished and often single or abandoned women” (Scheper-Hughes and Hoffman 1994, n.p.). Although Ivete can’t recall her exact age when she began to sleep on the streets, she remembers that she did not yet have children of her own. She insists that she stayed on the streets because she wanted to – “Nobody abused me, they always treated me well. It was really because I wanted to leave!”. Talking about her time in the streets with her brother she becomes nostalgic, describing this period fondly, smiling mischievously as she recounts their adventures. She points out that – like many of Brazil’s so-called ‘street kids’ – she and her brother did not live on the street full-time; they were not completely detached from a household. At times, Ivete’s father would send her step-mother chasing after them; at times, they would return home for a few days. In a sing-songy voice Ivete explains: “One day we slept at home, one day in the street, a day at home, a day on the street...”

Ivete frames her separation from her father’s house as a choice. She was neither abandoned nor expelled from the household. In fact, her step-mother chased after Ivete and her brother, trying to bring them back into the domestic fold. This reminds us that unrelatedness is not exclusively a status unilaterally imposed upon a vulnerable (ex-)relation (the impression sometimes conveyed by Biehl’s 2005 account of Catarina’s social death in Vita). In Ivete’s narration of events, she played an active role in her own gradual disassociation from a household. While taking Ivete’s own sense of agency seriously, we cannot ignore the role of typical home conditions (e.g. overcrowding, demands for privacy from adults that can preclude older children from sleeping at home) known to propel poor youth into the street (Scheper-Hughes and Hoffman 1998, 359). And, of course, these home conditions are a reflection of the broader political-economic context in Brazil at the turn of the 20th century: “a failed economic development model that has relegated a vast proportion of the population to misery” (Scheper-Hughes and Hoffman 1998, 353). By the

196 time I encountered Ivete imprisoned at Feminina, she had no further relationship with her father, step-mother, or brother. She did not entertain the possibility that anyone in this (ex-)familial cluster might visit or otherwise offer support. She did not even bemoan this fact; her effective unrelatedness to these people seemed complete and unspeakable.

Although Ivete does not express regret or shame about her past as a ‘street child,’ when asked, she is adamant that she would not let her own children sleep on the street because of her “current situation.” I gather that by “current situation” she is referring to her imprisonment, her missing son, and the fact that she is entirely without familial visitors. These circumstances could reasonably generate a sense of her own effective expendability. Importantly, Ivete refuses to make a reductive causal link between her experiences as a ‘street child,’ processes of criminalization, imprisonment, and unrelatedness. However, at the same time, she seems to recognize that this cluster of experiences is complexly entangled: I’m not [in prison] because I slept in the street. It’s because of another thing. But, as I did that thing – a favour – it’s possible that he [one of her children, if permitted to sleep on the street] could do the same thing – isn’t it? He could do something worse…If I gave him enough rope I think he’ll do something worse. I don’t want this for my children, for my children to go through what I’m going through here, no... It’s very difficult... Ivete’s Institutional Encounters and Experiences of Social Development

As a child and mother, Ivete has had numerous encounters with public institutions seeking to improve people and their welfare as a means to integrate the (deserving) poor into society. Her public abandonment, or exclusion from programs aiming to cultivate good self-governing citizens, has been gradual and cumulative. But how are we to understand Ivete’s agentive role in the reproduction of her own subordination? It is well established that ‘universal’ provision of health and education services does not mean universal access (take up) by the poor. Ivete’s life history demonstrates a pattern of sporadic uptake and foreclosed access to (or ‘failure’ to access) social services, social assistance, and social protection programs. Diverging from Ivete’s own self-blame, I contend her exclusion from these interventions is not best understood as the result of individual choices and (in)action. Rather, her public abandonment is a predictable outcome of constrained and structured choices made against a background of increasing marginalization; discrimination; responsibilization; and exploitation.

197

When asked about schooling, Ivete laughs sardonically as she claims that she only went to school to mess around, identifying herself as a real troublemaker. Repeating her earlier sing-song cadence, she tells me that she went to school one day but not every day – “one day yes, one day no...” In this intermittent manner, Ivete ‘attended’ school until around 5th grade. However, she describes herself as knowing “almost nothing” because she “went to mess around” and lessons “didn’t connect.” Today, Ivete is functionally illiterate – she can’t read well although she desires to.208 Ivete reports that her children are studying but is unable or unwilling to elaborate. One obstacle to education is ‘failure’ to register a child with the state, a basic precondition of school enrollment and access to other public programs (i.e. Bolsa Família). At least some of Ivete’s five children are not (yet) registered.

As I explain below, the fact that Robison was not registered seems to have facilitated his disappearance in a number of ways. Not only does this make his location within a complex system of bureaucratic organizations less traceable, Robison’s unregistered status is interpreted by many authorities as an incontrovertible sign of Ivete’s deficiency as a mother and her dangerousness vis-à-vis the intergenerational transmission of poverty (and criminality). This apparent evidence of Ivete’s ‘personal failure’ to provide the necessities of life to her children (by accessing ‘available’ services) becomes mobilized, in the context of her imprisonment, to support the more or less explicit claim that she does not care (enough) for her children to warrant reunification assistance. Though Ivete may not have technically abandoned her son, many middle-class actors seem to feel that she might have eventually done so or that she might as well have done so.

208 Gender and ethno-racial identity shape access to education and schooling experiences in Brazil, as Lovell’s 2006 research on São Paulo’s urban labour market indicates. In 2000, around the time Ivete would have been attending school, only 37% of employed Afro-Brazilian women aged 18-64 had completed nine or more years of schooling. Marteleto’s 2012 findings confirm that, throughout Brazil, white adolescents have had persistent educational advantages over their Afro-Brazilian (black and pardo) counterparts during the period 1982-2007. “Educational stratification by race extends from the quantity of education completed to the quality of the education received inside schools” (Marteleto 2012, 340). Although Brazil reached almost universal primary school enrollment for children ages 7 to 14 of all ethno-racial categories by the mid-2000s, “grade repetition and school drop-out and push-out are common” and, thus, “completion rates are substantially lower than enrollment, and many children abandon school with relatively low levels of completed education” (Cardoso and Verner 2006, 1). School abandonment is particularly common in poorer neighbourhoods (Cardoso and Verner 2006, 1), suggesting that educational experiences are shaped by intersections of gender, ethno-racial identity, and class. Cardoso and Verner have identified early parenthood and extreme poverty as forces that play an important role in driving teenagers out of school in Northeast Brazil.

198

In Brazil, a child must be registered in order to enroll in school. Additionally, monthly bolsa família (federal income transfer) payments are calculated on the basis of the number of registered children the recipient is caring for. Ivete becomes quite melancholy as she explains why (some of) her children are not registered: because she had lost own documents and didn’t “care” to go through the process of getting new ones. She seems to be experiencing a diffuse sense of regret over her disposition, her unwillingness to recognize or seize ‘opportunities’ that were theoretically available to her. She observes that this is the same attitude that led her to “mess around” instead of studying.

The experience of imprisonment – namely, the sudden and intense foreclosure of possibility entailed by coercive confinement – may throw retrospectively visible agentive possibilities into relief or make it seem as if particular opportunities must have existed regardless of their actual availability. Moreover, imprisoned women are often confronted with hegemonic discourses of femininity, motherhood, and individual responsibility as they are processed through the criminal justice system (McCorkel 2003; Haney 2010). These pervasive discourses tend to construct imprisoned mothers as deviant women and bad mothers who have made an immoral choice to reject respectable femininity and neglect maternal duties. In short, women’s intersecting experiences of criminalization and motherhood predictably generate self-blame and feelings of failure as they did with Ivete. But, to understand how Robison disappeared and Ivete became expendable, we must look beyond the sum of her individual decisions and (in)actions.

By attending to the circumstances surrounding Robison’s birth, it is possible to reveal forces largely beyond Ivete’s control that severely circumscribe the parenting ‘choices’ of marginalized women. To acknowledge this structural dimension is not to negate Ivete’s agency but to consider the role of structural violence in discouraging service uptake. Does the theoretical availability of social development programs undermine the claim that exclusion from improvement interventions is primarily a matter of public abandonment? The following account of Ivete’s extralegal exploitation within the labour market counters discourses of individual responsibility, according to which Ivete is to blame for Robison’s disappearance specifically and her public abandonment – or exclusion from improvement interventions – more generally.

Ivete’s main employment experience has been in the field of domestic service. This is not surprising given that domestic work represents the single largest occupation among Brazilian

199 women. In 2008, Brazil had approximately 6,600,000 domestic workers (Gomes and Bertolin 2010, 2). Recently, Brazilian law has begun to recognize domestic workers’ right to have rights. This process is still incomplete; in 2008 only 25.8% were working formally with legally guaranteed entitlements and protections (Gomes and Bertolin 2010, 10). Moreover, there exists a consequential distinction between two categories of domestic workers – domestic employees are entitled to employment rights while day-workers are not (Gomes and Bertolin 2010). In recent years, as domestic employment has been increasingly formalized, the population of domestic employees has aged and shrunk while the number of day-workers has doubled (of course, formalization has not necessarily caused these changes). Ethnographic documentation of domestic workers’ stories helps us to grasp experiential dimensions of this shift, especially as it affects social inclusion and mothering.

Over the last 20 years, the national landscape of domestic work and its regulation has been transformed in Brazil. In the early 1990s, Goldstein documented her key informant’s (Glória’s) experiences working as a heavy-duty day cleaner (faxineira) in Rio de Janeiro209. At the time, most of Glória clients belonged to a large network of AIDS activists. Each day she would travel to a different employer’s home. She worked long and grueling days (see Goldstein 2003, 61-2) for a daily wage that “provided just enough money to shop in small amounts and provide for her household directly from that day’s work” (Goldstein 2003, 64). From Glória’s perspective, this work routine had some advantages. For example, the daily rhythm and rate of payment (full-time domestic workers who work and sometimes live in a single household tended to earn less) were compatible with her tight economic situation. If an emergency at home caused her to miss a day of work she could combine two already-long days of work into one very long one. Furthermore, different flexible arrangements in each household enabled her to solicit help in times of need. Glória received benefits from these multiple patron-client relationships – such as loans of money,

209 Faxineiras are sometimes brought in on a weekly (or less regular basis) to supplement the services of a full-time, exclusive empregada (domestic worker). In this case, faxineiras would perform a specific cleaning task or combination of cleaning tasks (e.g. cleaning windows) that do not need to be completed on a daily basis. When the task(s) is/are complete, the faxineira is free to leave. With the expansion of the Brazilian middle class, however, there seems to be an increased demand for faxineiras, as primary rather than supplementary domestic labourers. Middle-class professionals, who cannot afford full-time domestic help, tend to bring in a faxineira once a week to do the heavy-duty cleaning (cleaning the entire apartment, changing bed linens, and doing laundry). The designation “diarista” also refers to a part-time domestic worker. Diariatas, unlike faxineiras, are hired to provide services (e.g. cooking, tidying, laundry, cleaning, etc.) for the duration of a given work day. In practice, there is a great deal of slippage and confusion between these designations.

200 assistance with a sick son in need of hospital care, etc. – that proved vitally important. It is notable that, in the early 1990s, while Glória chose day work over a full-time position, she was able to assemble a steady schedule of jobs that yielded a living wage and allowed for the cultivation of important patron-client relationships. By 1995, she had accepted a full-time, well- paid empregada position with one of these patrons.

Fifteen years later, by the time I was conducting fieldwork (2010-12), full-time empregada positions seemed exceedingly rare. I was only aware of a handful of older women (in their 40s- 50s) who held such positions. Most research participants (in their 20s-30s) working in the domestic service sector struggled to cobble together irregular faxina jobs. In part, this is a consequence of a host of new labour laws. The new federal Constitution of 1988 guaranteed some fundamental labour rights to domestic workers: minimum wage; irreducibility of wage; an annual bonus equal to one month’s salary; paid weekly leave, preferably on Sundays; annual paid vacation with remuneration at least one third higher than the normal wage; 120 days paid maternity leave; five days paid paternity leave; notice of dismissal; as well as integration in the social security system (Gomes and Bertolin 2010, 8). Since then, legal changes210 and court decisions regarding the interpretation of the law “have followed a trend towards the inclusion of domestic workers in the labour and social security systems” and the “equalization of rights between typical workers and domestic workers” (Gomes and Bertolin 2010, 8). Although this process of inclusion of domestic workers through the recognition of rights should represent a gain for marginalized women, in practice it seems to have had some unintended consequences. Principally, the law differentiates “domestic employees” (empregados domésticos) from “self- employed domestic workers” (faxineiras and diaristas), guaranteeing employment rights only to the former. A crucial defining characteristic of day-work – other than being part-time, informal, on-call, casual employment – is that, legally, there is no “employment tie” between the employer and the employee.

Accessing domestic services, while avoiding the formation of such a tie, has become a major preoccupation of Brazilian professionals. The issue of lawsuits asking for the recognition of an

210 For example, law #11.324 guaranteed the right to thirty days of paid vacation, employment protection for pregnant workers, paid legal holidays, and the prohibition of a wage discount when the employer supplies meals, housing and hygienic products (Gomes and Bertolin 2010, 8).

201 employment relationship was a hot topic among my middle- and upper-class acquaintances. One male engineer told me how he made sure to study these employment laws on the internet. He wanted to be absolutely clear about what distinguishes a domestic employee from a day-worker so he can be sure to avoid a potential lawsuit from the woman he hires to clean, cook, and do his laundry/ironing. Although he ensures she only works a couple of days per week, he is still concerned that the regularity of her schedule could be interpreted as an employment tie. He would prefer a more flexible on-call schedule but finds this arrangement to be unreliable and inconvenient. Moreover, he does not trust his current diarista with her own key which means he must be home when she is working. This is not simply a nuisance; to him, it represents grounds for a potential lawsuit. He is anxious that simply being co-present in his apartment might give rise to something resembling an employment tie. Indignantly, he recounts a recent interaction in which his diarista had the audacity to ask whether he planned on throwing away his old iron after his purchase of a new one. This request, typical in the context of patron-client relations, made him nervous about the nature of his connection with this woman. He asked me if I knew anyone trustworthy who he could hire either in place of his current diarista or to take over one of her two days of work.

Although further research must be done to better understand these unfolding processes, my research suggests a trend toward precarization and “impersonalization” in the domestic service industry. Avoidance of an “employment tie” may contribute to the dissolution of patron-client relations or the production of official unrelatedness between self-employed domestic workers and their clients. Such a development would appear to have serious implications for marginalized women like Ivete, excluded from formal legal protections and the contingent benefits of workplace-based patron-client relationships.

Processes of informalization and criminalization also appear to be connected. For example, research participants speak about the casa de família (the family home – where domestic employees belong) as a moral domain. Day-workers, struggling to arrange a day’s work here and there, are both materially and symbolically excluded from this domain. Moreover, without stable, predictable full-time employment, women are less able to establish and sustain their own (moral) households. Ivete’s case is illustrative of many of the dimensions of precarious, informal domestic work that I have outlined here.

202

Ivete’s evolving position within the labour market figures prominently in her narrations of motherhood and criminalization. In a previous section of this chapter, I included an excerpt of a transcript in which Ivete described her children’s care arrangements in which she stated: “But I always went to see them [two of her sons], always worked as a domestic employee… always brought money. I never let my sons go hungry, I always brought things for them and their grandmother. I never let them go without.” At a separate point in our interview, while discussing Ivete’s imprisonment and the circumstances leading to her arrest, she indirectly resisted the status of criminal and denied any meaningful involvement in “the world of crime” through a popular convention: she identified herself as a worker. Specifically, she emphasized her gender- appropriate status as a woman who works (present tense) within the moral domain of the family home: “trabalho em casa da família.” It was both fascinating and difficult to witness the manner in which Ivete, over the next few moments of our conversation, came to acknowledge the dissonance between her self-statements and the reality of her situation. Without deliberate prompting on my part, Ivete began to grapple with this increasingly apparent contradiction. She became thoughtful, lapsing into periodic silences, occasionally articulating a fragmentary reflection as she reassessed the meaning of her own life. Ultimately, Ivete clarified that, in actuality, a significant amount of time had passed since she last had stable employment as a maid earning one minimum salary per month. However, Ivete went on to make the important point that she did not choose to abandon the respectable cultural role of worker.

The last time Ivete held a position that firmly embedded her in a family home, she was pregnant with Robison – her missing toddler. When Ivete’s employer learned of the pregnancy, she fired Ivete, promising the job would be waiting once Ivete had recovered. However, after giving birth, when Ivete attempted to reclaim her job, her employer had hired someone else. In order to provide food and shelter for herself and her newborn son, Ivete needed access to the employment she had been promised. Instead, rather than re-instate Ivete in her previous (full-time) capacity, Ivete’s ex-employer called her in occasionally to work as a day-worker. Notably, the circumstances of Ivete’s original position would seem to have qualified her as a ‘domestic employee,’ legally entitled to employment protection for pregnant workers and 120 days of paid maternity leave. Had Ivete taken her employer to court, it seems possible that she would have been awarded a settlement. However, it is difficult to imagine a woman such as Ivete – a female Afro-Brazilian head of household with a low level of education and primary responsibility for

203 her own child care – pursuing a lawsuit. It is not clear that she is even aware of the manner in which domestic work is regulated.

When Ivete explained that Robison is not registered because she had lost her own documents and did not “care” to go through the process of having them re-issued, her explanation bracketed out a number of structural factors that constrain her agency and capacity to take up “rights” to education, health, and social assistance. Within the current landscape of social development programs, the “failure” of a deficient adult subject to access services does not generally trigger an intervention. However, insofar as programs seek to “break the intergenerational transmission of poverty by promoting improved use of health and education services by the poor” (Lindert et al. 2007, 55), when deficient mothers fail to meet the conditions of programs, interventions may ensue.211 But how exactly would such a dangerous mother – one who seems to promote the intergenerational transmission of poverty – come to the attention of authorities in a position to intervene? And what interventions might follow? In the following section I describe the events leading up to Ivete’s arrest and her arrival in a carceral context of mediated relatedness and heightened problematization. This is the point at which ongoing processes of public abandonment and unrelatedness culminate in Robison’s disappearance and Ivete’s expendability.

Ivete’s Struggles to secure the necessities of life

As processes of public abandonment and (un)relatedness intersect, unfold, and compound one another, Ivete struggles to secure the necessities of life for herself and her child. At this point, far from being expendable as a mother, her extensions of maternal care are absolutely essential to baby Robison’s survival. Yet, over the course of approximately 18 months, this ceases to be the case.

While Robison was an infant, mother and son lived together in a neighbourhood in Salvador’s urban periphery (São Rafael)212 and Ivete worked occasionally, whenever she was able to

211 The 1988 Constitution and the subsequent SCA (1990), “recognize the rights of children and the obligation of the state, civil society and parents to protect these rights and to provide for the needs of children as individuals in a special condition of dependency, and physical and social development” (Scheper-Hughes and Hoffman 1994, n.p.). 212 Upon sharing this with me, Ivete reiterates a statement that she had also made previously – namely, that she had “always” worked as a maid in a family home and “never liked this business of...doing favours.” On one level, Ivete is referring to the “favour” she performed that led to her arrest. I suggest that Ivete may also be conceptually linking two types of precarious

204 arrange a job that did not get in the way of meeting childcare commitments. Soon, Ivete became pregnant (Ivete does not discuss the child’s father). After her daughter’s birth, Ivete and her children lived de favor (for free) in a small room. It was at this point that Ivete encountered difficulties and had to flee the neighbourhood. She explains: [It] got very dangerous... I had a problem there and [so] I took and got out of there… I got myself mixed up with friendship there, with the cousin of my daughter. And this cousin put me in the rabo de foguete [put me at risk]213… I almost died… I saw that it was time to go and leave my children... I left [them] with my daughter’s godmother because…I had to correr atrás [go after] the money I had to pay… Then this happened – I fui presa [was arrested].

In urgent need of money and shelter, Ivete relocated to the bustling historic city centre where she grew up and knows many people. Ivete repeatedly insists that she intended to send for her children as soon as possible. But, before reuniting with her son and daughter, she first needed to “find a place” because the room she was renting “didn’t have a stove, it didn’t have any of that.” In Ivete’s account, at times, she seems to suggest that she would have picked up her children on the very day she was arrested. At other moments, her reunion with her children is framed more as a imminent but taken-for-granted inevitability that was pre-empted by her arrest. It would be incorrect to assume that Ivete did not intend to resume primary custody of her two youngest children simply because her three oldest children are being (co-)raised by others. Marginalized women’s levels of involvement with their various children range significantly according to an infinitely complex calculus and, additionally, changes in a woman’s position in the life-cycle and status over time (see Fonseca 2006).

and de-valued (morally questionable) work: 1) informal yet legal work as a day-worker; and 2) informal and illegal tangential participation in the lowest echelons of the drug economy. Although these two modes of struggling to earn a very low income are clearly distinguishable, they are nonetheless related sociologically as well as imaginatively. For example, both types of labour are more associated with the (im)moral domain of the street than the moral domain of the family home. Furthermore, income cobbled together as a day-worker will likely need to be supplemented to make ends meet. This is tough when there are few ‘decent’ employment prospects for women who: have not graduated high-school; have no training and a spotty employment history; have child-care commitments; and who do not appear to be good, disciplined, self-governing subjects. Moreover, once a woman has come into conflict with the law her chances of being hired in the formal job market are significantly reduced (criminal record checks are almost always required) and she is more likely to find herself hemmed into precarious employment. 213 The production and maintenance of relatedness – as opposed to unrelatedness – should not be regarded as a social good by definition. Subjects of incarceration certainly do not view relatedness in such terms. Rather, as I explore in other chapters, relatedness is often problematized as a cause of criminalization and source of misfortune.

205

At the time of her arrest, Ivete was renting a room in a rather infamous ‘abandoned’ building. The building had been ‘invaded’ and occupied by the MST – the Movimento Sem Teto (the urban counterpart to Brazil’s famous landless movement). A number of research participants live in MST occupations. In addition to helping poor Brazilians meet immediate housing needs, MST occupations represent a culturally recognized means of accessing public housing and, thus, achieving long-term housing security. If/when state agents arrive to evict residents, evictees hope/expect they will be compensated with a space in a new – if undesirably located – social housing development.

On Christmas morning, only weeks before Ivete’s move to the city centre, the MST-occupied four-story building caught fire. Although all occupants (over 36 families) managed to escape unharmed, many of their possessions were lost. The following day, families made a controversial return to the building, dividing up the bottom two ‘habitable’ floors. City engineers directed them to leave the property citing the threat of collapse. The families refused to leave and mounted a protest in front of the building. Ivete arrived and began occupying a room in the context of this extra-precarious conjuncture. During our interview, as we wrap up a conversation about housing, Ivete updates me on the status of the MST-building: “I just learned that they closed the [building]… That’s just great! Now when I leave here I don’t even know where I’ll go. I don’t know but I’ll find a place for [the kids].” As she tries to imagine a future with her children, Ivete’s anxiety is palpable; she lowers her voice, shakes her head, looks down at the table, and begins grumbling, incoherently to herself.

Although it is my policy to never to ask participants, “what are you in for?”, Ivete spoke openly of her charge – “drugs” – and the circumstances of her arrest which, she takes pains to emphasize, was her first. According to Ivete, she was arrested while doing a favour for an acquaintance she had just met. Ivete was asked to deliver a snack and, unbeknownst to her, the package contained drugs. The police were violent during her arrest. She considered registering their abuse with a doctor but a police officer slapped her across the face, warned her to keep quiet, and threatened her life.

At the time of our interview, Ivete has been imprisoned for roughly four months during which no family member has visited. Ivete has managed to speak with a Feminina social worker about contacting her family but doesn’t know their current telephone number. I ask Ivete if her family

206 knows that she has been arrested. She says that they must know because her arrest was televised on a popular midday local news/variety program. She explains that being put on television is a horrible thing, it humiliates a person. She tried to hide her face from the cameras. She told the reporter that she didn't know the snack contained drugs – that she was “laranjada”214 – but they didn't want to listen. Journalists opined, on air, that Ivete deserved punishment.

Outside of the interview context, during one of my regular visits to Feminina, Ivete and I spoke again, this time more casually, about her lack of visits. On this particular occasion, Ivete was looking tired and dejected; her hair was not neatly pulled back, her eyes were dull, and her posture was slumped. She barely mustered the energy to ask after her missing son. I updated her on the status of the ongoing search and asked her how she was doing. Not surprisingly, she lamented her lack of visitors. Then, she added something in a voice so low that I had to request that she repeat herself: “One time my mom told me that if I were arrested because of a fight she could visit but if it was because of drugs she'd never visit me...and now, I'm here, needing her and not seeing her here...”

Ivete’s criminalization and imprisonment have not only undermined her status as a mother, but have also affected her status as a daughter. Standard carceral practices (i.e. the preventative detention of people facing relatively minor drug charges) and extralegal penality (i.e. the common practice of televised arrests which I explore in chapter 5) exacerbate pre-existing processes of familial strain and disconnection, creating conditions of possibility for the production of effective unrelatedness. Confined in Feminina, Ivete is unable to resist her mother’s withdrawal of care and recognition. More abstractly, Ivete’s imprisonment has entailed spatial as well as social dislocation which reflects and contributes to her positioning as a criminal (m)Other (Moore 2015a), a deficient subject whose dangerousness is to be contained and overcome rather than redressed through an individually transformative intervention. Confined in Feminina on extra-legally publicized drug charges, Ivete’s alienation from the moral female space of the home is perversely compounded. Like some but not all other prisoners (see chapter 4), she has lost access to the home qua place. She has also been denied the possibility of

214 The term “laranja” literally means orange but, in this context, it refers to a person taking the fall for someone else. Prison guards warned me countless times not to help prison visitors carry their heavy sacs as I might end up “laranjada” (transporting drugs unknowingly, getting caught, and facing the consequences).

207 proximity to her mother and her children, thus loosing access to symbols of home outlined by Hecht (1998).

Ivete’s mother (or “lost” mother)215 is certainly not alone in treating imprisonment as an occasion to exclude (or consolidate the exclusion) of a dangerous/endangered (ex-)relation from the household, configuration of houses, or mutual support network. At PLB, prison argot includes a term for prisoners without visitors or any other meaningful street-based support system: couro de rato (lit. mouse leather) (see Lourenço and Almeida 2013, 12-13). Certainly, in the Mata Escura penal compound, there are a number of prisoners, like Ivete, who have expressed deep sadness at their effective unrelatedness from former household members, romantic partners, and/or friends. With less frequency (due to difficulties of identification and recruitment) I have also encountered “non-visitors” who neither visit nor meaningfully acknowledge imprisoned consanguineal (ex-)kin. Often, these non-visitors have severed or “deactivated” kinship relationships to secure self or household from dangers associated with criminal kin. Whether such relationships might be (re)constructed or reactivated upon release depends on the specifics of each situation. Does a perception of connectivity persist? Will this perception be acted upon? Will “mutuality of being” be recognized and realized by both parties?

Though the ethnographic record provides ample evidence of “relations of birth being largely discounted as kinship, sometimes totally ignored” (Sahlins 2013, 3), in Brazil, an enormous weight is attributed to blood ties in reckonings of kinship (Fonseca 2006, 8) and self identity (Pina-Cabral 2013). That is, natal bonds have significant determining force in Brazilian kinship and personhood. In this context, can once-recognized genealogical ties ever be ruptured? And, if such rupture is possible, what are its subjective effects when a good part of personal identity is derived from one’s original, natal family (Fonseca 2009)?

215 I employ the term “lost” because the process of unrelatedness I am surfacing here bears some resemblance to a more familiar pattern of rupture spoken about in terms of “loss.” As Scheper-Hughes and Hoffman point out in their discussion of Brazilian ‘street children:’ “favela mothers will sometimes lament having permanently ‘lost’ one or more boys ‘to the streets.’ Here, the term ‘lost’ and ‘street’ are used to describe a poor child’s declaration of independence from his home and his parents” (1998, 359). Unlike typical ‘street children,’ these ‘lost children’ tend to live full-time in the streets, rarely if ever returning home or offering support to their mothers. I employ this indigenous idiom of “loss” to signal rupture, extending it to any type of person who has ceased to participate in a particular set of intimate exchanges. One necessarily becomes “lost” in relation to another.

208

Fonseca’s research on the circulation of children in a low-income neighbourhood of a large city in the south of Brazil reveals that provision of food and lodging, along with the labour of bringing up a child, carry “all sorts of affective and symbolic consequences, creating a bond that may rival, but is never confused with blood ties” (2006, 7). Her repeated observations that the distribution of brothers and sisters among different mothers during childhood does not foreclose eventual unification of uterine kin – where the mãe de sangue (blood mother) lives side-by-side with married, adult offspring, interacting with them daily and celebrating major family rites – has led her to remark: “It is as though the tie between a person and his blood relatives, going beyond individual acts of volition, cannot be broken” (2006, 9; also see Fonseca 2003). Indeed, to at least some extent, the powerful symbolism of shared blood “dispenses with the necessity of a person’s physical presence” (2006, 9), enabling long-lost virtual strangers to suddenly become intimates. Yet, my findings and other research on Brazil (Biehl 2005; Scheper-Hughes 1993; Fonseca 2011, 2009; Scheper-Hughes and Hoffman 1994; 1998) suggest that, in fact, blood ties can be volitionally ‘broken’ even if they are not entirely un-known or forgotten. That is, Brazilian kinship practices demonstrate that consanguineal relationships may be deconstructed in practice.

Following Nuttal, I think of this deconstruction in terms of “deactivation.” Writing of Greenlanders, Nuttal says that “people can deactivate kinship relationships if they regard them as unsatisfactory” (2000, 34). In Salvador’s prison-neighbourhood nexus, however, unlike the Greenlandic village studied by Nuttal, kinship is not primarily based on choice. Rather, procreation supposes a substantial connection between parent and child (as well as children of the same parent) which is understood in terms of shared blood possessing a special drawing power. According to indigenous statements and practices (e.g. “o sangue puxa”), shared blood entails “mutuality of being” (Sahlins 2013). Thus, refusals to nurture or extend care to “first degree relatives” (in locally recognizable, expected ways) tend to be marked, seem “unnatural,” and reflect poorly upon authors of deactivated kinship, especially women.

Inevitably, rationalization occurs around the deconstruction of kinship. And, in some cases, deactivation emerges as a “reasonable” (justifiable) response to particular culturally meaningful conditions. Among Salvador’s subjects of incarceration, one significant cluster of conditions (that could potentially legitimate deactivation of kinship ties) includes: involvement in the drug economy; criminality; and a concomitant dearth of consideração (consideration) on the part of

209 alienated (ex-)kin. Importantly, the presence of these factors – like practices of imprisonment – does not mechanically produce deactivated kinship ties as I illustrate throughout this dissertation (viz. in chapters 2 and 5). However, these factors do seem to represent conditions of possibility of a rupture of mutuality that is, at least potentially, culturally legitimate. Although ostensible cultural legitimacy does not mean that people experiencing alienation will accept their changing status and the “loss” of parents, offspring, and/or siblings this implies, carceral confinement appears to limit and undermine contestation. Imprisonment provides those who would pursue deactivation with an actionable foundation of separation. They can also be relatively confident that the institution will furnish the necessities of life; withdrawal of material support from a ward of the state should not represent a life-threatening deprivation.

Ivete’s non-visitor, “lost” mother has deactivated kinship ties through a combination of action and inaction. Not only has she declined to extend any form of care to her imprisoned daughter, Ivete and I eventually learned that she also played a key role in Robison’s disappearance.216 It is to this matter of Robison’s protracted disappearance which I now turn. Having already explored the ways in which diffuse processes of public abandonment, unrelatedness, and intersecting penal-welfare policy pragmatics combine to render both Ivete and her maternal tie to Robison expendable, I conclude with a reconstruction of the events conditioned by these processes.

Epilogue: “The smell of pizza” and the extra-legal production of lost kin

At this point, readers already know that Ivete left Robison – temporarily – in the custody of her infant daughter’s “underage” godmother when she headed to the old city centre. Readers also know that, by the time I first encountered Ivete, Robison was missing. Upon confirming that Robison was neither present nor expected at the Centre, I consulted with Ivete and accepted her request for assistance. I began to help her search for her son. Over the next few weeks, I was able to piece together a picture of what became of Robison after Ivete’s arrest. The following account

216 To my knowledge, I have never spoken to Ivete’s mother. My understanding of her (in)actions is, thus, necessarily limited and partial. Just as I conceptualize Ivete’s life choices as structured, I presume her mother’s agency is equally constrained by structural violence. In the precarious context of Salvador’s prison-neighbourhood nexus, mothers and their adult and child progeny can be rivals for scarce resources or otherwise threatened by mutuality of being. I do not suggest that Ivete or her mother acted deliberately against the best interests of Robison or others.

210 is derived from my own direct participation in the search for Ivete’s missing son. Based on the fragmentary details I was able to ‘detect’ as I struggled to negotiate the “black hole” of the Brazilian child welfare system (Fonseca 2002, 214), I attempt to explain what happened to Robison. How did he become lost to Ivete?

At some point after Ivete’s arrest, without Ivete’s knowledge, her daughter’s godmother brought Robison to stay with his grandmother (Ivete’s mother). Although I do not know what exactly provoked this transfer of custody, such shifting care arrangements are common in situations of profound poverty and uncertainty. Households already struggling to make ends meet cannot always bear the additional strains on time, space, and resources that an additional dependent represents. Ivete’s arrest and imprisonment would have meant extending the temporary care arrangement indefinitely, something the young godmother was unable or unwilling to do.

A couple of months after Ivete’s arrest, her mother appears to have deliberately given Robison away, surrendering him into the custody of the state. Reportedly, she left the child on the doorstep of a local crèche (day-care centre). This story, provided by the man in the black vest, is no doubt greatly simplified. What prevented the toddler from wandering off? How did the state agent track down Ivete if her mother did not communicate any information when she left Robison? Ultimately, it is not clear how exactly Ivete’s mother relinquished custody of Robison or what she intended to happen in the long run. What we do know is that Ivete’s mother’s actions bear a striking resemblance to historically entrenched practices of (temporary) institutional placement.

From the crèche, Robison was transferred by a pre-school teacher to a nearby branch of the Conselho Tutelar (similar to a Children’s Aid Society). Here, counsellor João – the man in the black vest – took charge of the case. At the time, he says, Robison’s identity was totally unknown so he began referring to the boy as “Junior.” On the 18th of April, counsellor João delivered “Junior” into the custody of a privately run children’s shelter (Eunice Weaver) located only a short drive away from his office. Salvador has 26 such abrigos (shelters) which are overseen by the Juizado da 1ª Vara da Infância e da Juventude (the first court of childhood and youth). In 2012, an estimated 750 children and adolescents (0 to 17 years of age) lived within Salvador’s array of shelters. And, in 2011, Ivete’s son, Robison, was one of approximately 650 children acolhidas (“welcomed” or admitted). After placing Robison at Eunice Weaver,

211 counsellor João began to conduct an investigation to identify the child. This investigation led him to the police lockup where he met with Ivete.

On Ivete’s suggestion, I began the search for Robison by trying to locate the elusive man in the black vest. As discussed above, Ivete initially (mis)recognized him as a FUNDAC representative. Thus, I paid a visit to FUNDAC’s headquarters. My visit yielded an important insight: FUNDAC217 is located in the same complex of state institutions as DECCA – Delegacia Especial de Crime contra a Criança e o Adolescente – a police station designated to deal with crimes against children and adolescents. This is significant because, before her emergency transfer to Feminina, Ivete was imprisoned at DECCA (next door to FUNDAC). Women arrested for drug offenses in Salvador cannot be detained at the police station designated to deal with this type of crime (DTE – Delegacia de Repressão a Tóxicos) because the DTE lockup only confines male prisoners. Thus, the carceral trajectory of women charged (or who will be charged) with drug trafficking often begins at DECCA. The adjacent placement and overlapping target groups of DECCA and FUNDAC, help to explain Ivete’s confusion about the organizational affiliation of the man in the black vest. More abstractly, this institutional configuration constitutes a powerful embodiment of the extent to which practices of confinement for the purposes of punishment and/or resocialization overlap and interact with interventions seeking to protect vulnerable subjects. Although my visit to FUNDAC did not turn up counsellor João, FUNDAC staff directed me to DECCA where a helpful employee suggested I visit the offices of the Conselho Tutelar. Salvador’s Municipal Council of the Rights of Children and Adolescents operates eighteen offices throughout the city, each with its own distinct coverage area. I only managed to track down the correct office, where counsellor João was employed, after a few days and several wrong turns. I was ecstatic when I finally found the elusive man in the vest.

Counsellor João invited me into his office and, after exchanging peasantries, informed me that, since visiting Ivete at DECCA, he had been in contact with Robison’s father and paternal relations. And, counsellor João was pleased to report, Robison’s father is a “trabalhador” who intends to register and care for his son. In this context, trabalhador literally means “worker” but

217 Recall, FUNDAC’s mission is to “[p]romote accountability and contribute to citizen empowerment of adolescents found to have committed infractions in the state of Bahia, while acting to safeguard human rights” (FUNDAC).

212 connotes an honest worker or a person who is not a criminal. Holding up a manila folder for emphasis, Counselor João explained that he was just in the process of getting the necessary documents in order so that Robison could finally be registered. “Once registered in the name of both parents,” Counselor João summarized, “the father will assume custody of the boy.” Counsellor João had attempted to make a follow-up visit to Ivete, at DECCA, to inform her of these developments and obtain her signature on the registration documents. However, by the time he returned to the police lockup, she had already been transferred. And, with all the confusion surrounding the death of Ivete’s cellmate, police were unable (or unwilling) to inform João of her current location. In fact, in Salvador, there are relatively few prisons for women. It seems that a few phone calls should have been sufficient to confirm Ivete’s imprisonment at Feminina. However, I did not press Counsellor João on this point. Once I learned that he had interned Robison at Eunice Weaver shelter, I became totally absorbed with the task of securing immediate access to this institution and, hence, to Robison. Fully aware that I was acting as Ivete’s proxy and attempting to help her maintain ties with her son, Counsellor João appeared keen to provide me with directions to Eunice Weaver. He seemed confident that I would find Robison well cared for, and would be able to deliver good news to Ivete.

I arrived at Eunice Weaver shelter less than two hours after departing Counsellor João’s office. The shelter – located in the low-income neighbourhood Águas Claras, which forms part of a notably isolated region on the outskirts of the city – occupies a picturesque building surrounded by lush green forest and fields. Just beyond these grounds are sprawling tracts of newly- constructed and under-construction public housing units (see fig. 25). Águas Claras and the surrounding area (viz. Cajazeiras) has been a major site of subsidized housing construction since the 1980s. The extensive Cajazeiras housing estates218 – of which the new 270-unit Águas

Claras development is a recent extension219 – have been built with the aim of creating a regional sub-centre that would prevent the “hypertrophy” of the city center.220 According to Serpa, the objective of this development “was to house a large population… and to distribute trade

218 As of 2009, O Complexo Habitacional de Cajazeiras consisted of 13 estates and housed approximately 400 thousand residents (Soares 2009: 85). 219 http://www.conder.ba.gov.br/index.php?menu=noticia&COD_NOTICIA=23 220 http://www.vertentes.ufba.br/bairro-cajazeiras

213 activities and services, in order to fixar esta população no local [secure this population at the site]” (2001: n.p.). Seeing the extremely peripheral location of these housing projects first hand, helped me to appreciate research participants’ profound ambivalence about the prospect of accessing public housing. As Perry puts it, “[u]rban displacement practices have created ‘new margins’ for poor blacks, which include housing projects such as Cajazeiras 10 and 11 distant from the coast and the city centre” (2004: 819). Indeed, Cajazeiras features a particularly high concentration of Afro-Brazilian residents (Carvalho et al. 2006, 98).

As I sat waiting to meet the shelter’s director, I scanned old photographs and framed documents decorating the walls of her office. Apparently, during the early- to mid- 20th century, children of lepers (people with Hansen’s disease221) were institutionalized here, at this “Educandário” (residential school) (see Figs. 12 and 13).

Figure 22. Educandário “Eunice Weaver”, Aguas Claras, Bahia in 1945; the building was completed in 1913 (de Souza-Araujo 1948b: 152).

Figure 23. Interior and activities of the Eunice Weaver “preventório” (specialized orphanage for children of lepers) in 1945 (de Souza-Araujo 1948b, 152). On December 31, 1946, 40 children were interned here (Souza-Araujo 1948b).

221 In 1976, “leprosy” was renamed “Hansen’s disease” to avoid the discriminatory connotations of the previous term (Oliveira et al. 2003 as cited by Fonseca et al. 2015).

214

Figure 24. Colonia Aguas Claras (a “hospital-colony” or “leprosarium” for the isolation of leprosy patients). On the left is a duplex built to house two married couples; on the right is a unit built to house 28 patients.

Figure 25. Public housing units in present day Aguas Claras. On the right-hand side of this image, Eunice Weaver shelter is visible in the background (Google Maps).

By the early 1920s, the government of Brazil had adopted a policy of isolation whereby leprosy patients were to be contained in special institutions (Fonseca et al. 2015). This policy came to full fruition in the 1940s; in the Vargas era (1930-1945), ‘the leper’ was removed from his/her family and subjected to legally mandated internment (Poorman 2008). By 1943, 41 leprosários (hospital-colonies resembling little villages) existed in 21 Brazilian states, housing nearly 17,000 patient-inmates (Fonseca et al. 2015). And, at the end of 1946, the leprosário population had increased to 21,000 (Souza-Araujo 1948a, 370). As part of the policy of isolation, these hospital- colonies were intentionally situated in the country’s hinterland. In 1949, Hospital Colônia Dom Rodrigo de Menzes (also known as Colônia Aguas Claras) – a leprosário located in the same region as Eunice Weaver – was inaugurated (figs. 20-23).222

Patient-inmates’ healthy children were abruptly separated from their parents and either raised in “preventórios” (specialized ‘orphanages’ such as Eunice Weaver) or adopted – legally or informally – by relatives and unrelated families (Fonseca et al. 2015). Between 1943 and 1960, the number of prevetórios operating throughout the country expanded from 22 to 31 (Fonseca et

222 http://www.cms.ba.gov.br/noticia_int.aspx?id=1933

215 al. 2015; Souza-Araujo 1948a, 370). During this period, institutions for the healthy children of lepers became central to the state’s approach to leprosy control. Within these institutions, children were kept under close observation in case they began to exhibit symptoms of the disease.

In spite of a federal decree (1962) advising against this policy of isolation and institutionalization – in order to “avoid the ‘rupture of family ties, occupational disruptions, and other social problems’” (Brasil 1962 as quoted by Fonseca et al. 2015) – compulsory internment was not legally abolished until 1976. And, consistent with longstanding patterns of institutionalized extra-legality in Brazil, patients in some states continued to be subjected to coercive institutionalization until the 1980s (Fonseca et al. 2015). As consensus surrounding the isolation model fragmented, it was established that severing family ties between adults with Hansen’s disease and their children was not medically necessary and, in fact, might have deleterious effects on the wellbeing of the children and adults involved (Poorman 2008). Certainly, as the result of the country’s policy of mandatory segregation, many Brazilians …currently do not know how to find their parents and siblings. Some of the children have no proof of their original biological identity. And even those who have kept in touch with their relatives may have no formal proof of their relationship (Fonseca et al. 2015).

In the early 1980s, an association (the Movement for the Reintegration of People Affected by Hansen’s Disease –MORHAN) was founded to promote the rights of people affected by Hansen’s disease. By 2007, this association had secured life-long pensions for ex-patient-inmates and, by 2010, the movement had launched a nationwide campaign “to identify and bring together siblings separated by the compulsory isolation of their parents” and “help this generation of ‘separated children’ to press legal claims for reparation against the Brazilian state” (Fonseca et al. 2015). In 2011, in Salvador, adults who had been institutionalized in Eunice Weaver as children made statements at a public hearing on this issue.223 In 2012, these efforts culminated in the formation of a working group by the Brazilian Ministry of Health to identify the number of individuals separated, as children, from their parents (est. 40,000) and to propose policies to compensate them for the perpetrated harm (Fonseca et al. 2015).

223 See, for example, http://www.cms.ba.gov.br/noticia_int.aspx?id=3527.

216

The parallels between this historic attempt to improve society through the mandatory separation of ‘deficient’ and ‘dangerous’ parents from their children, and the contemporary processes I am discussing in this chapter, are striking. However, whereas the (un)relatedness effects of past Leprosy interventions were calculated and explicit, the production of relational strain and unrelatedness between criminal (m)Others and their “still-saveable” children appears as an unintended – and officially disavowed – outcome of present penal and welfare policy pragmatics and their dysfunctionality. Yet, my research and Fonseca’s work on Brazilian adoption processes (1986, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2009, 2011), indicate that poor and criminalized women’s social relationships, especially their ties to ‘redeemable’ children, tend to be systemically undermined by state agents.

My musings on the haunting history of penal-welfare interventions in the out-of-the-way zone of Águas Claras (see figures 20-23), were interrupted by the arrival of the Eunice Weaver shelter director. Though, in retrospect, the building’s past eerily foreshadowed what I was about to discover. The director informed me that they boy I was here to see, Robison, was no longer a ward of the shelter. He had recently been removed by the juvenile court judge and the director claimed to have no further knowledge of his status or whereabouts. In late May, the presiding judge of Salvador’s 1ª Vara da Infância e da Juventude began holding a series of Audiências Concentradas (concentrated hearings) in the city’s various children’s shelters. The stated objective of these hearings was to “reintegrate children and adolescents, currently housed in institutions, into the family and community environment.”224 The judicial team conducted a hearing at Eunice Weaver on May 16 – the same day that Robison was removed from the shelter. According to the shelter director, at the time of this hearing, none of the officers of the court knew – or admitted to knowing – the boy’s identity or the identity/location of his parents.

As soon as I left the shelter and found a safe, public place to use my cell phone, I called Counsellor João to both update and question him on this disturbing turn of events. He accepted my call, seeming genuinely puzzled (and concerned) by my report. Counsellor João insisted that

224 http://www5.tjba.jus.br/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=90932:audiencias-concentradas-sao- retomadas-nesta-segunda-no-abrigo-eunice-weaver&catid=55&Itemid=202

217 he had communicated the results of his investigation to the juvenile court judge (“They must have known these details!”) and assured me he would look into the situation.

The following day I headed to the downtown offices of the juvenile court judge where I spent most of the day being shuffled from office to office. Just as the end of the workday was approaching, I finally made some progress. I found myself standing across from a woman employed within the records department. She was holding a manila folder containing Robison’s case. The woman told me that she couldn’t show me the contents of the folder until I established my authority to gain access to the file. She then lowered her voice and gravely warned me that I had better hurry. When I called João to relay the woman’s cryptic warning he informed me that he too had visited the juvenile court (earlier that very same day) and had actually managed to see Robison’s file. João confirmed my suspicion – Ivete’s son was in the process of adoption and his file contained no trace of his or his parents’ identities.

That night I created a document requesting authorization to act as Ivete’s proxy. The catholic prison pastoral, the prison social workers, and the centre social workers each endorsed and sent separate versions of the letter to the juvenile court judge. In the letter we also summarized Ivete’s situation and the findings of our investigation regarding Robison’s whereabouts. Finally, we requested that adoption proceedings be immediately suspended.

I impatiently awaited a response. The following week I returned to the offices of the juvenile court judge to check on the status of my application. I spoke to various state agents but there appeared to be no record of my request (sent by three separate, relatively powerful, intuitions). This time, no one that I encountered would admit to any knowledge whatsoever of Robison’s case. The woman from the records department was nowhere to be found and her colleagues, who were present, said it would be impossible to locate a child’s file without a case number. Although I still lacked authorization to view the contents of this file, I was desperate to confirm its existence at a moment in which all traces of Robison threatened to vanish. On the spot, facing row upon row of files and their keeper – an impassive bureaucrat, I called Counsellor João to obtain the required reference number. His secretary at the Conselho Tutelar informed me that he had been temporarily relieved of his duties and would not be back until September. My subsequent calls to his personal cell phone went directly to voicemail. We have never spoken again.

218

I will not continue to describe the waning remainder of our ultimately futile search for Robison. Instead, I will conclude by briefly mentioning three notable reactions I received from Brazilian friends and research participants when I discussed the matter with them. First, prison social workers and other ‘experts’ matter-of-factly concluded that it must have been an illegal adoption. Second, the maintenance man at the centre – a close friend – earnestly warned me that if I insisted on pursuing this issue I ought not proceed alone nor reveal my daily plans and routines to people like Counsellor João, officers of the court, or even the prison social workers. He worried they might arrange to have me killed if I threatened to reveal the conspiracy or the shady adoption which seems to have occurred. He said they could easily leave my body in a peripheral neighbourhood with a violent reputation and make it look like I had been the victim of robbery- gone-bad. He offered to accompany me to future meetings related to this issue. Other friends echoed his concern. Finally, several research participants (all marginalized subjects of incarceration) suggested that, if I wanted justice, my only real option was to attend a live taping of the same popular news/variety program that had televised Ivete’s arrest. They advised me to publicly denounce the situation as they were confident the program’s host would take up the cause and put pressure on the juvenile court judge, compelling him to “reappear” Robison.

Ultimately, to my knowledge, the (‘illegal’) adoption proceeded and Ivete and Robison were not reunited. In late June I was hospitalized with pneumonia. By the time I was able to return to Feminina, Ivete had been released. Her trial still had not occurred. I have had no further contact with Ivete. I suggest that Ivete’s crisis of care, as I have documented it, is not entirely exceptional.

In this chapter I have explored how the prison is implicated in processes of public abandonment, unrelatedness, and, ultimately, expendability. Throughout this dissertation, I show that practices of imprisonment do not mechanically strain or sever intimate relationships. Rather, the production of unrelatedness is one among many possible outcomes of incarceration. Or, more precisely, analysis of Ivete’s case has revealed how intersecting penal and welfare approaches to the management of urban marginality figure as conditions of the (present) impossibility of Ivete’s meaningful inclusion within a household and Brazilian society. What Ivete’s ‘singular life’ (Das 2015) tell us about carcerality and expendability more generally? In particular, it shows that the prison does not act alone, independent of other social institutions. Thus, to understand carceral effects, including unrelatedness and expendability, it is helpful and even

219 necessary to think in terms of carceral forms – characterized by the merging of carceral and non- carceral forms. In this case, heterogeneous elements – i.e. penal and welfare approaches to the management of urban marginality – and their becomings, “interlink and form relays in a circulation of intensities…” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 10), in such a way that Ivete’s fragile ties to consanguines and other once-intimates are ruptured. But, again, this is not an inevitable outcome. In the following chapter, I turn my attention to a series of carceral forms – viz. carceral conjugality, carceral houses, and ‘carceral respectability’ – in and through which relations are forged or maintained and belonging is asserted.

220

Chapter 4 Carceral Conjugality Introduction The Puzzling Case of Carceral Courtship and Conjugality

Figure 26. PLB Collective Wedding

The wedding ceremony was scheduled to begin at 9am. It’s now nearing 11am and guests are becoming restless. Tables near the entrance of the little chapel are loaded with tempting snacks, lembranças (mementos for guests), and four ornate cakes (fig. 26). There are four cakes because this is a collective wedding ceremony and there are delays because it is occurring within a maximum-security prison for men (PLB – Penitenciaria Lemos Brito). Specifically, we are congregated within the guards’ chapel, a rarely used church near PLB’s administrative building. Today, we have gathered here to witness the marriages of seven women to seven presos.

I overhear Pastor Almeida of Assembleia de Deus (Assembly of God) – Latin America’s largest Pentecostal denomination (Chesnut 1997: 129; see Selka 2007, 2005) – speaking on his cell phone, asking when we can expect the grooms. Pastor Almeida, who heads the Assembleia prison ministry, is also a prison guard. The grooms became crentes (lit. believers, those affiliated with a Pentecostal church) behind bars. The waiting brides are also active members of Assembleia. These women, initially, entered the prison as religious visitors, alongside other “missionaries of Christ.” It was in this capacity that they met and courted their imprisoned soon-

221 to-be husbands. Religious visitation is one of several possible avenues to carceral courtship and conjugality.

A buzz spreads through the crowd of hot and hungry guests. The grooms are rumoured to be on their way.225 We take our seats. There are none to spare. Several guests are standing. Many of those in attendance are brothers and sisters of the church. I have been chatting with an older female guest who is here for her irmã da igreja (sister of the church). She explains, in a tone that suggests there is more to the story, that this bride’s family is not present because of work obligations. When I lightly press her on this she says that the bride’s mother is working but disapproves. The implication is that the mother would have requested time off from her patroa if she weren’t ashamed of, or opposed to, this union. My seat mate glances around, leans in, and adds: “some don’t invite their families, don’t inform them... Some families don’t understand. There’s fear, prejudice…”

The occurrence of a collective wedding ceremony within a maximum-security prison is somewhat surprising. It raises questions about how and why women make conjugal connections with prisoners. This is an observable pattern of behavior that prison guards, academics, policy makers, and other members of the public — in Brazil as well as North America — tend to puzzle over.226 Indeed, “mulheres de presídio” (women/wives of the prison) rouse a great deal of curiosity in and around the Mata Escura penal compound; their presence at PLB was the topic of many conversations and debates. Specific questions I repeatedly encountered during fieldwork include: Are these women prostitutes or psychopaths? Is coming to the prison a ‘real’ choice or are they coerced? Does visitation prevent them from engaging in honest work – should visitation opportunities be reduced? Are they accessories to crime, smugglers of contraband, agents of corruption or is their presence essential to prison security and the project of resocialization? What of the children born of these unions? The majority of all visitors are female, yet, female prisoners receive so few visitors compared to presos – isn’t this is a sad reflection of the state of

225 Typically, prisoners do not leave their units – all activities are conducted within their assigned modules. Judicial hearings, indultos, bacalejos (module-wide evacuations to permit contraband searches) and medical appointments are exceptions to this rule. However, these occur only rarely. Medical treatment, for example, is notoriously difficult to obtain. In general, prisoner comings and goings are discouraged by prison staff and fellow inmates alike. 226 I now realize that guards’ fascination with this topic greatly facilitated my access to people and places within the penal compound.

222 gender relations in Brazil? While I do not address these questions specifically, I do attend to the phenomenon of conjugal visitation, approaching this practice in a manner that goes beyond problematization and the spatio-temporality of the visit itself. That is, I explore “carceral conjugality,” or the state of spousal relatedness where at least one spouse is imprisoned.

In this chapter, the concept of carceral forms finds expression in carceral conjugality as well as “carceral houses” embedded within “configurations of houses.” Both of these mutually constitutive forms consequentially encompass carceral and ‘non-carceral’ elements. First, carceral conjugality, in the iteration I examine here, involves imprisoned husbands and ‘free’ fiancés/wives. The second form – a “carceral house” or a “carceral configuration of houses” – involves a web of houses (re)produced, at least in part, by carceral forces. At the same time, a carceral space is transformed, in many respects, into a home in and through exchanges with ‘non- carceral’ houses that belong to the same (emergent) configuration. As I will show in this chapter, the contested transformation of carceral space (viz. prison cells) into a house, conditions and is often conditioned by the consummation of carceral conjugality. Moreover, these imbricated carceral forms enable some women to perform gender and generation – respectable adult femininity – when other avenues are largely foreclosed to them. Insofar as such women’s respectability is accomplished through practices of imprisonment, we might also think of their reputations as the result of a generative weaving together of carceral and ‘non-carceral’ elements and, thus, as another carceral form.

The Socio-Cultural Context of Carceral Conjugality

Through a focus on women who visit PLB as companheiras (wives and girlfriends),227 I theorize these interconnected carceral forms: carceral conjugality, houses, and personhood. Generally speaking, PLB’s companheiras are racialized; un- or under-employed; and struggling not only to make ends meet but to lead rewarding lives in contexts of deprivation, uncertainty, and insecurity. For many, an important part of leading a rewarding life is accomplishing respectable adult femininity.

227 Conjugal visitors are typically referred to as “companheiras” (lit. “companions”) rather than “esposas” (spouses). Although the sub-category of visitor is officially “Esposas e Companheiras,” in everyday talk and in the ledgers PLB staff use to record incidents and numbers of visitors (broken down by type) the term esposa is not employed.

223

For females living in Salvador’s low-income urban periphery, what marks adulthood, specifically respectable adulthood?228 In this context, educational credentials are not a strong marker of adulthood, in part, because primary and secondary school completion rates are relatively low. Paid employment is also not synonymous with adulthood: adolescents and even children engage in income-earning activities, while many adults struggle to secure jobs that would yield a living wage. This is especially true of females lacking educational credentials. And, while it is commonplace for young women to bear children, biological parenthood does not necessarily bring the high status that is attached to proper, social motherhood in Brazil (McCallum and dos Reis 2005). Rather, most health professionals at a public hospital in Salvador view the biological motherhood of adolescents as a cause and consequence of social disorder (McCallum and dos Reis 2005).

Today, in Bahia, young women, on average, have fewer children than their mothers but tend to become mothers earlier (McCallum and dos Reis 2005). While Brazil has presented declining fertility levels since the early 1970s, adolescent fertility is increasing, especially among the poorest (Santos 2012, 655). Half of the babies born in Salvador’s over-crowded and under- funded public hospitals are born to women aged 10-24 (Datasus 2001 as cited by McCallum and dos Reis 2005). Thus, a significant portion of conjugal visitors – who must be at least 18 years of age to register as such – have already given birth by the time they begin to visit the prison. It should be noted that adolescent pregnancies are often wanted, if not entirely planned. Local health posts offer free contraception and, although there are obstacles to accessing it, unavailability of contraceptive methods, does not seem to be the primary cause of high adolescent fertility rates (Santos 2012). Rather, pregnancy and marriage are still a central part of attaining social status even as adolescent parenthood is disparaged. In short, “[c]onstituting female identity through motherhood,” similar to constituting respectable femininity through carceral conjugality, “is never less than a highly fraught strategy” (McCallum 1999, 280).

The carceral conjugality that I have studied is realized in a broader social milieu characterized by a prevalence of consensual unions that are ‘neither religiously blessed nor legally’ recognized

228 In health research in Brazil, “adolescents” are defined as young people aged between 11 and 24 (McCallum and dos Reis 2005, 337).

224

(approximately 90% of couples) (Fonseca 2000, 53; Pina-Cabral 2013). These unions are spoken about in the idiom of marriage. In this context, a defining feature of marriage is cohabitation occurring ideally, but not always, within the couple’s own house. Cohabitation, and thus marriage, is often initiated in the wake of a pregnancy. For adolescents, in particular, procreation often (but not always) leads to the transformation of dating relationships (namoro) into marriages (marked by cohabitation).

In Bahia, there is a high rate of conjugal instability. When marriages end, as they do with great frequency, cohabitation ceases.229 In the case of conjugal dissolution, children and the family home (if one has been obtained) are typically expected to remain with the mother. However, there are no guarantees that: a) procreative sex will yield marriages; b) marriages will yield lasting houses; or c) mothers will retain lasting houses in the case of marital dissolution. Nonetheless, marriage or other romantic unions (e.g. concubinage) are important routes through which marginalized young women access housing, either in the short or long term.

Although Brazilian households are frequently composed of a single mother with her children (roughly 25% — Fonseca 2000, 53; Pina-Cabral 2013), so-called ‘female-headed households’ typically do not remain ‘husbandless’ for long. In this setting, re-marriage is common. Although most marriages are short lived, it is important to recognize that common effects of conjugality – namely, the formation of adult gendered persons, the establishment of houses, and individuation 230 – potentially persist after couples have separated. Within urban Bahia’s low-income neighborhoods, central importance is granted to personal independence (McCallum 2005; McCallum and Bustamente 2012). However, the successful realization of this life project is far

229 In chapter 1, I discuss serial monogamy, spousal abandonment, and housing instability/insecurity. 230 In research focusing on the Brazilian poor, there is a tendency to neglect the theme of individuation as an integral aspect of the constitution of gendered persons (McCallum and Bustamente 2012). Whereas middle-class and elite Brazilians are often depicted as ‘modern’ and governed by individualism, the poor are represented as ‘traditional’, thoroughly embedded in kinship relations that stifle individuation. What exactly is meant by “individuation”? A key anthropological insight “is that experiences and conceptions of personhood differ widely, both within and across cultures” (Calhoun, 359). The person can be characterized by its degree of individuation or, alternatively, its degree of embeddedness within social relations. Researchers ask whether, in a given social milieu, individual initiative, choice, and the construction of self is emphasized and valued. Is the person entitled (or obliged) to independently position him or herself within the social landscape? Feminist researchers (Whitehead 1984; Li 1998) have raised the possibility that degrees of individuation are gendered. They consider the extent to which forms of conjugal, familial, and kinship relations afford the subject an autonomous, independent existence and the capacity to assert rights as an individual.

225 from inevitable. Research participants seeking to realize their potential to individuate and experience autonomy, self-determination, and control over everyday decisions face numerous challenges. Often, for example, in situations of poverty, the interests of the group predominate leaving little room for individual projects (see Heilborn 1997; Sarti 1995a, 1995b, 2003).

One way the poor are (sometimes) able to attain respectable adult status and individuate is through conjugal relations that facilitate the establishment of a casa própria (one’s own house)231 either in the short or long term (McCallum and Bustamante 2012). Of course, the individuation associated with marriage also involves entering a network of affinal relationships – or establishing connectivity. Moreover, once established, the casa própria may be lost to one or both spouses in the event of separation. The point is that marriage is one avenue through which females are able to distance themselves from crowded houses of relatives and associated intense obligations to spatially and affectively close kin. In Salvador’s prison-neighbourhood nexus, there is a prevalent expectation that a husband ought to help his wife obtain a casa própria – a house she can administer and in which she can raise the (couple’s) children.

In Salvador, people inhabiting the city’s low-income, heavily-penalized urban periphery distinguish between a “casa normal” (normal house) and a “casa cheia” (full house) (see McCallum and Bustamante 2012). Though houses are often quite crowded and occupied by extended families, the form of living arrangement that enjoys greatest prestige is father, mother and children living together where: the man is the provider; the house is (relatively) autonomous; and the conjugal couple is capable of making joint decisions and acting with a certain independence from relatives. However, the independence of the conjugal family is always relative and unstable. The independent conjugal family represents only one among other eventual or possible residential arrangements, all transitory, and all centered on the symbolic valorization of the house (McCallum and Bustamente 2012).

231 Throughout my fieldwork, I learned that a casa própria can exist independent of property ownership. A casa própria (one’s own house) need not be owned outright. Indeed, such a house might be a rental, a loaned space (e.g. a room within a larger house), or an ‘incomplete’ construction on invaded land (where the ‘owner’ does not possess legal title to the land). What makes a house a casa própria seems to be the extent to which the resident in question has control over the administration of that domestic unit and feels that it belongs to him or her (and that he or she belongs in it).

226

In Bahia, there is a strong association between people and their houses. This association is particularly strong for women.232 Whereas men can legitimately pursue individuation on the streets, association with the street is generally harmful to female reputations and wellbeing. A woman’s possession of her own “normal house” – which she gets to administer – is central to local understandings of respectable adult femininity. “Doing” respectable adult femininity matters deeply to young women of Salvador’s prison-neighbourhood nexus. And, these women’s “structured choice” (Wesely 2006) to forge romantic relationships with presos both enables and constrains their performances of gender and generation. Though the effects of this choice are complex and contradictory, one thing is clear: through creative and meaningful engagements with the prison, young women constitute themselves as people –– distinct from yet deeply connected to – their families of origin. And, in some cases, processes of individuation and (conjugal) relatedness played out within and through carceral spaces give rise to houses or, at least, make the aspirational horizon of a ‘normal,’ and lasting casa própria more thinkable for subjects of incarceration.

In short, my central argument in this chapter is that young women, located at the bottom of intersecting hierarchies of class, gender, status, and race, are able to constitute themselves as relatively autonomous and respectable adult women – more or less permanently – through practices of conjugal prison visitation. This possibility presupposes that carceral spaces may become houses because, for Brazilian females, respectable feminine adulthood is generally accomplished in relation to the spatio-symbolic domain of the house.

Casa, Casamento, and Dona-de-Casa (House, Marriage, and ‘Housewife’)

The house – as a symbol and material space – is absolutely central to spousal relatedness and ideas about generation, gender, and respectability. Indeed, in Northeast Brazil, “…marriage, domesticity, and both the physical structure of the house and the conceptual realm of home all figure in the social construction of an idealized or hegemonic [adult] femininity in terms, or in defiance, of which women define themselves, or find themselves defined” (Rebhun 1999, 111). In Bahia, the word “mulher” means “adult woman” as well as “wife.” Furthermore, as Rebhun

232 This does not obviate a similar relationship, if less emphasized, for men.

227 points out, “[t]he verb casar, ‘to marry,’ derives from casa, ‘house’: to marry is to house (1999, 114). And, if being a mulher, in the matrimonial sense of the term, is to cohabitate with a partner (spouse) within a house, to become a mulher in the generational sense of the term tends also to necessitate a particular relation to a house. That is, to be recognized as dignified person, a mature woman ideally ought to have a house and control over how that house is administered – she ought to be a dona de casa. Although the label “dona de casa,” which translates, literally, to “female home owner,” can mean “housewife,” a woman referred to in this way need not be a wife. The label is also applied to unmarried women (viz. matriarchs) who possess and administer a house. More specifically, it is a term, analogous to the term “lady” (Lakoff 1975, 51-56), that is used to add or attribute status (prestige) to the referent. The term “mãe de família” (family mother – a decent mother oriented toward maintaining the wellbeing of her family) has similar positive connotations.

Throughout this chapter, I expand on this brief discussion of the term “casa” and its meanings, attending to how houses, housing arrangements, and spatial metaphors figure in the accomplishment of respectable adult femininity. I also ethnographically unpack how houses are inhabited, established, and accessed in Salvador and its environs. Specifically, I describe a regionally salient form: the “configuration of houses” (Marcelin 1999). Anthropologists studying kinship and the house in Salvador and the Bahian Recôncavo (the area around All Saints Bay, encompassing not only the coast but the entire region surrounding the inner bay), have shown that houses here are imagined and lived in interrelation with the other houses that participate in their emergence (Hita 2008; McCallum and Bustamente 2012; Marcellin 1999). Symbolically and concretely, the house only exists in the context of a configuration of houses (Marcellin 1999, 37). Moreover, in conjunction with this broader configuration, what transforms a space into a house is lived experience – one has a sense of personal belonging within the space and a feeling that it belongs to them (McCallum and Bustamente 2012, 237). This conceptualization of houses, and the broader configurations from which they emerge, allows us to think of carceral spaces as houses, as embedded within specific configurations of houses, and as generative of future houses. And, this analytic possibility is crucial if we are to theorize carceral conjugality and its effects.

To reiterate, carceral conjugality is occurring in a socio-cultural context in which many conventional markers of adulthood (i.e. completion of basic schooling, paid employment,

228 parenthood) – as they are typically experienced by poor female Bahians – actually represent challenges to the success of performances of respectable adult femininity. And, while casamento (marriage) and casas (houses) are certainly central to performances of respectable feminine adulthood, in this context, making and maintaining marriages as well as making marriages yield lasting houses, especially the ‘right’ kind of ‘normal’ house, are challenging life projects indeed. Their successful realization requires skill, savvy, and some luck.

How exactly is prison visitation – viz. carceral conjugality – implicated in these projects and the accomplishment of valued forms of feminine adult personhood?

First, in the region of the Bahian Reconcavo, where cohabitation is the foremost defining feature of marriage, PLB’s prison regime permits creative renditions of cohabitation to be realized. These enactments of (virtual) cohabitation occur within the prison as well as outside of it. By allowing cohabitation, and thus, marriage, the carceral regime provides an opportunity for women to enjoy intimate, sexual relationships that are at least potentially compatible with notions of respectable femininity. Although meanings of prison sexuality and intimacy are certainly contested, many subjects of incarceration, with whom I work, view conjugal visitors’ sexuality as properly contained within a conjugal union and, by extension, the socio-spatial moral domain of the house.233

Second, regimes of visitation/imprisonment can encourage men to enter marriages (even before or without procreation) and, in some cases, stabilize marital unions over time. In part, this is because prison visitation policies favour a particular heterosexual intimate form: the enduring monogamous union. Moreover, prison infrastructure somewhat subverts gendered patterns of mobility/containment so that presos are fixed in place and kept off the street. Carceral confinement can thus mitigate violent threats associated with the street that can disrupt lives and relationships (e.g. see chapter 1) as well as the relationship-destabilizing force of unconstrained masculine sexuality (Hayes 2011, 107).

233 I take seriously the statements and practices of research participants who give meaning to their world through the exercise of creative agency. Identifications, constructs of personhood, and the capacity of differently located persons to claim respectability, feel dignified, and pursue/realize valued projects are treated not as constants but domains of struggle.

229

Regimes of visitation/imprisonment, by permitting and even encouraging the production/maintenance of spousal relatedness, enables marginalized females to shore up their identities as respectable adult women. In the immediate present, conjugal visitors are able to conduct themselves as wives, try to have their actions interpreted in this light, and access the various reputational, affective, and material benefits that the institution of marriage might offer poor women. Over the longer term, the marriages carcerality fosters and that women cultivate both despite and through penal constraint, can allow for the stabilization of gendered and generational personhood. In some cases, contested performances of respectable feminine adulthood can have lasting effects on women’s subjectivities and social positionings. When carceral spaces are experientially transformed into houses (sites of individuation, autonomous decision making by the conjugal couple, conviviality, and a pleasurable sense of belonging); when carceral conjugality contributes to the emergence or sustenance of non-carceral houses; or when conjugal visitors’ practices of imprisonment and spousal relatedness shape and are shaped by the broader configuration of houses in which they are embedded, a relatively durable status may be sedimented. Ultimately, I suggest that propriety is accomplished via the casa própria, or its possibility.

I begin, my analysis, in the following section, by documenting costs of carceral conjugality for companheiras. While many pains of visitation are not unique to conjugal visitors, I contend that “courtesy stigma” (Goffman 1963) clings to companheiras more than other kinds of visitors (i.e. mothers visiting their imprisoned children). Yet, although conjugal visitation is both painful and deeply stigmatizing for women who engage in this practice,234 carceral conjugality also enables pleasurable performances of respectable adult femininity. These performances can be hard to recognize because they are contested and sometimes fleeting. However, viewing these performances through the optic of the house – specifically indigenous practical understands of the house – throws them into relief. Thus, I provide fine-grained ethnographic illustrations of how carceral spaces are transformed into and experienced as houses; how a “carceral house” is

234 At PLB, a maximum-security prison that confines approximately 1350 men (Almeida and Paes-Machado 2015), about 400 companheiras enter the prison on a given visitation day. Companheiras are permitted to visit Friday, Saturday, and Sunday from 8:30am to 4:30pm. Some women are present Friday through Sunday, every weekend of the year.

230 embedded within a broader configuration of houses; and how carceral conjugality can be generative of future houses and corresponding statuses.

In sections three and four, I focus on this dynamic but I am also careful not to reduce carceral conjugality to an outcome of pure instrumental calculation. Carceral conjugality is both pleasurable and productive. Through a detailed narrative of carceral conjugality that exceeds the spatio-temporality of the visit itself; a phenomenological account of carceral seduction; as well as other ethnographic examples, I convey feelings of desire and excitement which animate companheiras’ experiences of incarceration. These stories of carceral dwelling and seduction also operate to highlight underlying conditions of possibility for carceral courtship and conjugality at PLB, which I began to describe in chapter 2.

In section five, I parse practices of imprisonment and relatedness constitutive of carceral conjugality, focusing on how the prison mediates gendered mobility and containment in a manner that helps young women aspire to a “normal” life and, in some cases, realize their aspirations. But of course, carceral conjugality is a contradictory condition that is stigmatizing as well as stabilizing; companheiras’ entanglements with the prison are at once harmful and empowering. It is thus important to situate this carceral form within an understanding of what companheiras’ endure to engage in spousal relatedness with a prisoner. I now turn to a discussion of the costs of carceral conjugality.

The Pains and Contradictions of Conjugal Visitation Companheiras and Courtesy Stigma

In her mid-30s, Linda is a tall, curvy morena (variously translated as “tan,” “brown,” or “brunette”) with a cascading weave who commands attention when she’s present in the waiting area outside of her husband’s cellblock. She doesn’t just walk, she struts across the penal compound –– ample bosom thrust, chin up. Other female visitors refer to her, in Portuguese- inflected English, as “Big Brother” because, they say, she bears a striking resemblance to a contestant on the Brazilian version of the hit reality TV show. Linda dresses in form-fitting outfits with bright bold prints. She also wears heavy stylized makeup that identifies her as adjacent to – if not fully-invested in – Salvador’s oppositional street culture scene. She even has a semi-permanent tooth jewel affixed to her left lateral incisor that glints provocatively whenever

231 she speaks, smiles, or scoffs. Linda often jokes boisterously with other regular visitors. Linda met her husband while he was imprisoned elsewhere (before he was transferred to PLB). A friend set them up. They have now been together for seven years.

I am both surprised and flattered when, one weekend, this charismatic cool girl approaches me outside the cellblock with a warm greeting and a request. She explains that she’s arrived straight from a family birthday party and, thus, is wearing the wrong shoes: strappy high-heeled sandals. All elevated footwear is banned from entering the prison. This particular prohibition poses a major practical and symbolic challenge to Bahian women who feel shabby in flats. Today, Linda made a kilometer-long journey across pothole-strewn terrain from the compound entrance to the cell-block without registering the problem her shoes would pose. She was feeling buoyed (and possibly a little buzzed) in the wake of the birthday celebration. Dressed in new party clothes Linda felt confident and comfortable having successfully negotiated obligations of blood and marriage. Eager to spend a sunny, sexy Sunday afternoon with her husband, she told her family that she had work, and managed to duck out of the party without offending anyone. Linda’s relatives do not all know that she’s married to a prisoner.

Linda is not unique in this regard. Many women conceal their relationships with prisoners: to keep their jobs; as part of their persistent efforts to do respectable femininity; and in order to avoid generalized suspicion and the negative repercussions distrust can provoke from relatives, neighbors, and other people depended upon to extend crucial support in times of need. I learned quickly not to “out” visitors when I ran into them on the street. At the same time, it was important to acknowledge our familiarity and not appear dismissive or embarrassed to be associated with them. Thus, I adopted the techniques of coded silences and euphemistic pseudonyms that visitors themselves regularly employ in public non-prison contexts. For example, “We know each other from the gym…” Even in Salvador’s poorest, most heavily penalized neighbourhoods, imprisonment has not become so common a fate as to be unremarkable or destigmatized.

After being refused entry because of her high-heel shoes, Linda asks me if I will walk back to the entrance to rent or borrow a pair of plain rubber flip-flops from one of the vendors who specialize in providing goods and services to prison visitors (see the introduction to this dissertation). Linda hands me some money as she explains why she can’t run this errand herself:

232

Her father is a police officer, well known to members of the special unit charged with guarding the compound’s perimeter. Normally, at the penal compound, she surrounds herself in a crowd of visitors and quickly passes by police. However, at this time of day, most visitors have already entered the cellblocks so she has no camouflage. Linda is afraid of being exposed publicly as a “mulher de presídio.” She worries her father will disown her. After I have endeared myself to Linda by fetching her a pair of flip flops (and by doing so despite guards’ obvious disapproval) she opens up more about the anxieties that semi-covert carceral conjugality entails. She voices the possibility that her father and his police buddies will have her husband killed the moment that he’s released.

A few months later, in the wake of a conflict between Linda and prison staff over a too-short dress (see chapter 2) that ultimately mutated into a marital dispute, Linda stormed out of the cellblock early, less than an hour after she’d been admitted. In tears, she indicated that I should accompany her out of the compound. As we walked, she ranted, various issues bleeding into one another. Grievances about prison rules and their inconsistent application morphed into fragmentary and hard-to-follow expressions of dissatisfaction with her marriage. At one point, she said: “My family – they’re police – aren’t happy about the situation. They worry that I’ll be in danger when he gets out.” Ultimately, Linda and her husband did reconcile after this argument. But, at least in this fleeting moment, Linda did seem to question whether her marriage is worth maintaining. Certainly, it comes at a tremendous cost.

As I have described elsewhere, all ordinary visitors to the prisons where I conducted fieldwork are required to submit to revista íntima (strip and body cavity searches) as a condition of entry. The search takes place in a small, closed room and is conducted by a same-sex guard. In general, visitors are required to strip, squat three times, and cough while squatting. Guards may also inspect body cavities using gloves, mirrors, and flashlights. Ostensibly intended to find drugs, cell phones, and weapons being smuggled on or in the visitor’s person, this unpleasant procedure deters a number of people from visiting.235 Revista íntima is but one of many practices and

235 Some would make it as far as the entrance to the module before deciding they could not take off their clothes and endure that constrangimento (connotes embarrassment, constraint, violation, disrespect, and exposure to something undesirable). Sisters visiting their imprisoned siblings explain that they visit, in lieu of their mother (“because she is unwell and cannot handle the search” or “because she only shows herself to her husband”). As children of prisoners grew older, reaching the age (16-years-old) that they would be searched, some ceased visiting

233 details that “accrue in the lives of visitors,” communicating “the group’s diminished worth and generat[ing] feelings of stigma, confusion, trepidation, and humiliation” (Comfort 2008, 50).

In chapter 2, I explored how Feminina visitors are relatively disadvantaged vis-à-vis visitors to the compound’s men’s prisons (viz. PLB). For the purposes of the present analysis, a more nuanced discussion of PLB visitors is helpful. Specifically, I suggest that PLB visitors, as a group, are internally differentiated and subjected to different degrees of stigmatization.

In his writings on stigma, Goffman (1963) uses the term to refer to a social attribute that is deeply discrediting to an individual or group. He also discusses the possibility of “courtesy stigma” which afflicts those related to a stigmatized individual—the relationship “leads the wider society to treat both individuals in some respects as one” (30). Goffman notes “the tendency for a stigma to spread…” and goes on to suggest that this explains “why such relations tend either to be avoided or to be terminated, where existing” (1963, 30).

In urban Bahia, however, just as all prisoners are not uniformly stigmatized (see chapters 3 and 4), courtesy stigma does not plague all visitors equally. Prisoners’ close blood relatives, especially their mothers, are not, generally, expected to avoid/abandon their incarcerated kin. In fact, social workers employed at PLB endeavour to combat abandonment of prisoners by their natal families. In contrast, optive kin (a category which, to varying degrees, encompasses spouses, especially if the couple does not have children together) are more susceptible to courtesy stigma. In the context of the Bahian prison system, the only optive kin widely permitted to register as visitors are companheiras. Other people connected to prisoners by means other than shared blood – e.g. friends, neighbours, and relatives of criação or consideração – are only permitted to visit in the total absence of other visitors.236

Goffman explains that courtesy stigma sanctions those who provide a model of acceptance that breaches established norms and social hierarchies. Visitors’ extensions of care to PLB presos are an essential part of how this prison is governed. Yet, when these extensions of care are perceived

(“because she is still a virgin”). Also, although men’s non-visiting (men rarely visit imprisoned relations) seldom elicited explicit justification, I sensed that many men – namely fathers of prisoners – do not visit because of revista íntima (and its gendered meaning and effects). 236 I was not aware of a single person who received authorization to visit in the capacity of “friend.”

234 as a matter of choice, rather than consanguineal obligation, they threaten to breach a social order in which criminals are marginalized (see Penglase 2005). Thus, companheiras, especially nubile women forging fresh romantic/sexual relationships with prisoners,237 are often, themselves, constructed as “marginals” and made to suffer deprivations. The following excerpt from my field notes illustrates how guards construct companheiras as quasi-criminals in everyday, naturally occurring conversations.238 Cali (a relatively new female guard in her late 20s): “Ja peguei uma pelada…” (“I’ve already seized a naked photograph…).

Marco (a male guard in his late 20s): If they [a prisoner] approve [of the photograph] they get a laranga who doesn’t already have a [conjugal] visitor to register her.239

Cali: I can think of some who are probably prostitutes — that young pretty neginha who wears all the Adidas [outfits]. She arrived here with R$ 200 trainers. She’s practically my neighbor. She’s got a 55-year old ‘husband.’

Marco: Today it’s more difficult [for prostitution to happen in the prison], but it still happens… I know one [female visitor] who visits her husband but still gets passed around. She came in with 40 condoms to pay off his debt. He gets her to do it. This cellblock [Module II] is the most violent unit. Here, there are the most cases of men beating women. Every horrible thing happens here.

Cali: Yeah… Remember when that one left crying? She tore up her [visitor authorization] card? She’s obliged [to have sex with other men]. That’s rape. Some come [to visit] under threat. Some come under threat but at the same time like it. They think that threats are a kind of love. It's obvious that some are threatened... Many [of these] couples don't stay together on the streets. I'd like to do a research project: What feeds this love? For example, Friday there was a horrible rain storm and one [companheira] arrived with a 4-month old baby — she's putting herself and the baby at risk. How do you explain this?

237 In the everyday talk about crime and social disorder that I observed, when females are referenced, they tend to be problematized not as the traffickers who, themselves, pose a violent threat, but as either bad mothers who reproduce criminals (see chapter 3) or as immoral girls whose sexual attention encourages and rewards young men’s forays into crime. 238 This conversational excerpt is not intended to serve as an accurate portrayal of conjugal visitation. Rather, it illustrates how prison guards — as well as members of the public — talk about, perceive, and problematize the phenomenon of conjugal visitation. My findings suggest that most companheiras do not understand their prison encounters as acts of prostitution. Although money and other resources may be accessed through relationships with imprisoned boyfriends, lovers, or husbands this dimension of sexual/romantic relationships does not mean that visitors are engaged in sex work. 239 In chapter 2, I discuss the lively trade in visitors’ “names” that occurs at PLB.

235

Marco: Most [of the visitors] who arrive early — with that postura [posture, demeanor], who plant themselves there [points to a nearby spot on the pavement] — são bandidas tambem [“are also bandits”]. Many don't even know the last name of their ‘husband’. These are pretty young women. I think there's a lot of prostitution happening here in this modulo now...these guys don’t have anything else to do. On the street [when not in prison] they have outras... But not all of them are wealthy… so then what…? Homosexuality?

Cali: There are a lot of fights [between the female visitors] because of these men. They're ferocious. Confusao por bobagem [“a fracas over nonsense”]. They lie a lot. Even though they like me and Fabiane [another female guard] I still don't like to turn my back on them cause they nós olham [“look at us” — this is particularly menacing in light of local ideas about the olho gordo]. We persecute their spouses. But, I've already encountered many on the street, they even give me a kiss.

This exchange is typical of guards’ casual workplace conversations. On visitation days, in the late morning after most visitors have already been admitted into the cellblock, guards have an opportunity to chat amongst themselves as the last stragglers trickle in. During these moments, companheiras’ clothing and comportment are constantly criticized – as a group, this subset of visitors is characterized as lacking restraint and respectability. This characterization reaches its apex in more and less explicit assertions that these women are engaged in prostitution. Although prostitution has never been criminalized in Brazil, the prostitute herself has always been a figure of moral depravity (Hayes 2011, 109 N.33). This feminine figure, like that of the masculine bandido, “embodies the dangerous and illicit aspects of the rua [street] when unconstrained by the domesticated morality of the casa” (Hayes 2011, 113). I unpack the rua-casa (street-house) distinction and its place in reckonings of respectable femininity immediately below next. At present, the central point I am making is that stereotyping companheiras as illegitimate visitors (e.g. as fraudulently registered to laranjas to facilitate sexual promiscuity or prostitution) – and thus discursively constructing them as deviant, immoral women – reinforces the social hierarchy by reaffirming that decent citizens do not opt to associate with prisoners.

Even those companheiras who are not suspected of sexual impropriety or circumventing visitation regulations are marginalized. The decision to maintain or forge optive kinship relations with presos, who have been convicted of relatively serious crimes, is framed as coerced (not a real choice), irrational (the outcome of some individual mental frailty), or as a definitive rejection of a vida normal (a normal life). These three possibilities can be discerned in the above dialogue. Agency is only attributed to deviants immersed in an oppositional culture of resistance.

236

The fact that visitors like Linda (“Big Brother”) appear undeterred and unperturbed by courtesy stigma may actually exacerbate negative reactions towards them (by guards and other onlookers). That is, those who seem to routinely and steadfastly ‘accept’ courtesy stigma (e.g. by showing up at the prison several times a week, laughing and socializing with other visitors, taking apparent pleasure in the experience of visitation, etc.) are viewed as “bandidas” (bandits) and are treated accordingly.

Certainly, some companheiras’ visitation practices stem from investment in an “oppositional street culture of resistance” (similar to that which has been famously described by Philippe Bourgois 1995, 8; for Brazil see Goldstein 2013, 170). However, this possibility — indexed by clothing and comportment — offers more rewards and respect to men than to women (Miller 2002; Maher 1997; Fleetwood 2014). While some Baianas embrace and embody a local version of “bad girl femininity” (Messerschmidt 1995; Miller 2002), this identification is associated with a number of significant losses. In my experience, contrary to the assertions of prison guards like Marco, the vast majority of conjugal visitors are not proud “bandidas,” thoroughly identifying, and identified, as part of the “world of [street] crime”. Rather, many carceral courtships consolidate as female youth creatively engage with the prison as a means to be or become “ordinary” (Miller 2010) adult women.

Contested Meanings of House, Street, and Prison

As outlined in the introduction to this chapter, companheiras’ successful performances of spousal relatedness hinge on the possibility that carceral space may, at least symbolically, be transformed into a casa. Yet, this interpretation of carceral space is contested. When, for example, guards construct companheiras as marginal women lacking restraint and respectability, the prison is rendered as more street-like than house-like. In Brazil, “immoral female sexuality continues to be associated with the street, that is, the public sphere in which men circulate with impunity” (Hayes 2011, 106). Whereas the faithful housewife (dona-de-casa) and mother epitomizes the moral pole of femininity, the mulher da rua (woman of the street; prostitute) embodies the immoral pole (Hayes 2011, 113).

Intimate visits, then, represent a struggle over the meaning of carceral space. A decent (“normal”) woman’s sexuality ought to be confined to the domestic sphere and the conjugal family. By forging and maintaining spousal relatedness with imprisoned men, companheiras are

237 able to carve out a domestic sphere within the carceral sphere through which they can constitute themselves as respectable adult women. To better understand the contested terrain of intimate visitation as it manifests in Salvador and the Bahian Recôncavo more broadly, one has to pick up on the tension associated with the casa-rua (house-street) distinction.

In Brazil, everyday practices and discourses emphasize the difference between house and street (Rebhun 1999, 115).240 Of particular relevance is the way in which research participants speak about, and enact, gendered respectability in terms of the house/street opposition.

Metaphors from the domain of spatial organization are applied to the domain of identity, figuring in everyday assessments of females’ carácters (characters). Girls are scolded or disparaged if they “fica na porta” (stay at the door). Literally or figuratively occupying this liminal space between house and street identifies a girl as problematically worldly, oriented toward the domain of mobile “hungry” men, and open to inevitable male propositions. “Sair da casa” (to leave the house) is a euphemism for loss of virginity, illicit love affairs, and disobedience of parents (McCallum 1999, 280). Adult women with whom I worked insisted upon their own respectability by claiming, for example: “fico em casa, com porta fechada!” (I stay home with the door closed!); “só saio pra igreja e o trabalho” (I only leave [the house] to go to church and work). Males take pride in describing their wives — and parents take pride in describing their daughters — as “muito caseira” (homebodies — females who rarely leave the home, particularly in the evening or for pleasurable leisure pursuits). By emphasizing a woman’s preference for staying home, husbands implicitly affirm their wives’ fidelity, thus making a claim about their own masculine selfhood: “a man whose wife is thought to fica na rua (be out on the streets; literally to stay on the street) is sure to be a source of neighborhood comment” (Hayes 2011, 104). Likewise, describing a daughter as one who “only goes to school and back [home]” is a way of conveying the girl’s innocence, virginity, and decency. And, by extension, this affects the reputation of the household and broader kinship network to which she belongs.

240 Anthropologists writing about gender relations in Brazil consistently employ the category of ‘the house’ in their analyses. At times, it is unclear what exactly they are referring to: a symbolic realm structurally paired with the street (da Matta 1987; 1991) or a physical construction; a metaphor or a synonym for family/domestic group; a piece of alienable property through which the working classes formulate an “insurgent citizenship” (Holston 2008) or a complete social institution characterized by the presence of contrastive social forms (see Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995; Hita 2008).

238

Though, in reality, women and girls certainly leave the house and traverse the street with regularity — e.g. to go to school and church, work, shopping, the prison, the beach, etc. — their respectability, in contrast to that of men, depends, at least in part, on the extent to which they are identified with the moral domain of the house. Behavior understood as spatially and/or sexually transgressive can harm a female’s reputation. The sexual propriety of girls and women who spend too much (leisure) time on the street is likely to be called into question. Moreover, a woman who has sex-for-its-own-sake (outside of marriage) or who commits adultery (even within her own house) is often spoken about in terms of the street. As mentioned above, such women run the risk of being labeled mulhers da rua (lit. “women of the street,” an expression that can mean “whore” or “prostitute”). Within Bahia’s prison-neighbourhood nexus, identification as a transgressive, immoral woman can involve major repercussions including sexual harassment and assault as well as exclusion from crucial mutual support networks.

I have suggested that guards’ frequent problematizations of prostitution at PLB reflect, reinforce, and (re)produce an understanding of the prison as a street-like space. As such, females who engage in intimate encounters behind bars are positioned (though not always fully or unanimously) as transgressive, immoral figures. Crucially, however, many companheiras’ visits to the prison are not experienced in these terms. Instead, enactments of spousal relatedness that require companheiras to leave one house, traverse city streets, and enter carceral territory are practically understood as evidence of wifely devotion and proper gendered containment. The following account illustrates how a companheira, Carly, and her imprisoned husband distinguish the prison from the street through the course of quotidian negotiations concerning the matter of how good mulhers (meaning women and wives) ought to comport themselves.

Carly’s Wifely Conduct

It is a Friday morning in early December. Recall that Friday is o dia de visita íntima (intimate visitation day) at PLB. As I walk from the main compound entrance past “the tunnel” (see Ch. 1), the military police241 soccer pitch, and the invisible yet audible shooting range, I see a familiar visitor: Carly, a friendly heavy-set woman in her late 20s. I shout a greeting and she

241 A special unit of the state’s military police force – the Policial de Guarda – is charged with guarding the perimeter of the penal compound (see the introduction to this dissertation).

239 waits as I catch up. We’re headed to the same destination, the farthest of PLB’s scattered cellblocks, Module II, and we’re both running a little late.

In a voice that is even more gravelly than usual, Carly explains that she’s particularly exhausted today because she worked late last night at a Festa de Santa Barbara concert. She’s quick to admit that she “partied more than worked.” Her patron (boss) gave the staff four boxes of beer and half a litre of whiskey. Carly even got to go backstage and receive a birthday embrace from Parangole – a hearthrob pagode singer (see chapter 5 for a discussion of this music genre). This thrilling encounter moved Carly so tears. But, when her husband called (on a contraband cell phone from the prison) and she told him about her night, her pleasure dissipated. Carly’s husband was irritated and jealous. She sums up the situation: “Ele não me deixa sair, curtir… Mas, lhe contou ‘não sou presa! [pause] É ele que é preso…” (“He doesn’t let me leave [the house], [go] party… But I told him ‘I’m not a prisoner!’ It’s him who’s the prisoner…”). I nod but stay quiet, in part because I sense that Carly is resaca (hungover) and tense. I don’t want to fuel conflict that could disrupt her imminent visit and possible become violent.

Carly’s night of work at the concert permitted an ‘escape’ from her house and the punishing grind of barely making ends meet. Although her husband challenges the legitimacy of this escape, Carly forcefully defends the validity of her actions. First, she did so over the phone with her husband. Now, the next day, she is doing so again with me as we make our way across the compound. Carly insists that her actions were both exceptional and justifiable by emphasizing that: a) she attended the concert to work (that is, to earn income that will be directed back to the household); b) her patron gifted his employees with ‘free’ alcohol; c) she could not reasonably be expected to decline an embrace from a local musical hero especially on (or near) her birthday; and, d) she is not a prisoner and is therefore should be entitled to some freedom and fun. Notably, underlying Carly and her husband’s disagreement over the legitimacy of the time she spent na rua (on the street) is a veritable consensus regarding the mapping of house and street. It is also important to point out that Carley’s wifely virtue is being assessed in terms of this socio- spatial distinction.

Carly’s husband’s knowledge that she has been “na rua” making money and enjoying the Santa Barbara festivities is part of the reason why she is here (at the prison) today. She hasn’t visited for a few weeks and this absence has been stressful and a source of tension between Carly and

240 her husband. As we walk, Carly acknowledges that she’s mainly empty-handed. Indeed, unlike many of the other companheiras visiting today, she’s not hauling heavy packages of provisions. This absence of provisions is especially incongruous since she has not visited for some time. Carly explains herself: “I’m not going to be hauling weight on my birthday – today he’ll make the food! I just want to go in, eat, drink, and sleep!”. In Carly’s reasoning, we are able to recognize obligations and expectations involved in carceral conjugality.

Today, the only thing Carly is carrying is a handful of silver-coloured men’s jewelry (heavy neck and wrist chains) which she shows me as we approach the cellblock. She then volunteers an account of this jewelry that further reinforces her positioning as a dutiful wife. Carly says that she’s taken the pieces to be repaired. Before I have a chance to respond, Carly lets out a mighty groan. She’s just realized that, contrary to her expressed desire to spend the day eating, drinking, and sleeping, she won’t be able to truly rest because today is Friday, intimate visiting day: “On Saturdays he [her husband] likes to play with kids, he watches them, takes them out on the patio. Today I'll have to entertain him.” Carly is partly joking, she doesn’t entirely begrudge this sexual ‘burden’, but she’s planning on going out tonight to celebrate her birthday and wishes she’d had more of an opportunity to recover from the previous night.

In this scene, Carly (re-)casts the prison as a site in and through which wifely obligations are met. Leaving her residence to visit her imprisoned husband represents Carly’s adherence to – rather than transgression of – expectations about gender, sexuality, and social space. Respectable women’s sexuality ought to be confined to the house and the conjugal family, under the control of a husband (Hayes 2011, 106). Carly’s words and deeds demonstrate that her sexuality is, at least to some extent, properly under the control of her husband. And, to be sexually intimate with her husband in his prison cell, is to be literally and figuratively confined in the house occupied by the conjugal family.

Recently, Brazil has seen the rise of an ideology extolling female sexuality as liberating which likely derives from a conjuncture of feminist discourses and the globalization of consumerism (Hayes 2011, 106). It is possible that a highly “libidinized” (Reddy 2005, 43 as cited by Hautzinger 2007, 113) practical understanding of feminine virtue, where moral female sexuality is confined to the home and thoroughly controlled by males, has ceased to be hegemonic. Yet, nonetheless, notions of respectable femininity remain firmly embedded in the spatial

241 organization and structuring of quotidian life. Thus, it is imperative that we attend to how space and domiciles are organized and occupied in everyday life. In the following section I move from focusing on how the house figures within reckonings of gendered propriety to a related set of questions that emphasize the house as property. I consider how houses are accessed and constructed, in the material and symbolic sense of the term, in the Bahian Recôncavo. And, crucially, I explore the role of carceral conjugality in these processes of making, possessing, and inhabiting homes, especially the elusive casa própria.

Carceral Houses and Configurations of Houses

In this section, I draw on a conceptualization of “the house” that has been developed by anthropologists working in the particular geographic region in which I conducted fieldwork (the Bahian Recôncavo). These scholars attend to indigenous statements and practices related to housing in their investigations of the construction, design, and socio-cultural significance of houses (Marcelin 1999; Hita 2008; McCallum 2012). They show that “the house,” embedded within a broader “configuration of houses,” alongside principles of “blood” and “consideration” (see chapter 1), plays an important role in the creation and reproduction of family and relatives.

I begin by clarifying what is meant by a configuration of houses. According to Marcelin (1999), the house: …is not an isolated entity, turned in on itself. The house exists only in the context of a network of domestic units. It is thought and lived in interrelation with the other houses that participate in its construction – in the symbolic and concrete senses of the term. The house is part of a configuration (37 — translation my own).

My own research findings are quite consistent with this characterization. Through the course of fieldwork, by spending time in people’s homes and accompanying them as they circulated through other houses, configurations gradually became evident. Consider, for example, my friends Claudia and Rogerio.

Claudia and Rogerio’s Configuration of Houses

Claudia (34) is an ex-prisoner looking for work. Her husband, Rogerio (29), is sporadically employed as a bricklayer. They live in a little bungalow (an incompletely metamorphosed shanty) perched on the ocean’s edge in an invasion (the City of Plastic) located in Salvador’s

242

Subúrbio region. Rogerio’s mother, along with many members of his family, live a ten-minute walk away in an established neighborhood abutting Periperi beach (a prime weekend destination for poor and working-class Soteropolitanos). In fact, Rogerio also possess a very small “house” in this vicinity. His house, which is not immediately recognizable as a house, is composed of a few sparsely furnished rooms nested within his mother’s home.

Rogerio has decided to live with Claudia in the nearby invasion for a number of reasons. In part, by occupying the shanty-bungalow, they are doing a favour for a friend — the actual “owner” of the house — who is away working. If the house sits empty, its builder is unable to stake his claim to the invaded plot of land and the concrete structure he has erected upon it. This ‘house-sitting’ arrangement also grants the couple a measure of privacy and independence. Although Rogerio and Claudia intensively socialize with Rogerio’s family on the beach and inside the multi-story adjoining buildings in which many family members’ houses are located, by living independently, the spouses have the option of hosting guests at their ‘own’ place and acting more autonomously.

Their separation from the family home(s) brings a satisfying feeling of rupture and individuation. Materially, by creating physical and symbolic distance from the family home, a person is better able to resist the pull it exerts over the resources they generate (Hita 2008). These resources can then be directed to the new house. Claudia and Rogerio speak with pride and optimism about the furniture and appliances they have recently acquired as well as the items they have yet to obtain. While I was conducting fieldwork, the couple was highly focused on the project of outfitting and improving the bungalow. But, money is tight.

Rogerio pays R$ 50/month to support a toddler-son (who lives, primarily, with his mother) and R$ 75/month plus half of all medical expenses to support two daughters (who live, primarily, with their mother but who also spend regular weekends and school holidays with their father and paternal patrilineal kin). During Rogerio’s marriages to these children’s mothers, he contributed financially and pragmatically (with his own physical labour) to the establishment of the houses in which his ex-wives now reside.

Claudia’s two children, from a prior marriage to a criminal-husband, do not live with her and Rogerio. Instead, they “stay” some distance away, with their maternal grandmother (Claudia’s mother), in Madre de Deus, a tiny municipality on an archipelago that juts into All-Saints Bay

243

(across from Periperi beach).242 Claudia spoke often of her desire for me to accompany her back to this home on one of her ‘regular’ visits. Unfortunately, these visits were not as regular as Claudia would have liked. Cost of travel is prohibitive and, at the time, Claudia was busy looking for a job Salvador’s service sector. Moreover, for reasons that should become more clear below, Claudia was hesitant to leave Rogerio home alone, even for a few days. Claudia says that her children — especially her adolescent daughter — complain that she’s taking care of Rogerio’s children and not her own. As she says this, one of Rogerio’s young daughters moves through the living room and out the side-door prompting Claudia to exclaim: “What is this little girl doing here? Now I’m taking care of filhos dos outros (children of others)— it’s become a creche (daycare) here!”

It is important to note that these residential arrangements are likely to shift over time (even the short term), as children age, marriages begin/end, incomes are earned or dry up, personal crises erupt etc. For example, during my fieldwork, Rogerio briefly (for one week) left Claudia and moved (back) in with his ex-wife and son before returning home to Claudia. After this brief separation, Claudia often brought up the incident. Below, are the comments she made on one such occasion: This time I let him [Rogerio] come back but if it happens again I'll put him in a wheelchair. Once you've been in prison you don't have any more fear. I already know my children are well taken care of. This time god saved him [Rogerio]. I called up three of my old partners [in crime] and we headed out on motorbikes, everyone armed, to the place where Rogerio was staying... Only, once we got there, I found out he'd already left her and returned home. He was here when I got back. I told him and I told his mother, next time I'm not taking him back — I'll shoot him, I'll put him in a wheelchair. I have no more fear, not after my first time in prison. [Hollis], when you call from the bus station to say you've arrived for [our one year anniversary party] I'll say ‘sorry Rogerio can’t come pick you up, he’s in a wheelchair...’

This turbulent period in Rogerio and Claudia’s first year of marriage reminds us of the fragility of Bahian conjugality, the frequent instability of housing arrangements, and the changeability of configurations of houses.

242 On school holidays, when it’s possible, they come to stay with their mother.

244

Claudia and Rogerio’s case also illustrates that, in the Bahian Reconcavo, configurations of houses can be dispersed spatially, not only across neighborhoods and the city but also regions. People living in the capital often remain connected with, contributors to, constructors of, and part-time inhabitants of houses in smaller and less-densely-populated cities of the interior. The formation of new houses is made possible by circulations of people, sharing of resources, and donations of property243 that occur within the context of a configuration of houses. For example, a woman lives with her sister while working in the capital. This arrangement allows her to invest her earnings in the construction of a house on inherited family property in the interior. In another common scenario, a mother gives the slab on top of her house to her son and his pregnant wife. Her son is able to build a small room which the conjugal couple occupies. The couple continues to rely on the mother’s kitchen and bathroom facilities until, gradually, with the assistance of relations, they are able to renovate their room – their house. As the house grows, so too does the couple’s child. This child will be fed and cared for by others inhabiting a broader configuration of houses.

Crucially, a single room resembling an outbuilding behind a recognizable house, or a pair of rooms built on the roof of a residence, might actually be houses. Even if these rooms lack a stove or a toilet and their inhabitants must rely heavily upon amenities and resources located elsewhere, they may still be practically understood as houses in their own right: …what makes a space into a house is, principally, lived experience, the fact that someone feels that a particular space belongs to them and is their

243 Hita’s (2008) analysis of “ownership, appropriation, and the reproduction cycle of Afro-descendent houses in Salvador, Bahia,” provides important information on how houses and land are inherited by the poor in the context of precarious urban development in Salvador. As I discuss in chapters 1 and 2, the houses and land in question are located within neighbourhoods formed through the appropriation and occupation of empty plots of land (a process known as “invasion” in Brazil). Since the late 20th century, government programs have sought to “regularize” the precarious positions of land invaders. However, many residents of Salvador’s poor neighbourhoods have yet to receive permanent titles of land possession. The complex land tenure situation promotes fears of future eviction (Hita and Gledhill 2009a: 12). In this context, houses tend to belong to those who run them. And, often, it is women who are the primary administrators of houses (Sarti 1995b, 2003; Hita 2008). Women usually retain the house in cases of marital dissolution. The owner of the house may donate parts of the house, or the piece of land upon which it is built, to her descendants when she is still alive or transfer it as inheritance (after her death). A single original property could easily give rise to four houses through processes of donation, construction, and transformation. Gifts and inheritances of houses/land tend to benefit women (when they have become mothers) ahead of men (Hita 2008, 21). A complex and dynamic set of criteria — including gender, generation, consanguinity, consideration, as well as the contributions of a particular child’s father — also influence the determination of recipients and heirs (Hita 2008). Personal trajectories, power games, and other factors come into play in these determinations. It should also be noted that buildings, parts of buildings, and land may be unilaterally (not consensually) appropriated by individual family members or family sub-groups.

245

own house. In practical terms, “house” refers to a space where a relatively stable group of people – frequently parents and children – can sleep and keep their belongings. The house is also a space to administer, but not necessarily realize, activities necessary for survival, such as feeding or hygiene (McCallum and Bustamente 2012, 237).

This conceptualization of houses, and the broader configurations from which they emerge, underlies my argument that carceral spaces are, sometimes, houses. These carceral casas are generally embedded within broader configurations of houses. In this sense, carceral conjugality – contingent upon and constitutive of carceral houses – shapes configurations of houses. Additionally, in some cases, spousal relatedness enacted in/through the prison as well as a configuration of houses can give rise to new ‘non-carceral’ houses with the potential to outlast the husband’s penal sentence (or the conjugal union). For example, a wife may access housing through affines or secure/construct a house with the help of her imprisoned husband. Importantly, even when carceral marriages dissolve without, first, yielding a lasting ‘non- carceral’ property for the ex-wife, the sense (and aura) of propriety women are able to bolster/sustain through carceral conjugality is significant. For example, time spent living as a mulher (wife/adult woman) – whose sexuality is properly confined to the house/conjugal family and who, along with her spouse is able to make meaningful decisions about how activities necessary for survival of the household are carried out – can make the aspirational horizon marked by the elusive casa própria (and the associated status of dona de casa) seem not so distant.

I now ethnographically illustrate how carceral spaces are experienced not only as houses but, potentially, as coveted casas próprias. Throughout the following account of Ju’s carceral house, recall that a single room — even one lacking kitchen or bathroom facilities — can be practically understood as a house, even a casa própria. Of course, in order to perceive the existence of a house, there must be a material space. But this space need not constitute an independent domicile in any functional sense. As Marcelin puts it, “casa,” like “família,” has an ontological significance. These are symbolic locations in which, and through which, one defines oneself and sustains one’s social existence as a person (1999, 42). Thus, according to indigenous statements and practices, a house is a physical space that is regarded as such (McCallum and Bustamente, 2012). The following excerpt from my fieldnotes conveys how PLB prison cells can be regarded as houses.

246

Ju’s Carceral House

Ju is an upbeat and girlishly pretty visitor in her early 20s. She is petite with a bouncy mop of dark curls. She cobbles together a living as a dog walker and occasional tour guide. Her husband is a prisoner. Today Ju is excited because he’s been granted a rare and coveted ‘Saida de Natal’ (a week-long furlough over the Christmas break).

Like many of the young female visitors that I met, Ju began dating her husband once he was already a prisoner. They ‘met’ through his sister, Ju’s friend. He ‘happened’ to call his sister one day when Ju was over for a visit; his sister put Ju on the phone; and gradually the relationship bloomed. Now they are married though his upcoming furlough will be the first time they are physically together outside of the prison.

Institutional approval for Ju’s husband’s temporary release is interpreted as a sign that his sentence is actually progressing and nearing completion. This is not something that can be taken for granted in Brazil. Anticipation of release has re-opened an ongoing conversation between Ju and her husband about children. Ju already has a son from a previous union while her husband, 27, is still childless. He is eager to become a father but Ju has been putting him off. Ju tells me: “Not here inside, on the street maybe, we’ll see...” She trails off and then abruptly announces that she’s already requested a goiaba juice.

A freshly blended glass of tropical fruit juice will be waiting for her once she’s been processed through security and permitted to enter the prison. Ju has also requested that water be heated up so she can take a warm shower upon arrival. The day is cool and the overcast sky threatens more showers. Ju grew up in the heat of the Amazon; she explains that her constitution can’t handle this cool damp weather. She’s impatient to get inside. After taking a warm shower, she’ll join her husband in the double bed he’s built out from his bottom bunk. She stretches and yawns, describing the set-up as “very comfortable.” She is looking forward to spending a rainy day-off relaxing in bed, watching DVDs, and being intimate with her husband.

Ju is clearly pleased with her husband’s attentiveness, ingenuity, and status. Certainly, his position – as indexed by his relatively rarefied carceral access to fresh fruit, electronics equipment (e.g. cell phone with ample credit, television, and DVD player), and household amenities such as a spacious double-bed and appliances (e.g. a blender and a heating element) –

247 facilitated the courtship. However, Ju’s husband is not exceptional. In general, most PLB presos have similar opportunities and at least some degree of access to these kinds of resources. In general, imprisoned men are able to extend meaningful acts of care to their visitors (see chapter 2).

Of course, as I showed in my discussion of courtesy stigma, these extensions of care come at a considerable cost. And, not all eligible young women are willing or able to endure the pains of visitation. Many women, for example, find the prospect of revista íntima intolerable. On one occasion Ju arrived at the cellblock with a female friend she was trying to set up with her husband’s cellmate. Ju’s friend had already gone through the time consuming and cumbersome process of visitor registration and was looking forward to her first ‘date.’ Ultimately, however, this young woman could not bring herself to submit to the strip and body cavity search. After a lengthy period of anxiety, procrastination, and indecision she bid Ju farewell and left the compound without entering the prison or encountering her ‘date’.

The inability or unwillingness of some women (and most men) to endure regular invasive searches, reminds us that carceral conjugality is an achievement that cannot be earned without sacrifice. Ju’s loving relationship with her husband, and the fact that she has a comfortable place to spend a rainy day — a place in which she plays a key role in administering social reproductive activities, nourishes a sense of accomplishment and womanly decency. Ju’s marriage serves as a foundation from which she constitutes her identity and imagines a relatively bright future.

I now leave Ju’s carceral house and turn my attention to a configuration of houses that encompasses a carceral house. In Bahia, the prison and its carceral casas exist within a landscape of unfinished houses. Here, houses only exist in the context of “configurations of houses” (Marcelin 1999, 36), which may be dispersed spatially. Resources and people (both adults and children) circulate through these configurations, including carceral casas, in a way that is constitutive of both houses, configurations of houses, and relatedness. In what follows, I thickly describe a specific configuration of houses244 that shapes and is shaped by a carceral marriage.

244 Note, the shape and substance of the configuration varies in different family members’ experiences. A configuration of houses is analogous to the bilateral kindred insofar as it exists in relation to a particular ego. For the purposes of this sketch, I include the houses of the five Jardim family members I spent most time with.

248

The configuration under examination is inhabited by members of the Jardim family (see fig. 27). An in-depth discussion of this extended family and their housing situation helps us to grasp how carceral conjugality: a) participates in the transformation of prison cells into houses; b) knits carceral casas into broader configurations of houses; c) socially positions companheiras; and d) is implicated the emergence of future houses and the transformation of configurations of houses.245

The Jardims’ Carceral Configuration of Houses

Figure 27. Jardim Kinship Diagram

During the period of my fieldwork, the Jardims inhabited four primary houses which constitute the core of the configuration I sketch here: 1) a rented house in Catu (a town an hour’s drive outside of Salvador); an under-renovation (still unfinished) house in Fazenda Coutos (a low- income neighbourhood in Salvador’s Suburbio); an older house in Piraja (a low-income neighbourhood in Salvador’s urban periphery); and Tucano’s PLB cell.

245 Note, the present discussion of the Jardims also serves the purpose of contextualizing events analyzed in chapter 5 (viz. the televised arrest of Leleco Jardim).

249

Figure 28. Spatial positioning of houses within the Jardims’ configuration: (1) the Catu house; (2) the Fazenda Coutos house; (3) the Pirajá house; and (4) the PLB carceral house.

The event of Tucano Jardim’s imprisonment seems to have stemmed from, and spurred on, a series of conflicts with the police and other enemies occurring in and around Fazenda Coutos, where Tucano lived prior to his arrest. In the midst of this crisis, Nilson (Tucano’s father and the patriarch of the Jardim family) managed to secure a major tilework job in Catu. This employment contract enabled Nilson, Adelce (his wife), William (their 13-year-old youngest child) and Joca (their 28-year-old son) to leave Salvador, at least temporarily. Nilson and Adelce hoped this move would prevent William from emulating his older brothers and becoming involved in the drug economy. They also hoped it might protect Joca from the fallout of his criminal activities/associations in Fazenda Coutos. This move represents a spatial-temporal fix (see chapter 1).

Unfortunately, conflict seems to have followed the family to Catu. Some time after taking up residence in a rented house in this relatively quiet and rural small town, police “invaded” their home and arrested Joca. This violent incursion, which caused property damage and a public spectacle, precipitated the family’s eviction and severely tarnished their reputation in the community. However, because of Nilson’s employment and Joca’s imprisonment at the local police lockup, the family could not leave Catu. Instead, they rented a smaller, less-ideal house which they have nonetheless laboured to transform into a comfortable home. Adelce has filled the rear walled-garden with buckets of medicinal plants grown from cuttings. Leleco, during a

250 visit, endeavored to train a new puppy to stand guard in the house’s problematically un-barred, ground-level, street-facing window. And, I fondly recall the evening that I ‘helped’ Joca (recently released from jail) paint the kitchen a pretty green colour using old brooms.

Meanwhile, while a group of Jardims relocated to Catu, others stayed behind, remaining in the Fazenda Coutos house. The core of this contingent includes: the Jardims’ oldest daughter, Michelle (29) and her daughter Adrielle (12); the Jardims’ ‘working’246 son, Leleco (21), who serves as the requisite resident male protector; and Laine and Yasmin (8). Laine is Michelle and Leleco’s sister-in-law; she is married their older, imprisoned brother Tucano. Yasmin is Laine and Tucano’s daughter. The Jardims’ youngest daughter, Rosi (17), also lived in the Fazenda Coutos house until the arrival of her first child, Vitor Jr. (2).

When Rosi became a mother, she (and Vitor Jr.) began to circulate between the Jardims’ houses and houses belonging to Rosi’s affines (Vitor Jr.’s patrilineal kin). These affines extend crucial support to Vitor Jr. and his mother, providing food, milk, shelter, diapers, etc. However, Rosi’s relationship with Vitor Jr.’s father is turbulent; her place of residence, and their cohabitation, fluctuates with the state of their union and his/their perilous personal security situation. Rosi’s husband is “involved” (in criminalized activities) and, at times, has to distance himself from escalating tensions and police crack-downs by going to stay elsewhere (another example of the pervasive tactic of the spatial-temporal fix).

Among the Jardims, it is generally assumed that Rosi will eventually return to one of the family houses when this relationship dissolves (or Vitor’s Jr.’s father ends up dead or in prison). It is less clear whether Vitor Jr. would stay with her or remain with his paternal kin. Currently, the cherished toddler spends some time, including statutory holidays, in Catu and Fazenda Coutos, where he is cared for by his maternal grandmother and/or aunt Michelle. However, the Jardims’ resources are already stretched quite thin. Not one of the core family members earns a stable income from legal employment. Nilson, the possible exception to this rule, works fairly regularly but is hired/paid on a job-by-job basis. In addition to Nilson’s precarious income, Adelce’s

246 Although Leleco was not employed at the time of his televised arrest, he displays an orientation toward the world of work and otherwise distances himself from the illegal economies and local feuds that his older brothers’ are clearly invested in.

251 mother (who resides in the Pirajá house) receives a modest state pension and a few of the Jardim brothers (including Tucano who is imprisoned) earn some money through their involvement in the informal/illegal economy. Michelle contributes to the household(s) by extracting small financial inputs from Adrielle’s father, from whom she is estranged, as well as her current partner, an employee of a bus company. During my fieldwork, Michelle was establishing herself as this man’s outra (mistress) but it was not yet clear whether or not he would fully support her (and Adrielle).

The various sources of household income I have sketched, are not sufficient to reliably sustain the Jardims and their configuration of houses. Members of this extended family are clearly preoccupied with securing other revenue streams. The prison’s place in these schemes registers the consequential integration of carceral space – a carceral casa – within this configuration of houses. Consider the following excerpt from fieldnotes I recorded while staying at the Jardims’ Catu house. We’re called out of the back bedroom where we’ve been lounging around watching pirated DVDs. Nilson has just returned with Leleco and William from Feira de Santana, a city in the interior. They left early this morning in Nilson’s beat-up red car (which he only recently reclaimed from the police impound) to purchase a pile of ‘name-brand’ (e.g. Billabong, Quicksilver, etc.) men’s clothing in bulk. As we browse through several sacs of t-shirts, shorts, and underwear — carefully removing items from their individual plastic packaging to examine them — conversation bounces around:

Adelce: There are a lot of these [holds up cellophane package containing black ‘Adidas’ shorts]. There’s too many. These don’t enter [the prison]. Why didn’t you get more green, red, light blue? … [the intention is to sell (some of) this merchandise in Tucano’s cellblock – Module II].

Leleco: What’s ‘XL’?

Adelce: La dentro [inside the prison] I learned in means ‘GG’ [extra- “grande” (large)]. I think it’s roman numerals…

…

William: I’m going to check out that traveling carnival that’s in town.

Adelce: How much would it cost to buy one of those trampolines or a ball pit?

Leleco: You can charge R$ 2 for 10 minutes.

252

Michelle: Not if you set it up [over there] where there’s only pobres [poor people]. No, there it’d get wrecked in a shoot out.

Leleco: William should go on Bocão247 and ask for one!

Michelle: I’ve been on before…

…

Adelce: I’d like to set up a hotdog or snack cart. But is it better to sell cans or cups of soda? …

Hollis: There’s that program for ex-prisoners – through the catholic church – that helps them set up vending carts or other small enterprises. Do you know about that?

Adelce: It would be better if family members [of prisoners] could do the program and get a cart…

Talk circles back to the bags of clothing, specifically about how to price the shirts. There’s some debate about the going rate for items of a lesser quality. As Nilson explains: “These are falsas [knock-offs] but the best quality — the same fabric [as originals] but made by a different manufacturer. These are not from Paraguay. The best falsas come from Japan…”

Eventually, it is decided that a t-shirt (purchased for R$ 15) will sell for R$ 25 a visto (payment up front) and R$ 30-35 a fiado (payment later, possibly in installments).248 The family then discusses when they’ll be able to get to PLB with this merchandise and whether they can send some in with Laine, the family member who visits Tucano most frequently. Currently, aside from Laine and her daughter, only Adelce and William are visiting.249

Later in the evening, Tucano calls [from prison] as he does almost every night. The

247 A popular variety television show that I discuss in chapter 5. 248 William heads out after dark to visit his padrinho’s house. He’s carrying bags that have been labeled with prices. He returns with R$ 25 but he’s down two shirts. His father is dismayed: “I’d rather sell something a visto for less and have the cash in hand so I can do other business.” 249 Adelece and William are not able to visit Tucano as often as they would like because they are living in Catu. When they do visit (approx. 2 times per month) they stay at the Fazenda Coutos house for the weekend. During the early part of my fieldwork Michelle visited the prison every weekend but then stopped visiting altogether. I eventually learned that Michelle had met a man in her brother’s cellblock who she had been dating. This relationship ended, and Michelle stopped visiting the prison, during a time when: a) she had accrued a number of steep debts from prison vendors who were pressuring her to repay and b) she had managed to consolidate her position as the outra of a relatively affluent man (a non-prisoner) who works as a bus conductor for a Salvador transportation company. Michelle had this man’s name tattooed across the base of her neck and he helped the family out in various ways, though he continued to live with his primary wife. The father of Michelle’s daughter, Adrielle, also helps out with some expenses.

253

phone is passed from person-to-person, me included. Family members tell Tucano about the newly acquired clothing items and the pricing system they’ve come up with. Someone asks if he’ll speak to Laine and enlist her cooperation…

Nightly conversations with Tucano, such as this one, are an established part of the Jardims’ quotidian routine. These phone calls enable family members to keep apprised of one another’s lives. Commenting on the dynamics of a configuration of houses inhabited by different family subgroups, McCallum and Bustamente observe that an “expression of the ‘connectivity’ existing among these individuals is their awareness of one another’s lives” (2011, 371).

Before turning my focus to Laine and Tucano’s conjugal union, I must complete my reconstruction of the broader configuration of houses of which their carceral house is an essential part. The Jardims’ house in Piraja is primarily occupied by another Jardim son, Ne (23), and his maternal grandmother. I never had the opportunity to visit this house and I suspect this has to do with its members’ level of involvement in the drug trade. For a period of time, Rosi, Vitor Jr., and his dangerous/endangered father stayed at this house. And, after Joca’s release from the police lockup in Catu, he began spending more and more time in Piraja. He eventually moved there definitively when he impregnated a girl from the neighbourhood. Joca already had one daughter, Evelyn (8), who lives, primarily, with her mother, Katia (32), in a house that Joca helped to build. Evelyn also spends some weekends and school holidays with her father or paternal relatives.

The dynamics I have sketched here do not exhaust the density of interactions between family members or the fluctuation of living arrangements occurring within, and constitutive of, this particular configuration of houses. As Hita observes, in Salvador and its environs, “the house must be thought of in light of the inter-relationships which are established with other houses, and which also participate in the construction of the kinship network” (2008, 4). Circulations of people as well as resources are constitutive of configurations of houses. And, in the context of the Jardim configuration, prison visitation plays a key role in these processes. As mentioned above, the person who visits Tucano most often is his wife, Laine. She visits PLB 2-3 times per week, often bringing large deliveries of groceries and other objects to Tucano. To grasp Tucano’s cell as a house embedded within the Jardim configuration, it is helpful to consider Laine’s experiences of carceral conjugality. Laine’s story also suggests ways in which carceral conjugality can help women access housing – both in the short and long term.

254

The following narrative – a composite that supplements Laine’s particular experiences of visitation with data collected through interviews with other companheiras – demonstrates how companheiras’ practices of imprisonment and spousal relatedness contribute to the material and symbolic construction of houses and overlapping configurations of houses. The following story of a marginalized young woman’s visitation labours and spousal sacrifices illustrates the role carceral conjugality plays in her agentive pursuit of an aspirational casa própria. That is, carceral conjugality is a means through which this young woman endeavors to perform gender and generation, stabilize her status as a respectable adult woman, and project this propriety, indefinitely into the future.

Prelude to a conjugal visit and, possibly, a casa própria

Figure 29. Inside the Jardims’ Fazenda Coutos house. On the left, at the foot of the bunk-bed there is a prison-made chair (“From Grandma for Yasmin”). On the right, is Laine's locked cabinet and a prison-made stool.

It’s Saturday morning. The alarm on Laine’s cellphone goes off at 6am. She silences it and quietly climbs out of the bottom bunk, careful not to wake her daughter Yasmin. Although the top bunk is available, Laine and Yasmin sleep together. Yasmin is 8 years old, thin, light- skinned, and pretty with long golden-brown hair. She is still a child but, soon, will become a moça (girl). Laine sleeps on the outside edge of the narrow mattress, protectively sealing Yasmin between herself and the concrete wall.

Laine does not like staying here, in her in-laws’ house (Figs. 19 and 20). She would rather stay with her mother who lives only a few blocks away. Laine already spends her days with her mother, heading over there as soon as she drops Yasmin off at school. But Tucano insists that she

255 and Yasmin sleep here, in the Jardims’ Fazenda Coutos house. He feels more comfortable having his wife and daughter under ‘his’ roof, among his siblings. Tucano wants to protect his own patriarchal status by exerting effective control over his wife and daughter. He also wants to keep them safely cloistered (and under surveillance) within his domain of influence; it is the duty of the pae de família (family father) to protect his family from the dangers of the street. However, the Fazenda Coutos house is not an ideal refuge. It has been raided by the police on multiple occasions. And, furthermore, some claim that is has been violated adversaries who planted incriminating evidence on the premises before calling in a tip to the police. Certainly, the house is perceived as vulnerable to incursions.

Antagonisms and threats lurk within the house as well. In particular, tension simmers between Laine and her sister-in-law Michelle. Such conflicts are not unusual, especially within a “crowded” house such as this one. And, lately, Michelle has been moody and erratic, barely containing her contempt for Laine. Last night, Laine overheard Michelle blaming her for a broken cell phone and plotting to achieve vengeance through macumba (magic).

Beyond this specific interpersonal conflict, the living arrangements within the house make Laine anxious. It is densely occupied and visitors are often present. Various members of the Jardim family, as well as friends and associates, regularly spend time at the house, sometimes staying overnight. Laine has no control over these comings and goings – this is not her casa própria. In Brazil, “[s]tepfathers, or merely men who are considered outsiders to the family unit, are perceived as dangerous, and women, accepting this danger as part of the natural order of things, practice all kinds of precautions to protect their children from these men’s aggressions” (Goldstein 2003, 249-50). Insofar as “any man not fully related or committed to the protection of the child” is considered to be a potential abuser, Laine, like other poor women, is left as the guardian “against a socially constructed transgressive male sexuality” (Goldstein 2003, 257). This is part of the reason that Laine shares the bottom bunk with her vulnerable young daughter.

Laine slips on a pair of flip-flops, grabs her clothing from the top bunk, and moves across the bedroom, past Tucano’s younger brother, Leleco, who is sleeping shirtless on a small single bed by the door. Laine, Yasmin, and Leleco share this room. Michelle and Adrielle occupy the house’s only other bedroom. Leleco was up late last night, watching pirated horror DVDs with a visiting friend-of-the-family — a 17-year-old male with the nickname of “Gordo” (because of his

256 rotund figure). The bedroom Laine occupies does not (yet) have a door, so sounds of gruesome violence carried in from the living room as she and Yasmin painted their toenails and then, later, tried to fall asleep. When inside the Fazenda Coutos house, Laine and Yasmin spend most of their time in the bedroom.

Figure 30. Jardims’ Fazenda Coutos House

Laine pushes back the curtain that substitutes for a door, exits the bedroom, and heads through the living room, where Gordo is snoring on the couch. She reaches the front door and grabs the key from the windowsill, relieved she won’t have to wake Leleco to ask for it. She enters the front, fenced-in courtyard, fetching a small and faded towel from the line. The neighbourhood is tranquil at this early hour.

Towel in hand, Laine checks on Yasmin, who remains sleeping. Reasonably satisfied that

257

Yasmin is safe for the moment, Laine enters the bathroom. She douses herself with cold pails of water and dares to use a drop of Michelle’s depleted shampoo (if a significant amount remained, Michelle would surely have secured the product in her bedroom). Laine takes special care washing her partes íntimas (intimate body parts). She already showered yesterday afternoon dentro (in Tucano’s cell), after the conjugal couple had engaged in sex. Laine had then showered again, last night, before bed. She was sweaty and hot after the long bus ride home from the prison and her feet were filthy because, as a visitor, she has little choice but to wear flat sandals. Now, she vigorously cleans herself in anticipation of revista intíma. This weekend, the women agents assigned to Tucano’s Module are Cali and Fulana. Fulana is a judgmental crente and tends to be the one to do the body searches. She makes Laine very uncomfortable.

Laine refills the big water bucket before picking her way across the wet floor to the narrow shelf where she’s carefully balanced a pile of clothing. She pulls on a clean pair of underwear and her favorite skinny jeans. They feel limp and don’t smell as soapy and clean as she’d like. After yesterday’s visit, she didn’t have a chance to hand-wash them. Laine does laundry at her mother’s house, in part, because she fears her clothing items will go missing if she leaves them hanging unattended on the line in the Jardims’ courtyard. Things are always disappearing from this house. Perhaps, today, if it’s sunny enough, she’ll wash a few items during the visit – Tucano might even hire someone to do a load of laundry. That would be nice. She can just borrow a t-shirt and shorts from her husband while her clothing is laundered. Laine’s bra is also smelling less-than-fresh — but this is the only nice one without underwire that she has (underwire is prohibited from entering the prison). At least her t-shirt – tight and white with a colourful “Quicksilver” logo – is pristine. It has even been ironed. Its crisp creases make it look and feel brand new. Before the weekend, Laine also took time to press Yasmin’s pale purple cotton sun dress in preparation for today’s visit (it was a birthday gift from Tucano, he gave her the money to purchase it a visto).

Fully dressed, Laine exits the bathroom and moves into the kitchen to boil water for coffee. She fills a kettle and grabs matches, hoping the gas tank isn’t empty. It’s not. And, there’s still coffee grounds left in the bag. Laine doesn’t spoon many into the coador (a sock-like cloth filter) because she does not want to anger Michelle. While she waits for the water to heat, she slips back into the bedroom to wake Yasmin and send her into the bathroom to wash and dress. Yasmin groans and resists. She enjoys seeing her father but doesn’t like the prison. Laine coaxes

258 her out of bed: “There’s water on the stove, we can warm up your bath water. You can have yogurt for breakfast. Hurry up, we still have to get to the market.” Laine checks the time on her cell phone: “Come on, we can’t be late. We’ll get stuck in line.”

While Yasmin bathes, Laine unlocks the cabinet where she keeps her valued possessions (fig. 29). She told Tucano she wanted to start locking-up her belongings because Michelle and Adrielle (and Rosie, when she lived here) wouldn’t stop taking her things. Tucano must have passed her request along to Leleco. The very next day, a hasp had been installed on the wardrobe and a padlock was waiting on her pillow.

Laine rubs gobs of fragrant hair cream through her chin-length kinky dark hair and then smooths it into straight sheets with a few forceful swipes of a laundry brush. With her fingers, she applies more cream, ensuring her part is precise and that no fly-away hairs are ruining the slick-sheen of her bob. Then, she plucks her upper lip and eyebrows and begins to apply makeup. Using a brown pencil, she shapes her eyebrows into dramatically defined triangles. Aware that makeup is prohibited from entering the prison, and that touch-ups won’t be possible, she is slightly heavy- handed in her application of pink blusher and blue eyeshadow. Finally, she applies a few splashes of Avon perfume (a present from Tucano), making sure to brush some onto her jeans and cleavage. Just then, Yasmin returns, wearing nothing but a pair of flowered panties. A quick glance confirms that Leleco is still sleeping. Laine sucks her teeth, irritated that Yasmin didn’t dress in the bathroom.

Once Yasmin is dressed, Laine stows everything back in the wardrobe. She then removes a small zippered clutch before locking-up. A few months ago, after prison rules were changed to prevent visitors from brining purses inside, Laine, along with many other visitors, transitioned from carrying a convenient cross-body-purse to tiny wristlet-clutch. She bought it from an opportunistic vendor outside the prison (Tucano provided the cash). Today, Laine’s little pouch contains a crisp R$ 50 bill from Tucano that she will use to purchase the food and hygiene items he’s requested. Shopping on the morning of a visit isn’t ideal in terms of timing. However, Laine doesn’t want Tucano’s family to be involved with the process – they might interfere with the merchandise or raise questions about costs and any remaining money that Laine managed not to spend.

Before 7am, mother and daughter slip out of the front door, pause at the outdoor laundry sink to

259 brush their teeth, and then exit through the front gate. They head up the hill towards the shops and bus stop. As they enter the little market, Laine instructs Yasmin to fetch a handful of produce bags while she shops for the items on Tucano’s list (e.g. coffee, instant noodles, laundry soap, etc.) While selecting merchandise, she’s careful to save enough money for today and tomorrow’s bus fare plus a few reals that she can keep for herself. Tonight, on her return from the prison, she’ll be able to buy fresh bread for café (dinner) at her mother’s house. After dinner, she’ll stay to watch Insensato Coração (a telenovela) with her female kin. Leleco has agreed to escort her back to the Jardims’ Fazenda Coutos house when the program is over. Laine appreciates Leleco’s assistance. She should make sure to get enough bread that he can take some home for the others – they’ll need more coffee as well.

Laine picks up domestic cleaning jobs when she can. She’s hoping for a call from her patroa about coming in to do a faixina (cleaning job) on Tuesday or Wednesday. That should pay R$ 50. However, Laine’s worried the job won’t pan out. Her patroa called last Thursday asking if Laine would work today (Saturday). Unfortunately, Laine’s visitation schedule meant she had to decline. She lied to her patroa, saying that she’d already committed to helping her mother with another job. Laine fears that her occasional-employer will learn that she’s a mulher de presídio and cease hiring her. Even if her secret remains hidden, it is possible that her routine unavailability (Friday to Sunday) will prompt her patroa to replace her. This is the only kind of work Laine is able to perform right now. Through the week, she has to be free to take Yasmin to school in the morning and pick her up at lunchtime. Then, Laine brings Yasmin to her mother’s house. Laine and her female kin (who live nearby) assist one another with child care duties when necessary (e.g. on Fridays when Laine visits Tucano without Yasmin or on days when one of them has secured a cleaning job).

Laine and Yasmin leave the market and head to the bus stop. Laine is carrying three heavy plastic bags of goods and Yasmin has a handful of produce sacs. It takes less than 10 minutes to walk to the bus stop but they have to wait there for another 15 minutes. The bus only runs twice an hour on Saturdays. When it arrives, Laine sends Yasmin to enter through the front, without paying. Although only children 5-and-under are technically permitted to ride for free, there’s a general resistance surrounding the legitimacy of this policy and older children commonly enter through the front or beneath the turn-style without comment. The bus is not too crowded and Laine and Yasmin get side-by-side seats. Laine digs through the groceries and passes her

260 daughter a single strawberry yogurt cup, covered in condensation. Yasmin hands over the bunch of produce bags, eager to consume this special treat. Laine still needs to transfer everything that came in opaque packaging — coffee, juice crystals, tomato paste, etc. — into the thin transparent produce bags. For goods to enter the prison, they must be contained in searchable, transparent packaging. Laine resists performing this visitation re-packaging task on the bus because it might betray her destination and cause other passengers to think poorly of her. Laine doesn't even like taking the tell-tale handful of bags from the market. Some visitors avoid this humiliation by purchasing bulk boxes of transparent sacs (which are more durable than ‘free’ produce bags) but Laine doesn’t have the “conditions”. Instead, she uses complimentary sacs to double- and triple- bag her goods, hoping to avoid wasteful and messy leaks. She’s heard rumours that shopkeepers around the prison are starting to prevent customers from taking extra ‘free’ but flimsy produce bags. Whenever Laine purchases vegetables, she double- or triple-bags them so she can accumulate transparent packaging. One time, she and Tucano argued because his coffee tasted like onions.

As the bus rumbles on, Laine sorts through her purchases, fastidiously removing all price stickers. Tucano doesn’t need to know exactly how much she spent. She gazes out the window, catching occasional glimpses of the ocean. Before Tucano was arrested, he took Laine to the beach on dates. He drank beer and she had sweet cocktails. They shared acarajé and stayed into the evening, dancing. After, they often stopped for a few hours at a love motel.

Tucano was arrested at about the same time that Laine discovered she was pregnant. When she told him the news, he said he was happy and that they would marry and be a family. He arranged for her to move into the Fazenda Coutos house. Like many houses in Salvador’s urban landscape, the second story of this house remains unfinished (fig. 30). A staircase leads promisingly from the front courtyard to the rooftop. Laine hopes to one day have a casa própria on this slab. Having her own house so close to her mother, sisters, and cousins would be ideal. However, ownership of this rooftop space is still somewhat contested. It should belong to Tucano – indeed, his insistence that Laine stay in this house is a way of laying claim to this space – but, until he begins to construct the new house in earnest, its ownership remains in flux. Laine is discouraged and frustrated because, just recently, the Jardims built a ground-floor extension onto the house. The new room has been designated as a hair and beauty salon to be operated by Leleco and Michelle. She had hoped the bricks used for this project would have been used to start

261 construction on a new house.

Today, because there are no major traffic jams, Laine’s bus ride from Fazenda Coutos to Pirajá station (one of Salvador's three major bus hubs) takes about 40 minutes. The station is busy when Laine and Yasmin disembark to transfer busses. The queues for the two busses that travel past the prison are both quite long — Laine interprets this as a good sign, an indication that a bus didn’t just depart. Glancing around, she recognizes a few women from the prison; they exchange subtle nods of greeting. Laine reaches to check the time on her cell phone before remembering that it’s back at the house, locked in the wardrobe. She hopes she doesn’t miss a call from her patroa. Cell phones aren’t permitted in the prison. Some of the other visitors carry their phones as far as the entrance to the Module, then store them in the new lockers the men built. But, it is unclear whether visitors are permitted to possess phones inside the compound, even if the devices remain outside the cellblocks themselves. Laine would rather avoid confusion. She has considered paying one of the women at the compound entrance to store her phone for her, but generally prefers to save the money that this service costs.

The Mata Escura bus pulls into the station. As passengers pour out from middle and front exits, the queue creeps forward towards the rear entrance. Quite suddenly, a group of young men materialize. They ignore the line, swarming past it, pushing onto the bus through any available openings (doors and windows). Laine, worried the bus will fill before she makes it on, assesses the pack of boisterous young men disappearing onto the bus. They’re wiry and dark, wearing trendy board shorts, logo t-shirts, baseball caps, and rennar sandals. They seem so free and unburdened. They move unencumbered around the city – from neighbourhood to neighborhood, beach to city center – partying, smoking, womanizing, and fighting. Tucano used to be like this but now he’s a real man – her husband, a pai de família.

Laine pushes Yasmin onto the bus and they squeeze awkwardly through the turnstile. There are no available seats and the aisle is very crowded. They wedge themselves into a spot, accepting a seated woman’s offer to hold their bags on her lap. The bus pulls slowly away from the curb, its doors propped ajar by barely-boarded bodies. A few people didn’t make it on; a new queue is already forming.

This part of Laine’s journey is unpleasant but short. After each stop, more space is created and the intense discomfort of overcrowding is relieved. The prison is only four stops from Piraja

262 station. Laine really should have started pushing toward the exit in anticipation, but was hesitant to publicly disclose her destination. Thus, she and Yasmin barely escape the bus before it lurches forward, continuing on its route. Holding Yasmin’s hand and juggling her shopping bags, Laine hurries across the busy road. She is hungry and tired. She wishes she were already inside. She wants to tell Tucano about Michelle’s macumba threats and talk about starting construction on their own second-story house. Laine does not want to continue living in the crowded house with Tucano’s “crazy” sister. Also, Yasmin is getting older and really shouldn’t be staying in a house through which unrelated men circulate.

The preceding account of Laine’s journey to the penal compound demonstrates key practices and affective responses integral to companheiras’ enactments of carceral conjugality. It also reveals some of the complex forms conjugal ‘cohabitation,’ within a configuration of houses, can assume when one spouse is imprisoned. Laine’s experiences highlight both the challenges and promises of carceral conjugality as well as the central importance of the house. Carceral conjugality offers companheiras, like Laine, the possibility of accomplishing propriety and possessing a casa própria. But, carceral conjugality ought not be reduced to an instrumental calculation, a means to an end. It is necessary to acknowledge the powerful affective dimension animating this carceral form. The following phenomenological account of carceral seduction and courtship highlights this crucial dimension while also providing a window onto the conditions of possibility of carceral conjugality at PLB.250 The final two sections of this chapter document how conjugality, respectable adult femininity, and houses are realized not only in spite of imprisonment but also because of penal constraint.

Conditions of Carceral Courtship and Conjugality A Seductive Carceral Encounter

Maria251 is a Catholic in her mid-20s. She is single, childless, and lives with her strict working-

250 This discussion of the conditions of carceral conjugality builds on the description of PLB’s regime of imprisonment/visitation provided in chapter 2. 251 Maria is a composite character based on the female religious visitors who I worked with in the field. In my ethics protocol, I state my intention to use this writing strategy. Crapanzano has employed, and theorized, a similar strategy (2013; 1992; 1986).

263 class parents in a condominium of a conjunto habitacional (a state-planned housing complex) in Cabula IX.252 This address – located outside of a favela – indexes her family’s socioeconomic status. With a household gross monthly income of between 3 and 6 minimum salaries (R$ 2.215 - R$ 5.159) Maria’s family is lower-middle-class. Insofar as Maria lives just above the poverty line, she is positioned differently than most prison visitors. Yet, her future is similarly uncertain.

After graduating from secondary school Maria began looking for work. She entered a state job competition to become a prison guard253 but, unfortunately, did not receive one of the 100 positions reserved for women. Hoping to gain relevant experience that would improve her chances in the future, Maria started volunteering with Pastoral Carcerária, the Catholic prison pastoral. After completing the requisite training, she was assigned to the team that visits PLB on Thursday mornings. Aside from the priest who leads this team, all other members are female. Most Pastoral visitors are older than Maria but of a similar or slightly more affluent class position – many are homemakers or retired professionals (e.g. teachers).

Religious visitors are not submitted to the same security protocols as ordinary visitors. Maria enters a cubicle, lifts her shirt (demonstrating that she is wearing a bra without under-wire), and spins slowly as a female guard does a visual check and a light pat down. After each team member has undergone this relatively-unobtrusive procedure, and stowed their prohibited possessions in a locker in the female guards’ change room, they are admitted to their assigned cellblocks.

Maria’s team enters Cellblock II, arriving on the outskirts of the patio. Religious visits, like all

252 Housing complexes are a distinctive feature of Salvador’s landscape. Consisting of clusters of uniform mid-rise condominium buildings, their planned uniformity contrasts meaningfully with their surroundings – namely, sprawling irregular “favelas” (or “bairros perifericos”), formed through processes of invasion and auto-construction. The city’s original housing complexes are scattered throughout northern and northeastern areas of the city (viz. within the Cabula district). They emerged as part of a process of government-led “peripheralization” which began in the 1970s and involved the construction of new commercial and business areas outside of the city center. The complexes are the result of public housing policies administered by URBIS – Habitação e Urbanização da Bahia S.A. Today, condominiums within these buildings are occupied by working families with a monthly household income of approximately 3-10 salários mínimos. Thus, though these residential areas can be characterized as “bairros populares,” households are relatively affluent vis-à-vis other nearby popular neighbourhoods. In Mata Escura, for example, household incomes tend to range from 0-3 minimum salaries (see Almeida Gouveia 2010; Braga Fernandes 1993; Pinheiro 2010). 253 In order to enter the state job competition to become a prison guard, applicants must posses a secondary school diploma and a class ‘B’ driver’s license.

264

PLB visits, do not occur in a separate visitation area. As explained in chapter 2, visitors have access to cells and common areas of this maximum-security prison. The particular cellblock (module) visited by Maria’s team confines approximately 280 prisoners. Each week, as soon as the pastoral volunteers have entered the module, they are politely greeted by the same young man, a representative of the linha da frente (the group of prisoners that commands this unit). He is tasked with monitoring the entrance and conveying messages between guards and his higher- ups. This minimizes contact – and potential collaboration – between ordinary prisoners and guards. Like his fellow prisoners, the young greeter is not wearing a uniform. The greeter keeps an eye on the Pastoral team until an escort arrives to lead them up to the church on the second floor.

The escort, a newly-practicing protestant, is charged with the task of overseeing people and spaces associated with the church (i.e. the place of worship itself and the row of cells reserved for crentes. He is authorized by the linha da frente to perform this duty and, more generally, to mediate between the crente faction and the leadership.254 As the escort leads Pastoral visitors through the prison he calls ahead, warning prisoners of the presence of guests and allowing them an opportunity to drop the curtain across door of their cell if, for example, they are engaged in illicit activities. The little convoy passes a barber shop, a woodworking shop, and a gallery displaying paintings and other artisanal wares produced by prisoners. Prisoners are active today, moving purposefully around the module, preparing for three consecutive days of visitation.

The church is a large and echoey room of cement and tile, shared by the different religious groups – Catholic and Protestant255 – that visit this unit every day of the week except Fridays— the day of the week that is dedicated, exclusively, to visitas íntimas (conjugal visitation). Whereas the evangelical churches offer weekly cultos (services), the Catholics do not perform mass. Instead, Catholic volunteers facilitate bible discussions, prayer, and song. However, because the church is located beside the woodworking shop, it is often difficult to hear one

254 Crentes constitute a distinctive sub-group within the prison, readily identifiable by their clothing: they wear pleated trousers and tucked-in long-sleeved dress shirts. Crentes are permitted to ‘self-govern’ as long as their activities do not interfere with the leadership’s business. 255 Module II does not accept visits from Barabada, the Pai de Santo (of the Candomblé faith) who visits other PLB cellblocks and prisons within the Mata Escura compound.

265 another over the screeching roar of the circular saw. Thus, volunteers and prisoners tighten their circle of chairs, leaning-in close.

Maria is seated next to Tony. At first, he was an irregular participant in these weekly meetings but, recently, he has become a constant presence. He is tall and thin – but muscular. He has light skin and thick dark hair. He is well-groomed, clean-shaven, and dressed in pristine, fresh- smelling clothing. When the circle breaks into small discussion groups Maria, Tony, and another young man are tasked with interpreting and depicting a scene from Mark 1:17 (when Jesus calls his first disciples) on a large sheet of butcher paper. Tony is an artist – his paintings are sold in the aforementioned gallery. He takes the lead, designing and illustrating the poster, while Maria and the other preso, a youthful drug trafficker from Ecuador, enthusiastically colour and insert biblical passages transcribed from a photocopied handout.

After 20 minutes, they are called back to join the group. They reluctantly put down their markers as the first presentation begins. Tony, silently, takes the photocopied handout from Maria and begins to sketch her. She notices.

At the end of the Pastoral visit, everyone returns to the circle to sing and pray together. Participants join hands and close their eyes. Maria is acutely aware of Tony and the sensation of her hand in his. She is vaguely worried that others might notice what is happening between them. As the volunteers pack up to leave, Tony is, again, next to her, covertly passing her his sketch, requesting her phone number. She glances around furtively before jotting it down.

When Maria exits the prison and retrieves her phone from storage she finds a text message from an unknown number. The text is so long that it has arrived in three out-of-order fragments. It’s a poem. Throughout the afternoon, she reads and re-reads it many times. Over the next few weeks, Maria and Tony exchange photos and messages over Orkut (a Brazilian social media sensation similar to facebook) and listen to one another’s music recommendations.256 During one pastoral visit, Maria even smuggles in a mix CD to surprise Tony. They talk on the phone almost every night, for hours. They talk late, after Maria’s parents are asleep and the prison is quiet. Tony regularly purchases credit for her phone so she is always able to text and place calls. Through

256 Music streaming and access to social media are enabled by access to wifi accessed through cell phones.

266 this mechanism, by materially providing for young women, presos show their willingness to meet gendered expectations.

During late-night phone calls Maria and Tony talk about their pasts, families, and aspirations for the future. Tony is from a rural region of Minas Gerais, a state in Brazil’s Southeast. He owns property there and that’s where his family is –– because of the distance, they’re unable to visit as often as they would like. Tony hopes to be released soon. He discloses that he’s in prison for robbing armored vehicles and escaping a police lockup. The information Tony shares with Maria is loaded with significance. For example, statements about his crimes and family amount to claims to masculine respectability. Robbery of armored vehicles is a particularly high status offense. Furthermore, Tony is letting Maria know that his family has not abandoned him — they are simply unable to visit because of distance. Tony avers that he is done with the outlaw lifestyle, that he’s looking forward to a quiet life he can share with someone special: “I just want to stay in my own little house, and have uma vida tranquila (a tranquil life). The farm [his land] is beautiful. You’ll see it one day.” He encourages Maria to call his sister for a reference of sorts –– she’ll confirm what a good brother and son he is, speak to the decent character of his family, and substantiate his glowing accounts of the family land. When I left Brazil, Maria was debating whether or not to cease volunteering with the Pastoral and register as Tony’s companheira.

This narrative, though exceptional in certain regards, nonetheless reveals basic conditions of carceral courtship. Fundamentally, couples require an opportunity to meet. Religious visits provide one such opportunity. Other means are also available. In North American carceral contexts, written correspondence, often initiated through personal ads placed in periodicals, serves several important sexual/romantic purposes, including the facilitation of first encounters. In Bahia, however, there is no postal service in prison. Instead, phone calls, social media interaction, letters and photographs ferried by visitors, and ‘set ups’’ by family/friends are primary mechanisms through which people enter into contact, get to know one another, and express interest. Indeed, prisoners’ close relations “na rua” (out on the street) often act as romantic intermediaries. Some even personally escort new visitors to the prison, helping them through the complicated and daunting registration and admittance process.

The logistics of visitation at PLB and the availability of contraband cell phones allow for fairly casual flirtation and ‘dating’ (courtship) to occur in this context. I use the term “casual” because,

267 initially, no major commitment is required by either party. I suggest that this possibility is central to the relatively ‘mainstream’ appeal of carceral courtship in Bahia. “Decent” women – females invested in performing respectability rather than “bad girl femininity” – who are unlikely to seek out a romantic relationship with a convicted criminal might still be willing to accept a few flattering and flirtatious calls or messages. In this respect, cell phones function as “vectors of relatedness,” enabling prisoners to forge new ties with non-prisoners. Cell phones facilitate seduction. And, presos’ unique circumstances seem to breed impressive seduction capabilities.

First and foremost, presos have abundant time to dedicate to wooing and romance (as well as building desirable physiques). As Goifman (2002) has observed, Brazilian prisoners experience an “overpowering and undifferentiated excess” of time. While excessive ‘free time’ certainly facilitates paqueração (flirtation, hitting on, or seducing) and ongoing attentiveness, it is also important to consider how presos’ circumscribed freedom of mobility and association underlies mutual attraction and willingness to enter a marital union.

Carceral incitement to settle down

Penal confinement can both heighten a man’s appeal and kindle his desire to marry. Na rua, in contrast to the prison, many men, especially young men, resist entering enduring relationships with women. And, within intimate relationships, they often avoid monogamy. Men tend to value freedom of movement and independence above the institution of marriage (McCallum 1999, 282). A short sample of casually-occurring conversation between research participants illustrates the predictability of non-monogamy in Bahia and the high degree of mobility characteristic of non-prisoner men in this context. Readers already encountered Claudia, an ex-prisoner, above in my discussion of configurations of houses. Claudia: Men are men — they’ll sleep with other women. But they need to have respect and not arrange another woman who lives nearby, that everyone knows about. Rogerio [her husband] was traveling [for work] for two weeks and didn't arrange anyone, then he disrespected me and got together with [someone] right in front of me, she lives over there [points]. And he left, went and lived with her. I didn’t do anything to deserve that. I do everything for him. I help him, I care for him. Everyone knows that. It’s one thing if a wife deserves it but I didn’t deserve it, that’s why he came back, he realized how well I take care of him.

Married Male Friend of Claudia and Rogerio (a guest at their house): I have two other women, one in the city and one on the

268

coast. Every Bahian guy does. There are like fifty women for every one man here. All the guys are in prison or dead. For every ten men who are murdered, only one woman is killed…

Men and women among the poor of contemporary urban Brazil differ in their expectations about family life (Scott 1996; McCallum 1999). In contrast to female youth, young men tend not to rush marriage, preferring sexual exploration.257 While unmarried (and without children), their time and money can be spent, legitimately, on the pleasures of the street (Mayblin 2010; McCallum 1999). The life project of conjugality and setting up an independent household is simply not a priority. Not only can a valued form of philandering, virile masculinity be accomplished on the street outside of marriage, but enduring male-female unions involve economic obligations which are especially daunting in light of men’s economic marginality and the difficulty they encounter becoming breadwinners in the current economy (Scott 1996, 2005).

Often, a man’s first marriage follows an unplanned pregnancy (Scott 1996). Once a man becomes a father, he is faced with social and legal pressure to provide for his child. But avoidance of censure is not the only factor motivating men to marry. In low-income Salvador, a highly valued model of domiciliary organization involves parents and their children living in the same house (McCallum and Bustamente 2012; McCallum 1999).258 While men may resist marriage, and continue to act freely and independently on the street after becoming fathers (potentially resulting in multiple paternities and weak links to a number of households), to do so can be costly: failure to provide child support can result in jail time, reputational damage, and a personal sense of impropriety or masculine failure. Instead, some men embrace an alternative, highly-esteemed form of masculinity by coming to embody the proper pai de família (father-of- the-family). Notably, however, decent family men can still be mobile and pursue love affairs

257 Promiscuous bachelors maintain strong ties to the houses of ascendant female kin (e.g. a mother) while asserting “a virile freedom to act in the street” (McCallum 1999, 286). 258 Though this arrangement is highly valued, it is not particularly common. In Mata Escura, Mother’s Day is a major event whereas Father’s Day is barely acknowledged. In fact, when the day arrived, my inquires about its commemoration were met with the following comments: “não temos o dia dos pais aqui” (here we don’t celebrate father’s day); “porque faz algo?” (why do anything [to commemorate this occasion]?); “veja as familias lá embaixo… têm pai?” (consider the families around here… do they include a father?). It is important to acknowledge that the valuation of nuclear, neolocal arrangements exists within a range of viable familial forms expressive of other values. Sibling relationships, for example, are highly valued. Spousal relations are just one of the experiences of connectivity prized in low-income neighbourhoods in Brazil. People also focus on building and maintaining relationships with relatives of blood and consideration. In everyday life, such ties are often more present and active than affinal relationships.

269 within certain bounds. Imprisonment shapes opportunities to perform these two available masculinities. Practices and structures of imprisonment do not merely permit courtship and conjugality; in some cases, they actually serve as a catalyst for enduring unions.

In the remainder of this chapter I explore how practices of imprisonment and carceral structures shape gendered social relations, somewhat subverting broader social patterns of gendered mobility and constraint. Penal constraint is shown to be productive (Foucault 1977) and enabling, particularly when it is channeled by creative companheiras. For example, penal constraint enables young women to increase control over their own reproductive choices and marriages. Moreover, in contrast to “the street,” the physical structure, policies, and dynamics of a prison like PLB afford young women opportunities to cultivate and inhabit relatively stable conjugal unions that endure over time. Unions of this sort can generate a subjective sense of respectable femininity as well as favourable social positionings. Such effects are related to the possibility that carceral conjugality will yield a casa própria, either in the short term (with the emergence of a house within the prison) or in the long term (in the form of a non-carceral house). Non-carceral houses emerge, for example, as spousal relatedness opens up affinal resource streams, assembles propagative configurations of houses, shores up aspirational horizons, and otherwise helps women move closer to securing a coveted and deeply personal form of property. In short, by fixing men in place, PLB’s prison regime can help women resolve tensions that plague ordinary conjugal unions and/or “fix” unreliable men, transforming them into good husbands.259 Working with carceral constraints, companheiras stabilize and secure their marriages; they manage and address common masculine behaviors that threaten the strength of their unions and their positions; they make themselves indispensable, highly valued, and the kind of woman they want to be; and some, especially crentes, leverage the prison to more deeply transform troubled men – to decriminalize them, to “save” them.

259 This process is related to my discussion of the prison as a technology of care (chapter 1).

270

Carcerality and the making and management of successful marriages Penal Constraint and Procreative Agency

Imprisonment, in certain respects, encourages conjugality, and opens up the possibility of making marriages without – or before – procreation. This prospect tends to appeal to companheiras, many of whom are single mothers of childbearing age struggling to provide for the children they already have. How does imprisonment enhance women’s “procreative agency” (McCallum 1999)? Recall Ju’s hesitation to have a child with her imprisoned husband or even discuss this possibility. The prison allows this single mother to delay or avoid subsequent procreation; she is able to cultivate a committed, cooperative, and enduring spousal union without recourse to reproductive sex.

As touched upon above, on the street (or outside of the prison), child-bearing, cohabitation, and conjugal commitment tend to go hand in hand, especially for younger people. Within Salvador’s gender system, girls often seek to transform themselves into respectable adults — who exert a measure of control over their domestic domain and daily activities — by making (sexual) relations with men into (familial) relations with children. In Bahia, motherhood can be a source of female power (Souza 1992; McCallum 1999; Hita 2008), particularly when, through “procreative agency” (McCallum 1999), women come to mother at home in the context of a marriage. Although casual, sex-for-its-own-sake encounters outside of the conjugal home may create the impression of autonomous female sexuality, a moral double standard is at play in terms of how male and female sexuality and promiscuity are assessed. While it is possible for men to leverage sexual prowess (and promiscuity) into empowerment, sexual containment is emblematic of respectable femininity. Decent mulheres ought to forgo the excitement of the street. As McCallum explains: women ‘give’ sex …to their actual or potential providers, but the meaning of this gift can shift depending on context. In the realm of the street, sex-for-its-own- sake can mean male penetrative conquest, female submission, male virility and female whoredom. In contrast, at home [in the context of marriage] the gift demands a return. Procreative sex insists that men reciprocate through money, fidelity, labour (most importantly in building the woman her house) [1999, 286 – emphasis my own].

In this socio-cultural context, men tend to be the ones who buy and build houses (Mayblin 2010;

271

Rebhun 1999, 114; c.f. Hita 2008). But, they have little incentive to do so – to channel limited resources toward such an endeavor –unless they are incited to do so through procreation or are otherwise inclined to “do masculinity” in the image of the pai-de-familia (a proper father-of-a- family, the familial patriarch). This latter inclination might be a corollary of age, religious identification, or other factors. The important point is that, fatherhood is central to this conjugal version of respectable masculinity, whatever motivates it.

The prison intersects with these gendered processes of relatedness, affording some women the opportunity to construct marriages, affinal relations, and houses without (or prior to) the reproduction of descendant kin. Simply put, imprisoned men seem more willing than non- prisoner men of a similar age and orientation to become husbands without also becoming fathers. Arguably, prison sex – even when it is not procreative – demands a return. This helps to constitute conjugal visitation as a rewarding practice for marginalized young women. Although, companheiras’ practices of imprisonment and (optive) relatedness entail real reputational risks and hardships, the routine labour and sacrifices of regular conjugal visitation can also be quite rewarding in both a subjective and material sense.

Subjectively, given prevailing ideas about feminine virtue, companheiras can feel virtuous when their sexuality is confined within the conjugal family/house. Materially, conjugal visitation can involve (indirect) remuneration and/or redistribution of economic resources. Recall Laine’s tactic of removing the price tags from purchases destined for the prison. This routine helps her to retain a small portion of the funds furnished by Tucano for his provisioning (the quantity of this surplus is unknown to Tucano and his family) thus enabling her to access cash-in-hand, a crucial resource within Salvador’s market economy. Less tangibly, Laine strengthens her claim to resources, space, and other assets through her consistent traversal of carceral and non-carceral space. Her level of entitlement – or “consideration” – within this the Jardim kindred will almost certainly increase as she supports their efforts to market clothing within the prison. But, before accessing affinal resource streams or meaningfully participating in the circulations constitutive of the configuration of houses inhabited by one’s in-laws, companheiras must first become (or become recognized as) wives. Whereas this is unlikely to occur independently of procreation on the street, it seems more possible when one spouse is incarcerated.

272

Disciplining Husbands

Presos have relatively limited access to (other) women. This can lead to an intensification of focus on one person in particular, reducing a major source of tension in Brazilian relationships: the omnipresent prospect of betrayal (see Shapiro 2013). Of course, as I show in my discussion of one affluent preso’s impressive juggling of three visiting companheiras (chapter 2), carceral promiscuity and adultery is certainly possible, especially for affluent presos. However, in prison, in contrast to the milieu of the street, polygyny, concubinage, and adultery are actively and institutionally discouraged. Prisoners are only permitted to register one woman as a conjugal visitor. Officially, PLB seeks to enforce monogamy. For example, in August 2011, PLB administrators posted an announcement at the cellblock entrances. Printed on official letterhead and addressed to “inmates and visitors” it read: The director of this unit, in the exercise of his powers, in response to the recurrent requests of visitors and inmates, decides to make public to all penitents and visitors, the following resolutions:

1) From this date, all visitors who are in an irregular situation, are summoned to appear at the visitor registration area, [within] a period of 60 days, in order to properly adjust the registry (of those who may visit the unit).

2) The following situation is considered irregular, liable to regularization: occurrences in which the visitor is registered to visit a given convict, however, effectively visits another inmate.260

3) Visitors who do not seek the administration of the unit for proper regularization of their registration, within the designated period, will have their registration canceled definitively, and the inmate will suffer disciplinary sanctions.

4) Inmates and visitors who, in the period highlighted, heed this notice shall be exempt from any restrictive or punitive measure arising from the administration or the unit’s security team.

By December 2011, it was clear this attempt at regularization (enforced monogamy) had not been totally successful. Over the course of a single weekend, at just one of PLB’s four cellblocks, Moto, a keen and experienced guard, managed to catch eight women visiting men

260 Insofar as each prisoner is only authorized to register one conjugal visitor, this policy seeks to eliminate sexual promiscuity (see chapter 2 for a discussion of how prisoners subvert these structures).

273 they were not registered to visit. He explained that some prisoners receive a different woman each visitation day: “one woman on Friday, another on Saturday, and a different one on Sunday.” He was able to ‘catch’ these irregular visitors through a process of ongoing observation and covert tip-offs (received mainly from spurned wives and girlfriends). Moto explained: “If Fulana is registered to visit João, but João spends the day hanging out on the patio (sans Fulana), I can see that Fulana is elsewhere, with others...”

Nonetheless, companheiras can and do use the prison as a resource to defend against the incursions of outras (“the other woman” or “secondary wife”) and establish themselves definitively as a legítima (the legitimate wife). Consider the following excerpt from my field notes. This account was recorded a few weeks before the birth of Barbara and Sandro’s first child together – a son. Readers were previously introduced to Barbara, a conjugal visitor, and Sandro, her imprisoned husband, in the introduction to this dissertation when I described her ‘non- carceral’ house’s permanent telephonically mediated auditory connection to the prison. I’m surprised to see a very-pregnant Barbara261 waddling towards the cell-block. I hurry over to help her carry her bag. She hands it over and informs me a fardo azul (a blue-uniformed prisoner on work release) is bringing the rest in his cart. Barbara has lied to prison staff about her expected date of delivery (EDD) to prolong her ability to visit.262 Even so, yesterday, a guard advised her not to enter telling Barbara: “You’re looking too pregnant. You can’t give birth in there!” But, enabled by her fraudulent EDD, Barbara proceeded with her visit and will enter again today.

Barbara is becoming increasingly anxious about the pre- and post-partum period during which she’ll be unable to visit. She tells me that she didn’t visit last Sunday because she’d taken a fall at home the day before: “Sandro ficou doido!” (went crazy!). Sandro was concerned about Barbara and the baby but also upset over missing a visit – he craves companionship and relies heavily upon the weekly

261 Above, I suggested that carceral courtship may allow women to delay or avoid reproducing (more) children. In the case of Barbara and Sandro’s procreative conjugal union, it is important to point out that the couple had been together for several years before they had a child together. Interestingly, Barbara’s pregnancy did occasion the (temporary) establishment of a new house. Sandro and Barbara thought it would be best if she left her parent’s house and took up residence in a casa própria. This move was made possible by Sandro’s income and family connections (presumably Sandro’s income is tied to the drug economy). However, Barbara only occupied her new home for a short while (less than a month) before returning to her parents’ house. In the Northeast, it is still difficult for girls or young women to live ‘alone’. An unmarried female living independently reflects badly on her and her family. Though Barbara is married, Sandro is not physically present within the house and Barbara’s sons are still too young to be considered masculine protectors. A woman who is not clearly protected by a father, brother, or son may be considered ‘fair sexual game.’ That is, she may be subjected to verbal and physical sexual harassment/assault (Rebhun 1999, 123). In Barbara’s case, the source of Sandro’s income (which allowed for the establishment of the house) is also a source of intolerable fear and insecurity. 262 Expectant mothers are not permitted to visit within four weeks of their EDD.

274

packages Barbara brings.

She typically visits two or three days per week. As we join the crowd waiting outside the module Andrea, the veteran companheira who organizes the order of entry, greets Barbara warmly and offers to arrange things so that she can bypass the queue. Barbara thanks her but declines – she is still waiting on the fardo azul. França, a tall handsome light-skinned guard who is a favorite with the compnheiras, emerges from the module talking on his cell phone. When he terminates his call, Barbara calls him over with a smile. She asks if it’s really true that she can’t visit for a month after the birth. His response is telling: “Barbinha [diminutive], don’t worry about it. I’ll be your caguette [snitch]. I’ll let you know if your husband has anyone else.”

The logistics of visitation mean that conjugal visitors who visit regularly can be fairly certain their partners are not seeing other women. Even when visiting privileges are temporarily suspended due to pregnancy or penalty,263 companheiras like Barbara use the spatial organization of imprisonment to ward off competition. By frequenting the main entrance of the penal compound at key hours, they can see and be seen by all those who arrive and depart. Barbara, during her pre- and post-natal suspension, came to the compound most weekends to deliver packages for Sandro (containing meals and baby pictures) through an informal system of hand-offs that is discouraged by the prison.264 Barbara’s presence also allowed her to mine fellow visitors for information and watch for suspicious new females.

Taise, a companheira who was suspended from visiting after she was caught smuggling contraband, also frequented the compound entrance on visitation days during her suspension. This is how she came to suspect/learn/confirm that her husband had begun to see another woman. From her post next to Rita (see the introduction to this dissertation for a discussion of the social-spatial orientation of this particular prison vendor), Taise managed to identify the outra. The other woman turned out to be the 19-year-old daughter of a different prisoner

263 E.g. Visitors caught attempting to smuggle in cell-phone chips received 60-day suspensions. 264 The hand-off system involves a person who is not visiting the prison on a given day passing an item or a package to a visitor who will deliver it on her (or his) behalf. This is a common but fraught practice as visitors may unwittingly end up smuggling contraband (for which they are held responsible). Sometimes, this service is performed ‘gratis’ (though there are actually no ‘free’ gifts) and other times the transporter is paid in cash or in kind. Before her birth-related suspension, Barbara helped out many people by delivering food into Module II. A male guard, who is quite fond of Barbara, speculated that she brings food for others because she comes from a family humilde (lit. humble – poor): “When she arrives with a lot of stuff I know it’s for someone else – they’re paying her to bring it in. She’s a laranja.” While this may be true, I believe Barbara was also motivated to transport food to build trust and establish reciprocal obligations with others so that they were more inclined to return the favour during her two-month visitation hiatus.

275 confined within the same cellblock as Taise’s husband. The young woman, Jessica, occasionally accompanied her mother to the prison to spend time with her father. The frequency of Jessica’s visits intensified dramatically once she developed a romantic interest in a preso – Taise’s husband.265 Soon after, however, Jessica abruptly stopped visiting altogether upon receiving a warning from Taise. Taise threatened to wait outside the compound and throw acid in the young woman’s face if she dared to return to PLB in any capacity.

Companheiras who are unable or unwilling to visit frequently or who are consistently unable to visit on certain days (e.g. because of a standing work commitment) run a relatively high risk of having their partner “arrumar uma outra” (arrange another woman). But, as Taise’s case demonstrates, wives are able to use the prison to negotiate this dilemma. Katia’s experience is illustrative.

Katia is an older companheira (in her late 40s) who misses at least one visitation opportunity per week. As a practitioner of Candomblé, she is expected to participate in many of the festivities and ceremonies of Salvador’s busy ritual calendar. Moreover, unconstrained by the precepts of evangelical Christianity, she is tempted to spend her weekends tomando sol e cerveza (sunbathing and drinking beer) at the beach. In general, Katia likes to spend at least one day of the weekend with non-prisoner friends and family. Whenever I have visited Katia’s home, popular music is pumping from one nearby house or another and her door is open to the life of the street. She regularly hosts guests, treating them to Afro-Brazilian delicacies that she’s prepared. Katia is the primary caregiver of a young child with a physical disability –– her filho de consideração (“son of consideration” — like a foster son) – and has a “normal” (uncrowded)

265 The young woman’s name is Jessica. Her mother (Sonia) was already an important research participant before Jessica started visiting on a regular basis. Sonia introduced me to Jessica and the three of us had several pleasant conversations as they waited to enter the cellblock. Though I knew Jessica was in the midst of a flirtation with a prisoner, which might have blossomed into a more serious relationship, I did not initially realize that he was Taise’s husband. Taise was also a research participant at the time. From guards’ point of view, Jessica was, at best, an “irregular visitor” insofar as she was registered to visit one prisoner but spent time with another man. Women in Jessica’s situation, especially pretty young females like her, may also be categorized as prostitutes or victims of sexual coercion (e.g. they are pressured into having sexual relations to relieve a relative’s debt). Sonia would certainly be regarded with great suspicion if it were known that she had facilitated her ‘vulnerable’ “adolescent” daughter’s namoro (dating relationship) with a prisoner. As I observed this situation unfold, it did not occur to me that Jessica was being victimized or exploited. She seemed to be taking pleasure in this experience. Week by week I saw her giddy excitement as she prepared to enter the cellblock and spend time with an attractive and attentive young man.

276 casa própria in an well-established low-income neighbourhood where she is surrounded by friends, family, and “neighbour-relatives” (McCallum and Bustamente 2012, 2011). In fact, Katia’s status as a mother-of-consideration – one who fosters and receives circulated children – is greatly contingent upon her accomplishment of respectable feminine adulthood which, in turn, is achieved in relation to her casa própria.

Katia has unambiguously managed to establish herself as a respectable adult woman, a dona-de- casa and a mãe-de-família. She is consistently addressed – by fellow visitors, prison guards, and me – as “Dona Katia.” In many respects, Katia is an embodiment of the Bahian “matriarch” famously described by Landes in her ethnography of Candomblé in Salvador, The City of Women (1947). In contemporary Salvador, “matriarchality” refers to a collection of domestic relationships and relatives centred around the figure of a mother-grandmother (matriarch), who is the hub of interactions in her consanguineous network and the locus of descent and inheritance in her family. She is the one who exercises power regarding the house and her kin and is an important centre of diffusion from whom relationships between all the other members of her network multiply… To be the owner of a house is an essential requirement of… “matriarchality”, since it is principally through this resource that these women exercise their power (Hita 2008: 5-6 – emphasis my own).

What is particularly interesting, and not immediately evident, is the extent to which Katia’s relatively prestigious positionality is made possible by carceral conjugality. Pragmatically, spousal relatedness with a non-preso would entail her husband’s presence within the house and at least some diffusion of Katia’s authority within and over her domestic domain. Furthermore, it is through carceral conjugality that Katia is able to economically sustain the household, contribute to a broader configuration of houses, and comport herself in a manner befitting of a matriarch who is also, not incidentally, a filha-de-santo (daughter of saint; a Candomblé devotee).266

Unfortunately, Katia’s robust social life caused her to miss several prison visits which provided her husband with an opportunity to be unfaithful. However, because Katia is a respected mulher

266 Research shows a strong correlation between Candomblé and the values, beliefs, feelings and organisational principles of Bahia’s “extended matriarchal Houses” (Landes 1947; Woortmann 1987; Hita 2008).

277

(in both senses of the term) and because the prison is a “small world” where regulars are known to one another, she quickly caught wind of his dalliance with a much younger woman, the sister of another preso. Katia responded to this news by refusing to visit her husband for over a month.

On the street, this course of action – (temporarily) abandoning a spouse – might have ended the relationship. If Katia’s husband were free, it is likely that he would have had his own independent source of income which would have provided him with considerably more room to maneuver. However, as a prisoner, his comfort and earnings depend, largely, on Katia. She brings him packages and, together, they sell Avon products and other small commodities (i.e. sex toys) to prisoners and visitors of Cellblock 2. In fact, part of Katia’s indignation over her husband’s brief dalliance stems from the fact that he had gifted (rather than sold) an expensive bottle of perfume to the younger woman he was seducing. In so doing, Katia’s philandering husband committed the violation of channeling essential resources away from the house in a manner that made his family more vulnerable. Outside of the prison, income-earning men have more leeway to seduce/support their mistresses, in the accustomed manner, without depriving his primary family of the share of his earnings that ought to be invested in the conjugal house.

When Katia stopped visiting the prison, as she had anticipated, her husband suffered. Because of his mistress’ positionality (as a poor young single mother) and cultural conventions surrounding concubinage, she could not reasonably be expected to correr atrás267 (e.g. prepare and bring home-cooked meals or run errands) on his behalf. Thus, without Katia, he was left scrambling with no other established means to meet his basic wants and needs. His dilemma was further compounded by the fact that, in addition to the couple’s joint enterprises, Katia also performs an important service for the linha da frente. Specifically, she is charged with the task of purchasing and delivering artisanal supplies for the cellblock’s handicraft industry (a project orchestrated by the prisoner-leadership as opposed to PLB officials). This is a major job that cannot be performed by just anyone. Katia is trusted with large sums of the leadership’s money; she knows what they need and where to get it; she has relationships with their suppliers; and she is authorized by PLB’s administration to make large-scale deliveries to the prison (these special

267 This common phrase means, to “chase after.” In the context of Salvador’s prison neighbourhood-nexus, it is often used by visitors to refer to the multi-faceted labours of visitation. Visitors “chase after” provisions, lawyers, legal documents, rights and entitlements, etc. on behalf of imprisoned relations.

278 loads are processed on Wednesdays, outside of the normal visitation routine). Thus, Katia’s absence had a negative effect on other prisoners who, accordingly, put pressure on her husband to resolve the situation.

Eventually, Katia resumed visiting her husband – though she now comes even less frequently than before. Regardless of Katia’s feelings towards her husband (theirs is probably more of a companionate than a romantic union), she has come to rely upon the income she earns through her status as a conjugal visitor to sustain her house and her foster child – two key elements of her status as a respectable adult woman. Katia simply could not risk being supplanted by another woman or being perceived as a weak woman who can be taken advantage of. The success of her carceral enterprise, her livelihood, and the stability of her gendered and generational status depend upon: a) her ability to reliably collect debts (because few of her clients can afford to pay for her wares up front, she often sells items a fiado); and b) a guarantee from her husband that he will not exchange coveted cosmetic merchandise for sex (or the attentions of pretty young girls).

The tactic of withholding visits in order to preserve a floundering spousal relationship is certainly a risky gambit. More often, companheiras who do not attend every possible visitation use a subtler technique to manage their relationships. Specifically, they communicate and schedule their weekly visits in deliberate ways. In terms of communication, in order to undermine men’s ability to organize alternative ‘dates,’ companheiras resist disclosing their precise plans to their partners until the last possible minute, sometimes even upholding the illusion of a visit they have no intention of realizing. In terms of scheduling, many companheiras opt to skip days that correspond with their mother-in-laws’ visits as these sogras tend to keep prisoners occupied and observed. Additionally, companheiras required to work over the weekend will sometimes manage a ‘quick’ morning visit before their afternoon shift. At first I wondered why women would sacrifice so much time and energy for such a brief encounter. Only when I began to appreciate the omnipresent prospect of adultery and spousal abandonment contended with by Bahian women, did I begin to understand the logic of these partial visits.

Though the prison provides women with some opportunities to achieve and maintain primary- partner status in their unions (as a legítima — “the legitimate wife”), on numerous occasions throughout the course of field work I watched companheiras arrive for visits only to be refused entry because they had been abruptly removed from a prisoner’s list of approved visitors

279

(presumably to make room for a replacement). Yet, this does not negate the fact that companheiras creatively engage the prison to help realize various aspirational life projects.

As I discuss in Chapter 1, confinement keeps prisoners off the street and away from the dangerous and distracting exploits and pleasures associated with this gendered social space. On the street, men drink, fight, womanize, and commit crimes. These risky activities expose men to harm and pull them and their financial contributions away from the house (or away from constructing a house), a dynamic which potentially exacerbates household penury and vulnerability (e.g. to violent incursions by police or other enemies). Ultimately, courting or being married to a prisoner affords women a comforting sense of confidence and control vis-à-vis the physical security of their partners as well as the state of their relationships.

Conclusion

Megan Comfort (2008) has conducted ethnographic fieldwork with women visiting husbands, fiancées, and boyfriends imprisoned in San Quentin State Prison, California. She argues: …as kinship gatherings, family celebrations, and romance are imported into the carceral environment, the penitentiary becomes a domestic satellite, an alternative site for the performance of “private” life, which, in addition to investing the prisoner more firmly in his outside connections, simultaneously absorbs his relations within the boundaries of “Papa’s house.” Hence the peculiar predicament facing women fighting the institutionalization of their mates: through their efforts to create strong inclusive bonds with incarcerated partners, they partake in the paradoxical secondary prisonization of their own family lives and thus extend the reach and intensity of the transformative effects of the carceral apparatus (103 – emphasis my own).

“Prisonization” (Clemmer 1940) refers to a process through which people adapt to prison life, internalizing the customs and values of inmate subculture(s). Prisonization has been conceptualized as a barrier to successful prisoner rehabilitation and re-entry, a catalyst for recidivism. In this sense, “secondary prisonization” (Comfort 2008) is a deviance making or sustaining process. The findings I have presented here call the generalizability of Comforts’ notion of secondary prisonization into question. Comfort’s characterization of the visited prison – as a “domestic satellite” – and her interpretation of prison romances – as pathways to prisonization – do not seem to apply to my own findings, which have been interpreted through literature on kinship, personhood, and houses in Bahia, Brazil. Instead of (or in addition to)

280 approaching the prison as a malignant growth threatening visitors, their households, and society at large, we may ask: what do creative agents engaged in conjugal visitation make of this institution?

A challenge experienced by many of the women who engage in conjugal visitation is they do not, at least initially, possess a casa própria; most have not managed to attain the high status of dona- da-casa. Those who were already mothers before forging a relationship with a preso had, generally, not managed to translate procreation into an enduring union, a lasting casa própria, or a firm identity as a mature and respectable adult woman. This is a common dilemma faced by poor females in urban Bahia. Many females in their 20s and 30s, who do have access to relatively secure housing, are living in crowded houses where they are dependant upon and subordinate to higher-ranking kin. Others – those experiencing a high degree of residential precarity (e.g. Edina and Ivete, who have featured in previous chapters) – live in meager rented rooms (paid for themselves or by married lovers); join land or building invasions; or stay “de favor” (for free — used frequently in the sense of “crashing”) with friends. Such arrangements — indexical of varying degrees of disrepute and indignity — significantly curtail women’s sense of control over daily affairs. Carceral conjugality offers such women the opportunity to shore up their reputations as respectable adults — that is, as wives whose sexuality is properly contained within a marriage and a conjugal house. Moreover, I have suggested that carcerality empowers women to find marriage partners without, first, becoming pregnant. Carceral conjugality seems to offer the possibility of greater procreative agency insofar as carceral wives need not bear children, or bear more children, as a precondition of conjugality.

Caring for children, especially young children, tends to impinge on a mother’s ability to earn an income and to limit her mobility/autonomy in various ways. In Salvador’s prison-neighbourhood nexus, in light of Brazil’s sex/gender system, mothers tend to be preoccupied with properly containing themselves and their children inside the house, away from the contaminating chaos of the street. Pressure to be inside – and identified with – the house, as well as protect children from the dangers of the street, is intense. The weight of this pressure led at least one female visitor to remark: “we are the real prisoners.” The group of female visitors that she addressed this remark to vigorously expressed their agreement with her observation.

While houses are coveted, they are also experienced as sites of gendered confinement. Conjugal

281 visitation may expand the territory legitimately occupied by a respectable wife to the penal compound and the route she takes to/from there, but it does not decouple femininity from constraint and confinement. The carceral house that emerges in the space of the prison cell is implicated in processes of confinement but so to are houses located far away from the penal compound. Laine does not freely choose to reside within the Jardims’ Fazenda Coutos house. She is obliged – quasi-extorted – to do so. And, as I explore in the final chapter of this dissertation, residing in a “criminalized house” (or configuration of houses) can be perilous.

282

Chapter 5 The Televised Arrest Introduction The Televised Arrest as a Carceral Form

The carceral form explored in this, final, chapter is the televised arrest. The televised arrest brings “penal judgment” home in at least three senses, which I will explore throughout this chapter. First, scenes of detention, interrogation, judgement, and punishment play out on TV screens in homes throughout the prison-neighbourhood nexus. Criminal justice events such as these are transformed as they are filmed and televised. For example, the presence of an audience alters the substance and effects of the event. Just as at-home viewers become part of the event which is ultimately produced and consumed, televised criminal justice events become part of quotidian domestic life by virtue of their omnipresence and the extent to which they affect relations within and between households.

Second, the televised arrest serves as both a confirmation and catalyst of criminalization. This institution, independent of a legal finding, makes people publicly known as presumed criminals.268 And, crucially, this status is prone to spreading. The publicity of the televised criminal justice event and the way in which the “mass-mediated pillory” punishes beyond the legal offender, combined with the familiarity of those caught on film, facilitates the spread of presumed criminality to whole households and extended families. While subjects of incarceration are always already broadly criminalized (subject to generalized criminalization), televised arrests are an important mechanism of social differentiation at the local level, marking particular people, houses, and families as especially dangerous/endangered.

Finally, televised arrests bring penality home by involving ordinary people in the detection, adjudication, and treatment of ‘crime’ or, as Foucault might put it, the “whole field of objects” – i.e. man as an object of knowledge, the soul, the normal or abnormal individual, and, I would

268 I employ the term “presumed” to emphasize that, in my usage, criminalization is a matter of perception. Among research participants, discovering the truth of an individual or group’s law-breaking activities (or lack thereof) is often secondary to determining how best to respond to the fact of their presumed criminality. Interactions with presumed criminals must be carefully governed if one hopes to protect self and family from pervasive processes of criminalization and their devastating effects.

283 add, criminalization as a knowable and actionable process – that has “come to duplicate crime as objects of penal intervention” (24).269 Ultimately, the institution of the televised arrest both models and provokes a disaggregation of penal labour. Beyond the police who capture offenders, members of the judiciary who convict and condemn, and prison staff who administer punishment, journalists, along with other speaking subjects caught on film, perform investigations and interrogations, deliver verdicts, and co-produce a spectacular punishment of public humiliation. Televised arrests invest detainees; mark and torture them; force their bodies to perform ceremonies and emit signs. But televised arrests also incite viewers to interpret performances and signs and, of course, act upon these interpretations. I am interested in the form these interpretations and responses take among research participants painfully aware of their own vulnerability to criminalization and extralegal injustices perpetrated by state institutions and the media.

In this chapter, I approach the televised arrest – a significant carceral form in contemporary Bahia – as an object that is co-constituted by a range of judicial and non-judicial actors located throughout the prison-neighbourhood nexus in, for example, police stations, television studios, and ordinary homes. As penality becomes increasingly participatory and public; as the gap widens between the legal offender, the essentialized figure of the evil criminal, and eminently familiar presumed criminals; and as the prison is somewhat decentered as the primary site of punishment and (re)habilitation, agentive opportunities arise for research participants to intervene in the field of crime control. These interventions are possible (thinkable and feasible) because, as I will show, subjects of incarceration tend to mobilize televised arrests as actionable narratives (stories that incite action and involve actors in their unfolding). In short, I will argue

269 During the centuries (18th and 19th) that Europe established its modern penal systems, according to Foucault (1977), “[a] whole set of assessing, diagnostic, prognostic, normative judgements concerning the criminal have become lodged in the framework of penal judgement” (19). The result is that sentences are no longer judgements of guilt and designation of a corresponding punishment (based on knowledge offence, offender, and law) but, instead, imply assessments of normality, attributions of causality, technical prescriptions for a possible normalization, anticipations of the offender’s future. Moreover, the judge is no longer alone in judging: “[t]hroughout the penal procedure and the implementation of the sentence there swarms a whole series of subsidiary authorities” (Foucault 1977, 21). I am inspired by Foucault’s expansionist account of the displacement of the object of the punitive operation (e.g. from the body to the soul) and the attendant proliferation of the power to punish. Beyond psychiatric and psychological experts, educators, magistrates concerned with the implementation of sentences, etc., what other parties’ “knowledge of the criminal” (1977, 18), and what forms of knowledge, are associated with everyday, extralegal penal practice as embodied by the televised arrest?

284 that televised arrests, equivocal in meaning, are often interpreted by subjects of incarceration in a manner that provokes immediate pragmatic action; encourages involvement in the ongoing construction of the event; and yields critical insights.

This chapter pivots around an account of the televised arrest of a key informant and close friend, Leleco Jardim. Readers were introduced to the Jardim extended family in the preceding chapter. Leleco is the 19-year-old moreno270 brother of Tucano, a prisoner at PLB. Recall that Leleco lives in the Jardims’ Fazenda Coutos house with his sister, Michelle, her daughter, Adrielle, his sister-in-law, Laine, and her daughter Yasmin. Leleco has not (yet) graduated from high school and is not currently a student. He does, however, regularly express a desire to enroll in evening classes. Until recently, he was employed at a locally-owned furniture store. When business slowed, Leleco was laid off. Currently unemployed and looking for work, Leleco is optimistic that he might be hired back at the furniture store when business picks up. Or, more accurately, he was optimistic until, in early December 2011, he was arrested. Although no charges were laid and police released him mere hours after dragging him to the station, Leleco’s brief detainment was televised. In fact, at least two separate television networks aired (and subsequently re-aired) footage of this event. And, at no point, did either network inform viewers of Leleco’s quick release without charges. It is significant that I first learned of Leleco’s televised arrest at the penal compound from visitor-friends who had seen the story on TV. Aware of my close relationship with the Jardims, these women – themselves wives of prisoners – warned me to stay away from this ‘dangerous’ family. I unpack their warnings in the final section of this chapter.

Leleco’s arrest and research participants’ various responses to it, raise important questions about the effects of broadcasting “actuality footage” of “criminal justice events” (Doyle 2003).271

270 Moreno – refers to a male of visible Afro-Brazilian descent with brown/tan skin. 271 Doyle (2003) has identified a recent media trend – namely, an increase in the number of “criminal justice events” that have been recorded on video – captured ‘live’ in front of television cameras – and broadcast on TV (“actuality footage”). It should be noted that these scenes are recorded, but not necessarily broadcasted, ‘live’; cameras record actual events as they occur and this “actuality footage” is then incorporated into programming which may be aired at a later time. Previously, however, TV crime news was based on a spoken account, possibly supplemented by related visual material (e.g. footage of the crime scene). Brazilian television appears to reflect the actuality footage trend (Cunha Costa 2013). Notably, usage of actuality footage does not entail the airing of unfiltered reality. Producers employ storytelling devices and other techniques to turn criminal justice events into entertaining narratives that suggest ‘raw reality’. In this chapter, for example, we see how Brazilian policialesco reporters and producers create drama, by relentlessly harassing arrestees in hopes of inciting them to respond in a

285

Although I have a stated interest in the “effects” of televised arrests, my approach diverges from conventional media effects research. In place of my own interpretation of media content, I have conducted fine-grained ethnographic research focusing on the situated practical understandings of consumers of mass-mediated crime stories. Doyle suggests that a valuable supplement to existing media effects literature would be scholarship that examines the meaning of crime stories for particular audience members (2006, 875). Moreover, building on Doyle’s critique of traditional media effects studies, I ask: How is crime, policing, and penality altered as it is televised? Thus, I approach the issue of “effects” by examining the meaning of televised arrests for subjects of incarceration and how this meaning translates into action. This enables me to analyze how the mass mediation of criminal justice events shapes everyday practices of penality.

A premise of this chapter is that subjects of incarceration have a special relationship to televised arrests. They are not merely avid consumers of televised criminal justice events but are also “newsmakers”272 and among those most likely to appear as prisoners on TV. As such, their engagements with televised arrests are necessarily ambivalent and complex.

way that effectively confirms their criminality. As Ericson notes: “The mass media do not merely report on events but rather participate directly in processes by which events are constituted and exist in the world" (1991, 219). 272 I am inspired by scholars who have moved away from characterizing media audiences (the masses) as passive and culturally unproductive. These scholars challenge the notion that mass media operate exclusively to reproduce and maintain an unequal social order (the “hypodermic needle” model of media transmission – Spitulnik 1993). Media anthropologists, in particular, attend to the ways in which audience members actively engage media products (Askew 2002) and reveal media as sites of negotiation, contestation, and politics that may contribute to processes of social transformation. For example, anthropologists have studied ‘indigenous media’ showing how historically subordinated groups have developed the skills and gained access to the technology required to produce their own media representations and “mediate” their relationship with society (Ginsburg 1991, 1995; Turner 1990, 1992). Of particular relevance are two studies of “newsmaking” by members of subordinated groups in Latin America that “lack access to the necessary technology and training to produce their own media self-representations, but who nevertheless strive to be more than mere recipients of media products” (Goldstein and Castro 2006, 385). Goldstein and Castro 2006 consider the ways in which marginalized indigenous Bolivians perform lynchings, creatively exploiting abundant and aggressive news coverage of this phenomenon to advance their own agenda. Goldstein and Castro identify “the important role that the subjects of media coverage can play in actively fashioning the content of that coverage” and reveal “that even the most marginal of people can become active news producers – or perhaps co-producers…– by creatively manipulating the perceptions and attentions of those behind the cameras (Goldstein and Costa 2003, 385). Building on these insights, Garces (2010), describes how prisoners (viz. remand prisoners in Ecuador) protested the juridical practice of preventive imprisonment (indefinite – and thus unconstitutional – detainment without sentence) by mounting and publicizing their own “inmate crucifixion protests”. His findings support Goldstein and Castro’s important contention that marginalized actors without direct access to the means of media production – even prisoners (albeit a privileged class of prisoners) – can be helpfully conceptualized as newsmakers.

286

Talk of crime and talking criminals

My analysis of the televised arrest engages the literature on “talk of crime.”273 Specifically, I approach the institution of the televised arrest as a mass-mediated iteration of the “talk of crime” that, in turn, contributes to the proliferation of everyday, interpersonal conversations about crime, criminals, and penality. Caldeira defines “talk of crime” as “everyday conversations, commentaries, discussions, narratives, and jokes that have crime and fear as their subject” (2001, 19). My review of the literature has revealed that, overwhelmingly, the examples of “talk of crime” collected and analyzed by scholars (e.g. Caldeira 2001; Moodie 2010; Scheper-Hughes 2015) have been articulated by people who identify as the victims (or potential victims) of violent street crime. In other words, the voices of those who identify as perpetrators of crimes; who fear the imminent criminalization of self or intimates; or who extend care to, and depend upon, criminalized kin are neglected. Although members of this group talk incessantly of crime, and certainly fear violence linked to the world of crime, their enunciations tend to differ from those of more privileged Brazilians274 who practically understand crime as a social problem generating from elsewhere, enacted by ‘Others.’ For example, talk of crime articulated by subjects of incarceration registers concern about criminalization, not simply victimization. By focusing on subjects of incarceration, my research not only fills a gap in the literature but also reveals meanings and effects of talk of crime that complicate extant theorizations which tend to emphasize the role of such discourses in the (re)production of social inequality, marginalization, discrimination, and violence.

As neoliberal economic programmes perpetuate and, in some cases, increase inequality, etching these divisions into the landscape of the ‘city of walls’ (Caldeira 2001) or the ‘divided city’ (Low 1996, 1999), elites’ access to public spaces is undermined by fear of crime and experienced as a

273 Recent anthropological literature explores how inequality and uncertainty in Latin America and the Caribbean have been experienced and expressed in reference to crime (Auyero 2000; Caldeira 2001; Garces 2010; Godoy 2006; Goldstein 2003; Moodie 2010; Prentice 2012; Taylor 2009). Specifically, scholars have analyzed “talk of crime” (Caldeira 2001), “discourses of crime” (Prentice 2012), “media-driven discourses of crime” (Penglase 2005, 2007), and “crime storytelling” (Moodie 2010). 274 This distinction can be thought of in terms of subjective experiences of citizenship. Whereas elite and middle- class Brazilians (“secure citizens”) generally experience their own citizenship as an ascribed status, the subjects of incarceration with whom I worked – denizens or “quasi-citizens” of the prison-neighbourhood nexus – tend to experience citizenship as an achieved status that is exceedingly difficult to realize and maintain. Quasi-citizens endure a great deal of slippage between (and simultaneous occupation of) citizen- and criminal- subject positions.

287 deterioration of class privilege (Prentice 2012). Goldstein, in conversation with Caldeira, argues that Rio’s middle-class and elite citizens feel a keen sense of vulnerability, though they have “relatively little exposure to the kind of violence experienced by the poorest” (2003, 175). This sense of vulnerability is expressed through “never-ending” and recursive “talk of crime” “in which fear is both dealt with and reproduced and in which violence is both counteracted and magnified” (Caldeira 2001, 19). Caldeira analyses crime as both a “disorganizing experience” and an “organizing symbol” (2001, 21-33). She argues that the narratives of crime storytellers reorder a world they perceive as disrupted and contaminated often justifying harsh personal security measures and forms of residential segregation. Importantly, Caldeira insists that, across all social classes, people reiterate fundamentally similar crime narratives to the same effect.

Caldeira contends: "The paradox of the working poor’s attempts to separate themselves from the stereotype of the criminal is that this is achieved by using the same strategies against one's neighbors that have been used against oneself" (2001, 90): a) “talk of crime” (in which the category of the essentialized, evil criminal is key); and b) residential and socio-spatial segregation (e.g. in the form of fortified enclaves). My findings complicate this account in relation to the posited project – separation from the stereotype of the criminal – and the tenability of strategies enacted to achieve this end.

First, these strategies do little to alleviate research participants’ sense of existential unease and personal insecurity; in fact, they exacerbate challenges already faced by subjects of incarceration. According to Caldeira, these strategies seek to effect symbolic separation from the stereotype of the criminal and, more broadly, “to recreate a stable map for a world that has been shaken” (2001, 20). For subjects of incarceration, however, this issue of symbolic separation exists in conjunction with a pair of related yet distinct concerns: a) resisting or reversing ‘actual’ processes of criminalization; and b) coping with the manifest criminalization (and, sometimes, practicing criminality) of self and/or dangerous/endangered intimates. I maintain that anxiety about being stereotyped and its potentially lethal consequences, like anxiety about being mistaken for a criminal, is different from, though connected to, anxiety about becoming a (presumed) criminal or being relationally obligated to one. For subjects of incarceration, the televised arrest specifically, and “talk of crime” more generally, are made meaningful in light of these pressing ontological concerns. And, as I will argue, the form and function of crime discourses are transformed in light of this (re)signification.

288

Talk of crime, as expressed by subjects of incarceration, is not best understood as a strategy to effect symbolic separation from the figure of the criminal. Moreover, it cannot be presumed to have this effect. The central ethnographic narrative of this chapter – an account of my friend Leleco’s televised arrest and its aftermath – demonstrates how in contexts such as Salvador's prison-neighbourhood nexus, particularly vis-à-vis households (or configurations of houses) that encompass criminals or potential criminals, talk of crime does not primarily operate to symbolically (re)order the world and enable speakers to fortify their place in the social hierarchy in the face of unsettling economic and political developments. Instead, it enables poor people to navigate a stubbornly stratified social world in which they find themselves at the bottom of intersecting hierarchies. Of course, it also positions particular individuals, like Leleco, as presumed criminals, shaping their self-identity and limiting opportunities available to them.

Whereas narratives of crime articulated by relatively affluent and privileged Brazilians may “bestow a specific type of knowledge,” “expressed in very simplistic terms, relying on the creation of clear-cut oppositional categories” (Caldeira 2001, 20), research participants’ talk of crime and their knowledge about crime and its aetiology is endlessly complicated by their intimate knowledge – their familiarity with particular individuals who have been criminalized or are perceived to face an acute threat of imminent criminalization. Clear-cut oppositional categories that proliferate and circulate through talk of crime crack and sometimes collapse in the face of direct, deeply-personal experiences of criminalization. To contend, as Caldeira does, that “[t]he most explicit and passionate derogations [of criminals] arise when proximity and the threat of mixture have increased” – that “proximity leads to the refinement of separations in order to sustain a perception of difference” (2001, 74) – is to neglect other possibilities stemming from social proximity to the category of the criminal.

Just as symbolic separation from the stereotype of the criminal may be less of a priority and less tenable for subjects of incarceration, the viability and desirability of spatial segregation – as a strategic response to uncertainty and insecurity – is also questionable. Within the milieu of the prison-neighbourhood nexus, spaces, like selves, cannot be reliably secured against the threatening presence of the criminal. And this is not simply a matter of the poor being unable to afford the cost of admission to fortified enclaves. Beyond lack of access to closed condominiums, limited housing options and the precarious social positioning of subjects of

289 incarceration straddling the citizen-criminal divide, entails a remapping (and reimagining) of the criminal threat.

On one level, the murky extralegal conditions of home construction, ownership, and rental (Telles and Hirata 2007) – along with the common police practice of invading select houses (with or without a warrant) – renders the strategy of ‘securing’ residences futile. In this sense, denizens or quasi-citizens of the prison-neighbourhood nexus are always already in-conflict- with-the-law and vulnerable to associated incursions (e.g. shantytown removal projects). They are also painfully aware of their generalized status as presumed criminals in the eyes of more affluent and privileged citizens as the result of, for example, “territorial stigmatization” (Wacquant 2007) low-income, heavily penalized neighbourhoods. Nonetheless, many poor people simultaneously self-identify as, or aspire to become, citizens.

For subjects striving to be citizens, “criminal contamination” – alongside other processes of criminalization – poses a significant threat. That is, within the close confines of crowded auto- constructed extended-family houses in the low-income urban periphery, dangerous and endangered intimates – i.e. criminal kin – may have a criminalizing effect on aspiring citizens who have little choice but to intensively associate with, depend upon, and extend care to them.275 Leleco’s arrest poignantly illustrates a possible consequence of relatedness to criminals: criminalization by proxy. Either Leleco’s brothers influenced him to practice criminalized acts or he became a presumed criminal through his connection to them. In the context of Salvador’s poorest and most heavily penalized neighbourhoods, domestic domains – houses as well as configurations of houses – often contain known (confirmed), unknown (concealed or unconfirmed), and/or emergent (in the process of becoming) criminals. The presence of dangerous and endangered intimates within one’s own home and primary mutual-support network seriously complicates strategies involving the erection of walls or otherwise premised

275 Criminalization, as I employ this concept, is a complicated process with various interrelated causes. Key causes salient to the account of criminalization analyzed in this chapter include: a) the structured choices to take “the wrong path”, embrace an oppositional street culture of resistance, and become a true bandit; b) the contagious spread of marginality between intimates (this process is central to the “relational theory of deviance” discussed in chapter 1); and, c) the discursive effects of the televised arrest. In the prison-neighbourhood nexus, individuals and families are not only fearful of becoming victims of crime, they also confront an ongoing threat of criminalization. Criminalization, in its “generalized” form, affects neighbourhoods and classes of people (viz. young Afro-Brazilian men of the urban periphery) while criminalization in its “specific” form can affect individuals as well as families and households.

290 upon coercive segregation and containment. For subjects of incarceration, the criminal threat is as much autochthonous as external. And, often, the most acute external threats (i.e. lethal police and drug-trafficker violence) are practically understood to increase as a result of criminalization (see Arias and Rodrigues 2006).276 When the criminal threat is both immanent and immanent, a different range of strategies and interventions become thinkable. Certainly, some people reproduce broader processes of socio-spatial distancing by temporarily or permanently severing ties with dangerous/endangered intimates, excluding them from the household to protect remaining members.277 However, the production of effective unrelatedness is not always possible or desirable. Often, subjects of incarceration struggle and strive to access the promises of citizenship and perform gendered respectability while maintaining, repairing, and/or forging relations with dangerous and endangered intimates, in some cases endeavoring to “citizen-ize” these presumed criminals, as we saw Edina attempt vis-à-vis her imprisoned daughter Neginha in chapter 1.

In summary, this chapter contributes to the literature on talk of crime by attending to the unique experiences of subjects of incarceration. This sector of the population is closely associated with the category of the criminal reflected in and reinforced through talk of crime. Thus, by attending to their situated narratives, I investigate the meanings of “talk of crime” for those people who are most likely to be objectified and harmed by this pervasive discourse. In my analysis, presumed criminals appear as speaking subjects whose own talk of crime differs in significant ways from that of more affluent and privileged Brazilians. This will be demonstrated through my focus on a specific mass-mediated instance and catalyst of talk of crime: the televised arrest.

The equivocity and utility of televised arrests

According to Caldeira, “the dominated do not have an alternative repertoire for thinking of themselves but must usually make sense of their own world and experience with the language by

276 Arias and Rodrigues confirm that residents of low-income neighbourhoods spend a great deal of time talking amongst themselves about local violence. They also identify criminalization as a locally-meaningful explanation for violent victimization: “When someone is killed, residents of the favela incessantly discuss the murder. The conversations usually hover around the issue of the deceased’s often tenuous involvement in trafficking. By talking about violence and finding explanations for murders, residents help to normalize events and augment their feelings of personal safety (2006, 63). 277 I explore this dynamic elsewhere, in article manuscripts both in development and under review (by JLACA).

291 which they are discriminated against” (2001, 85). While the poor may rely on such language – epitomized by the talk of crime – to make sense of their experiences, I suggest that the situated sensibility of subjects of incarceration and the inherent equivocity of speech acts (Butler 2012) gives rise to the possibility of politics. Here, I am drawing on Butler’s critique of “sovereign performatives” in which she argues: If utterances bear equivocal meanings, then their power [to injure] is, in principle, less unilateral and sure than it appears. Indeed, the equivocity of the utterance means that it might not always mean in the same way, that its meaning might be turned or derailed in some significant way and, most importantly, that the very words that seek to injure might well miss their mark and produce an effect counter to the one intended. The disjuncture between utterance and meaning is the condition of possibility for revising the performative, of the performative as the repetition of its prior instance, a repetition that is at once a reformulation. …The citationality of the performative produces that possibility for agency and expropriation at the same time (2012, 87).

In this chapter, I show how the discursive occasion of the televised arrest becomes an incitement to polyvalent performances and their (re-)interpretation, an incitement to talk of crime as well. Talk of crime proliferates but its recirculation is not within the control of any given subject or class of subjects. Subjects of incarceration, as I will show, often experience and engage televised arrests, as well as the abundant talk they generate, as “actionable narratives.” They are actionable in at least two senses. First, televised arrests and conversations about them are immediately useful to people navigating the dangerous social world of the prison-neighbourhood nexus. Second, in certain respects, televised arrests contribute to an emergent practical understanding of crime, criminals, and criminalization which broadly allows room for transformative interventions into these fields by ordinary people. That is, subjects of incarceration are empowered to engage in practices of non-violent crime control, (re)habilitation, and decriminalization; their enunciations about crime are less about policing social boundaries than transgressing and destabilizing them through policing the actions of self and intimates with a view to cultivating citizenship and diminishing criminalization and its injurious effects. Far from passively consuming and reproducing injurious narratives of crime, subjects of incarceration put narratives to use, shaping and making sense of their world through their active engagement with televised arrests.

The following analysis is divided into four parts. In the first two sections I situate the televised arrest within the context of a particular genre of television program: the policialesco. In

292 considering the widespread, somewhat paradoxical, appeal of policialescos among the group most likely to be criminalized on air, I show how televised arrests specifically, and policialescos more broadly, are useful to subjects of incarceration. In the third section I ethnographically document and analyze the institution of the televised arrest through a detailed discussion of Leleco’s own arrest. Then, in the fourth section, I trace a range of responses to this event and explore how televised arrests bring penality home.

The Puzzling Popularity of Policialescos

In this section I contextualize televised arrests vis-à-vis the lunchtime entertainment news television programs – policialescos – of which they are a fixture. I introduce the policialesco genre and consider the widespread, somewhat paradoxical, appeal of these daily programs among those people who are most likely to be criminalized on air.278 A major portion of these programs is dedicated to sensationalistic ‘crime reporting’ in which low-income neighbourhoods and their residents are depicted as dangerous and threatening.

I suggest that we cannot understand the popularity of policialescos among subjects of incarceration unless we acknowledge two crucial and interrelated aspects of their engagement with this genre. First, they strive to achieve the status of newsmakers (not simply passive consumers or helpless victims subjected to spectacular criminalizing rituals). Second, as aspiring newsmakers, who have already experienced some degree of criminalization (or who sense themselves and intimates teetering on the precipice of criminalization), the subjects of

278 Brazil has more “TV sets than the rest of Latin America combined” (Reis 2003, 126 cited in Cunha Costa 2013, 204). In Brazil, television sets are present in 98% of households (CGI.br 2011, 397; PNAD 2008* – 97.5%). And, according to the 2008 National Household Survey (PNAD), 52% of the population watch at least 1 hour of television per day while 42% spend at least 3 hours per day watching television. For the majority of the population, free-to-air analogue television, which began operation in Brazil in 1950, is still the primary source of information and entertainment (Cunha Costa 2013, 203). Brazil has a low number of households with access to cable television (televisão por assinatura or TV paga) due to its high cost and the reduced purchasing power of most Brazilians; as of 2010 cable television was available in only 10 million households (which represents less than 20% of the country's population). Moreover, while over 50% of Brazilians have mobile phones, only 5% use these devices to access online content (CGI.br 2011, 397-399). And, while only 35% of the population has a computer at home, just 27% of households have internet access. However, lanhouses – shops selling access to online computers – are present in low-income areas and are frequented, in particular, by young people. That said, the majority of Brazilians (87%) uses the internet primarily for entertainment purposes (CGI.br 2011, 428). In short, while most low-income households have a television, it is highly unlikely that they have a cable subscription. Thus, most precariat and working-class Brazilians watch network programming that is freely available. TV Globo and TV Record are two free-to-air Brazilian television networks/channels that concentrate the largest percentage of the national audience. As mentioned earlier in the chapter, policialescos are a common feature of Bahia’s free-to-air television offerings.

293 incarceration with whom I work, tend to approach mass-mediated criminal justice events as actionable narratives. In uncovering the utility of actuality footage to subjects of incarceration – in showing how mass-mediated crime stories incite very different responses among different sectors of the policialesco audience – the equivocity of televised arrests is established.

The very first time I was invited to a prison visitor’s home for lunch, we ate our beans and rice in front of a television airing a policialesco. This was unexpected. I had assumed (or perhaps hoped) that she, and others who occupy a similar position vis-à-vis the criminal justice system, would boycott or be highly critical of policialescos because of the way this genre (mis)represents low-income neighbourhoods, glorifies the police, villainizes petty drug dealers, and generally exploits the misfortune of the poor. My expectations were clearly misplaced. I have now spent countless hours of participant observation research watching policialescos alongside subjects of incarceration. I have watched these programs in shantytowns and other land “invasions”, in waiting rooms of the interstices of the criminal justice system alongside poor people who are actively in-conflict-with-the-law, and inside a number of bleak prison cells. Consistently I have found research participants to be enthralled by these shows.

Below is an excerpt from my field notes describing one of my many exposures to the policialesco genre. The segment featured below is typical, in terms of form and content, of a common type of story – the police operation – regularly aired on Bahia’s most popular policialescos. Reporters accompany military police (PM) on an operation. A shaky camera captures a procession of heavily armed police winding through the narrow lanes of a typical low-income neighbourhood (bairro periferico or favela). The coverage cuts to anonymous police (filmed from the shoulders down) herding three zip-cuffed arrestees (young Afro-Brazilian men) into the trunk of a PM SUV. Arrestees wear the masculine uniform of periphery youth – bright surf shorts with a name-brand slim-fit t-shirt or tank top. They sit awkwardly on the floor of the vehicle, gangly legs stretched out, hands behind their backs. They hunch and try to turn away from the cameras. A police officer slams the trunk closed with aplomb.

Coverage follows the SUV as – lights flashing and sirens blaring – it weaves its way through congested city streets to a police station. At the station a ‘faceless’ arresting MP officer is interviewed. He proudly displays a handful of small, individually wrapped drug packets as he praises the dedication and good work of the military police.

294

Custody of the arrestees is transferred from military to civil police. Coverage shifts to the inside of the station where prisoners are shown standing in front of a wall featuring the police station’s logo. Sometimes station logos are professionally emblazoned on a glossy, colourful back-drop. This time, however, the logo is printed in black-and-white on an 8x11 sheet of paper taped to a generic wall. Additionally, confiscated bullets and tiny balls of drugs wrapped in fragments of black garbage bags have been arranged on a table to spell out the initials of the station (“11 DT” – 11a Delegacia Tancredo Neves). The camera zooms in on the eponymous display before the program cuts to commercial.

After the commercial break, the program employs a split-screen technique. One half of the screen shows the host, who is back at the studio filming before a live audience, and the other half shows the police station. The host addresses one of the arrestees.279

The host is confrontational. He refuses to accept the arrestee’s version of events and professions of innocence. He scornfully disparages the young man for both his involvement in crime and his unwillingness to confess. He verbally prods the arrestee, trying to elicit remorsefulness. Unlike many young prisoners, this youth does not break down in tears or apologize to his mother. Nor does he defiantly embrace his criminal identification. Instead, he repeatedly insists that he “didn’t do anything” and that there has been a misunderstanding.

As if to contradict the arrestee, the coverage cuts to footage of the delegado (police chief) sitting at a little desk where he appears to be receiving calls from the public regarding the arrestee. The chief then relays these unconfirmed accounts, as well as other information (i.e. that the arrestee has a ‘history of arrest’) as the cameras roll. Then, there is a return to the split-screen as the host confronts the arrestee with these emerging ‘facts’, demanding a response. Confronted with an aggressive and relentless repetition of accusations and character defamations the arrestee refuses to engage.

For his part, the increasingly agitated host turns away from the captive or, more accurately, from the large in-studio screen streaming footage from the police station. Now he is addressing ‘us’ – the audience. The camera zooms in so the host fills the entire frame as he begins to rant with great intensity and dramatic gesticulation about crime, evil, impunity, appropriate punishments etc.

279 Although the practice of filming fresh captives is semi-illegal (arguably unconstitutional), reporters are consistently permitted to interview arrestees (and broadcast these interviews) before police have even decided whether or not to lay charges.

295

One need not fully identify with the host or the police in order to be an avid viewer of policialescos.280 The subjects of incarceration with whom I work – viz. (ex-)prisoners and prison visitors – also habitually consume these programs. Moreover, stories featured on these programs are a near-constant topic of their conversations. Initially, the familiar tone in which the ‘characters’ and events of policialescos are spoken of, was a source of confusion and some frustration. I perpetually struggled to determine whether participants were speaking of personal dramas or the substance of entertainment news segments. Gradually, I came to realize that televised criminal justice events involve subjects of incarceration with such frequency that there is considerable slippage between personal experiences and narratives on the one hand, and mass- mediated crime stories on the other. For this disproportionately penalized sector of the population, policialescos often publicize, as well as constitute, deeply personal dramas. The extent to which these programs are experientially embedded – both reflective and constitutive of participants’ lives – explains policialescos’ counterintuitive popularity among those who inhabit Salvador’s prison-neighbourhood nexus. Perhaps no experience better illustrates this dynamic than a scene that unfolded around me toward the end of my fieldwork.

I’m seated in the cramped living/sleeping area of a single-room apartment in one of the crumbling historic buildings of the old city centre. This house belongs to, Dona Val, a key informant’s close friend/co-madre. Dona Val is ailing. She is virtually confined to the bottom bunk of a bed that fills the back wall. Like the children of prisoners with whom I live, Dona Val and her family members are so thoroughly steeped in prison argot that they use prisoners’ term for bunk beds: “comarcas” (lit. a district or a county). I am interviewing Dona Val about her lifelong entanglement with Salvador’s prisons. She points to the room’s solid wooden door, explaining that her ex-husband learned carpentry during one of his sentences. He built this door. A figure stops outside the open window, shouts a greeting, and begins to talk. Dona Val interrupts sharply, quickly explaining that there’s a foreign researcher in the house. She laboriously rises and makes her way out of the apartment to converse privately with the visitor.

280 Like Cops (a ‘reality’-TV program about policing that has been analyzed by Doyle 2003), policialescos seem to promote “audience identification with police and a simultaneous distancing of the viewer from suspects” (2003, 41). However, research conducted with a range of policialesco viewers seems to suggest that these twin effects of identification with police and distancing from suspects are not consistently realized.

296

It emerges that a family friend – a talented thief who specializes in snatching gold correntes (chains) from the necks of relatively affluent281 passersby – has just been arrested. We missed the policialesco coverage of his arrest because the TV interfered with my ability to audio-record Dona Val’s interview. Over the next few hours, the tiny apartment is a hub of activity. The TV is switched on; calls are placed and received; family and friends circulate purposefully through the house, periodically disappearing onto the streets to run various urgent (and secretive) errands. At one point, the arrestee’s accomplice – a fence who buys and sells stolen gold jewelry – stops by the house. As he playfully weighs my gold engagement ring in his palm, he speaks quite candidly of ongoing efforts to successfully bribe those police officers who are currently detaining the family’s thief-friend. Resources must be rapidly accumulated and agreements swiftly forged if the criminal justice process is to be interrupted, before formal charges are laid, and the thief- friend released. Policialescos play an important role in this time-sensitive process, facilitating a relatively common type of extralegal exchange: the police station bribe. Consider a similar situation as it was recounted to me by another key informant, Isa (an ex-prisoner).

One afternoon in 2005, Isa’s adolescent daughter screamed and called her mother into the living room. Dara pointed at the TV which was broadcasting a local news program. There were Nene and Coca – Isa’s sisters – under arrest. When Isa saw them on TV, she fell to her knees, praying to God: “Lord, help me get them back. If they don’t go to prison I promise to stop this life and I’ll get them to stop as well!” Isa quickly transitioned from bargaining with god to bargaining with state agents and their proxies. She got up off her knees and called a lawyer. Then she went out to sell her laptop (itself a proceed of crime) while her lawyer went to the police station to faz um acerto (make an agreement). Her sisters were released. As Isa drove them home she told them about her deal with God, her commitment to go straight. And, for a time, she did stop committing estelionato (fraud).

Both of these examples feature the televised arrests of people whose involvement in the world of crime was already well-known to intimates. Of course, the specific incitements of actuality footage featuring known criminals will differ from that which features arrestees whose status, in

281 The fence of stolen goods introduced below explained to me why thieves gifted at stealing correntes generally aren’t stigmatized (within his social circle): “Only guys with money wear gold chains…”

297 the eyes of intimates and associates, is somewhat murkier. However, these examples help to illustrate a tendency of televised arrests more generally – namely, these crime stories obtain the status of actionable narratives among subjects of incarceration.

Additionally, televised arrests position actors as presumed criminals, independent of any formal legal sanction. Importantly, the publicized positioning of a person as a presumed criminal, even when such a positioning is contested, has the effect of criminalizing people and groups associated with the detainee. Where the detainee is familiar to consumers of policialescos (or those who participate in conversations swirling in the wake of each episode), actionable suspicion often spreads to their friends and family. Beyond positioning specific associates as presumed criminals, televised spectacles of arrest, interrogation, and detainment also render whole classes of people as presumably involved in the world of crime. This process of generalized criminalization has been well documented by scholars working in Brazil and elsewhere. For example, Penglase, an anthropologist of Brazil, has analyzed media coverage of two events that occurred in Rio de Janeiro in the 1990s – a 1992 beachside mass mugging and the Brazilian army’s 1994 occupation of several poor neighbourhoods (“Operation Rio”). According to Penglase, heterogeneous media depictions, “organized according to several common tropes,” repeatedly evoke similar images (2007, 308). The figure of the marginal is one such image. And, in Brazil, people identified as marginals are widely presumed to be criminals. Policialescos contribute to the construction of the category of the marginal and the categorization of particular people, and sorts of people, as marginal or presumed criminals. In most cases, arrestees are young, male, and Afro-Brazilian (negro/preto or moreno) with class markers such as lack of tee-shirts or ‘poor’ clothing. Once certain characteristics and markers become established as signs of potential criminality, police and others may mobilize this knowledge, consequentially ‘profiling’ those they encounter.

I am concerned with the experiences of people who are intensely subjected to both specific and general processes of criminalization. What do televised arrests mean to them? I have shown that televised arrests provide an opportunity for timely extralegal intervention into the juridical criminalization process. By bribing police, actors may prevent further consolidation (e.g. through prolonged imprisonment and the production of a criminal record) of an arrestee’s criminal status. More broadly, as vividly illustrated by this practice of police station bribes, televised arrests elicit action. Televised arrests incite subjects of incarceration – aware that they and their

298 intimates already are – or are likely to become – presumed criminals, to intervene in ongoing criminalization processes.

Televised arrests, like talk of crime more generally, do not simply “interpolate” subjects as criminal. Instead, with reference to Salvador’s subjects of incarceration – who tend to be familiar with, or identify with, those represented as marginals in the context of policialescos – televised criminal justice events, incite agentive responses involving intervention based on interpretation. For, the marginal label is too pervasively applied to be of much use to those inhabiting the prison-neighbourhood nexus. Varieties and shades of (presumed) criminality matter when it comes to determining the best course of action. Televised arrests, as I will show, model and provoke the actionable interpretive labour and critical reflection constantly required of subjects of incarceration. Is she really involved [in the world of crime] – just how involved is she? Is she a laranga? What kind of marginal is she – a user (of which substances)? A trafficker? A true bandit? Is she part of a faction – which one? Is she truly evil or has she been led astray by bad influences? Can she be redeemed? Does she have respect? Does she (still) have consideration for me, personally? How should I proceed? Is there anything I’ve learned here [on the policialesco] that I can apply to my own situation (e.g. in terms of the way I am raising my children)? How can we avoid this fate?

These are the sorts of personal and pragmatic questions that occur to poor people who habitually watch policialescos. In the next section, I explore how the genre of the policialesco conditions poor viewers’ dynamic engagement with characteristic elements such as the televised arrest.

The Policialesco Genre

It is difficult to grasp the meaning of televised arrests to subjects of incarceration without taking the policialesco genre into consideration. I contend that aspects of this genre condition the emergence of a significant sort of talk of crime – namely, actionable narratives which are empowering insofar as they present agentive opportunities to subjects whose agency has been seriously constrained by structural violence. In the section that follows, I explore three aspects of the policialesco genre that seem to encourage the articulation of actionable – and perhaps counter-hegemonic – discourses on crime in response to the provocation of televised arrests. I begin by outlining each of these aspects in turn. These aspects are then illustrated in an account of the policialesco genre that follows.

299

First, news is made, not simply reported on, in the context of policialesco programming. These entertainment news programs are spectacular events that enable studio-audiences and at-home viewers to participate in larger-than-life unfolding stories. In relation to these programs, the poor are newsmakers (even if the news they make is not made under conditions of their own choosing).282 As newsmakers, the poor do not passively consume policialisco content, they play a real role in shaping it. As I will show, audience participation is a key element of most policialesco segments.

Second, while the poor may engage policialescos as newsmakers at least some of the time, they also have a history of turning to popular television programs (or the hosts of these shows) for assistance in times of need. Historically constituted attitudes toward this genre of television arguably extend to the component of these programs under investigation: televised arrests. Televised arrests become one additional area of policialesco programming which creative actors may incorporate into their repertoire of tactics for negotiating adversity. But, resources and support available through policialescos are limited and must be actively pursued. Often, deservingness must be performed for claims are made in the both the idioms of personalism/clientalism and citizenship/ universal entitlements.

Third, building on the above observation that basis of successful claims is ambiguous, policialesco representations of the poor are equivocal. While the poor may be criminalized in the context of actuality footage of criminal justice events, in other key segments of the shows, the poor appear, alternatively, as: rights-bearing “insurgent” citizens making legitimate claims and denouncements; modern subjects participating in the market as consumers and striving to achieve or maintain an aura of middle-classness; and as decent Christians, dignified workers, or some other embodiment of the deserving poor that renders them (qua worthy clients) as eligible to receive various forms of patronage. Moreover, in the context of policialescos, particularly the live music segments, signs generally interpreted as indexical of marginality – e.g. tattoos, particular brands and styles of clothing, the racialized bodies of male youth, etc. – are glorified; to at least some extent, these musical performances constitute subversive spectacles, analogous

282 Of course, Marx suggested that people make history though not under conditions of their own choosing. The materially conditioned status of action and the contingent character of possibility is central to my analysis.

300 to 18th-century chain gangs discussed by Foucault (1977). Building on Foucault, we might think of these performances in terms of a (re-)popularization of marginality that opens up the possibility of marginality without presumed criminality. For example, as I discuss below, pagode artists perform aspects of oppositional masculinity but, generally, are not presumed to be perpetrators of violent street crime. These musicians are not feared by relatively affluent Bahians, they are revered.

From popularesco to policialesco

In Brazil, entertainment news shows that emphasise policing (policialescos) are on the rise in the context of increased local-level television programming. The expansion and popularity of policialesco programming also reflects the popularity of this genre with viewers and its ability to earn substantial advertising revenue (relative to cost of production). To understand the policialesco phenomenon it is helpful to briefly review the history of television and populist programing in Brazil.283 Television became a truly mass medium in Brazil earlier than in most developing countries, in large part because of effective, if highly authoritarian government policy. The military government…, which took power in 1964, saw television as a potential tool for creating a stronger national identity, creating a broader consumer economy and controlling political information. The military deliberately pushed television deeper into the population by subsidizing credit for set sales, by building national microwave and satellite distribution systems and by promoting the growth of one network they chose as a privileged partner, TV Globo (Straubhaar 2004, 91).

In the early 1960s there were approximately 200 thousand television sets in Brazil. By 1968, fueled by consumer credit, the number of sets had increased dramatically to 3.2 million. Programming aimed at the povo284 emerged in this context (CCDC 2010, 5).

In 1966, the show Homen do Sapato Branco (White Shoed Man), hosted by Figueira Jacinto Junior, ushered in a new style of television programming – the popularesco – that brought the “mundo cão” (the raw and naked reality of the streets) into viewers’ homes. The host heard and

283 See Matos 2012 and Kottack 1990. 284 The term povo (lit. “people”) connotes the majority of the population, the poor and working class.

301 publicized the problems of o povo; realized welfare actions (e.g. provision of emergency assistance); and exhibited everyday dramas – family disputes and police cases. This format encouraged Brazilians to engage with television programs as a means to resolve personal problems.

Following a career trajectory that is quite common in contemporary Brazil, Jacinto, the white- shoed host, became a state deputy of São Paulo (CCDC 2010, 5-6). The military, concerned with Jacinto’s popularity, laid charges leading to his arrest (and the cancellation of his TV show). Jacinto was imprisoned for almost a month after being accused of provoking public disorder. Specifically, he had promoted a Christmas celebration for the poor, inviting needy mothers to gather outside the TV station to receive gifts. A huge crowd formed and violence, injury, and death ensued.

Since the end of the military regime in 1985, “Brazil has seen the rise of a notoriously aggressive and outspoken press” (Penglase 2007, 308). The popularesco genre of the dictatorship has transformed into today’s policialesco genre (CCDC 2010). Both genres are typically filmed in front of a live studio audience285 and feature the personal dramas of the povo. Increasingly, however, police forces play a preponderant role in programming, granting reporters extralegal access to sites of detention and special operations.

In 2004, the National Ministry of Justice took action against stations that were airing particularly violent images, warning these stations that such content was inappropriate for the afternoon time slot. The day after this action was taken, the person responsible for this regulatory attempt was transferred from their position. Ultimately, the Classificação Indicativa (rating system)286 did not come into effect until 2007. Legislation and enforcement at the national level has corresponded with the migration of daytime policialescos to local stations (which are nonetheless affiliated with the national networks). Accordingly, in recent years, locally produced daytime policialescos have proliferated in many Brazilian cities, including Salvador. For research

285 More precisely, a significant portion of shows are filmed off-site and then screened on stage and presented, by the host, to live-studio and at-home audiences. 286 Legislation that determines the times when particular television content can be displayed according to its appropriateness for children and adolescents.

302 participants, this means greater social proximity to – and increased likelihood of familiarity with – those caught on film.

Policialesco Programs in Bahia

In Salvador at lunchtime, as of June 2012, three such programs were competing for viewers. Throughout the day, additional policialesco programming was available. As Bahia’s most elite newspaper describes the situation:

Dishes filled with assistencialismo [charity], drama, hilarity and music constitute the lunch menu of Bahian television. Programs with popular aspirations – what some would call popularescos – have come to dominate Bahian television to the praise of an enormous public and the incredulity of journalism professors and legal specialists (A Tarde 2012)

At least since 2008, when policialescos really began to dominate the Bahian airwaves, concerns have been voiced about the violence they showcase and perpetuate; breaches of journalistic ethics; and violations of human rights. One study based on the observation of two Bahian lunchtime policialescos, from August to January 2012, has found their principle human rights violations to be: 1) summary judgement; 2) showing people’s images without authorization (filming in police stations); and 3) showing children and adolescents in situations of risk (CCDC). Though my analysis does not utilize a human rights framework, it is worth noting that the widespread practice of televising the arrests of criminal suspects clearly involves two of the three aforementioned violations (numbers 1 and 2).

Among Brazilian activists, academics, and policy makers, debate regarding the unauthorized use of arrestees’ images largely pivots around ostensibly conflicting sections of Article 5, Chapter 1 of the Brazilian constitution. Section IX guarantees free expression “of intellectual, artistic, and scientific activity and of communication, independent of censorship or license” while Section X declares the inviolability of “intimacy, private life, honor, and people’s images” guaranteeing “the right to compensation for material or moral damages resulting from their violation” (Brasil 1988). The issue of privacy violation is related to the issue of summary judgement. A newspaper caption reads: “According to academics, police stations are becoming spaces of julgamento

303 midiático (media trial/judgment)” (A Tarde).287 Activists and academics argue that policialescos criminalize suspects (as well as city spaces and social groups) independent of the judicial process or sentencing. And, furthermore, it is suggested that this incites the violent action of grupos de extermíno (death squads) (CCDC 2010).

My inquiry and analysis have not been framed in these terms: whether and how human rights are being violated; whether one right ought to trump another and under what conditions; etc. Instead, I explore how lived experience – which varies according to social position – shapes interpretations of, responses to, and effects of julgamento midiático. I ask: What does julgamento midiático mean to subjects of incarceration? To grasp this meaning, it is helpful to contextualize this phenomenon within the whole media product that is consumed. To convey a better sense of the style and content of programs that feature televised arrests, and how these programs condition the emergence of televised arrests as actionable narratives, I provide a sketch of Bahia’s most popular policialesco – Se Liga Bocão. In terms of format, structure, and content, however, all policialescos are quite similar.

Se Liga Bocão288

Se Liga Bocão is a regional program (Bahia) broadcast by TV Itapoan, an affiliate of TV Record (a national network). Bocão airs weekdays at lunchtime. The program is hosted by José (Zé) Eduardo and drips with Christian content. At least to some extent, Zé assumes the persona of an evangelical pastor – mixing aggressiveness and vulgar expressions with salvationist and Christian idioms. While interviewing a criminal suspect, Zé might appeal to Jesus; he regularly incorporates prayer into his commentary on situations of crime and violence. He interprets

287 Most research participants know that televised arrests are, at least to some extent, an illegal/unconstitutional practice that violates their formal rights. Yet, it is the police – agents of the state mandated to uphold the law and ensure security – who enact this violation on a daily basis on television. Focusing on the decades immediately following Brazil’s final abolition of slavery (1888) and the end of the monarchical Empire (1822-1889), Chazkel “investigates the role that the House of Detention in Brazil’s capital—and by extension, the penal system writ large—played in generating and perpetuating the extralegal logic of the legal system” (2009, 697). I want to stress that this spectacle of the televised arrest goes far beyond the already controversial practice of ‘the perp walk’ (see Doyle and Erickson 1996; Miller et al. 2010). Mediatisation of arrest means that, on a daily basis, men and women are pilloried – confined and subjected to extra-/illegal punishment by public humiliation. The law is ritually eschewed; people are humiliated and cast with suspicion if not summarily branded as ‘no good’. What does this mean for research participants and the society in which it regularly occurs? 288 The expression “se liga” can roughly be translated to “heads up” or “watch out.” The title of this policialesco entreats its audience to be alert.

304 current affairs through evangelical Christian teachings and makes promises of salvation to select criminal suspects on the condition that they publicly confess and repent. The message is clear: in most cases, criminal status is mutable, a choice; moral (re)habilitation is possible if one is willing to accept Jesus.

Zé’s posture, and the evangelical tone of the show, is consistent with TV Record’s ties to the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus) – the largest evangelical church in Brazil. In 1989, Edir Macedo, co-founder of the Universal Church (established in 1977) and preacher of prosperity theology, purchased TV Record, Brazil’s second largest television network. TV Record is known for its populist programming: “sensationalist variety shows, talk and reality shows” have won Record “a consistent second place in the ratings” (Straubhaar 2004, 91).289

Se Liga Bocão is packaged as a news program that specifically focuses on violence (viz. interpersonal violence), criminality, and policing.290 It covers events occurring throughout the state, though Salvador and the RMS (the city’s metropolitan region) are the primary sites of reportage. More specifically, segments are regularly filmed within police stations with the obvious complicity of police officers (see fig. 31). Reports show occupied (often overflowing) prison cells as well as recently arrested suspects, like Leleco, who have been brought into the station. These fresh captives – who, in many cases, have yet to be questioned, processed, or charged — are lined up and displayed for the press in a main administrative room. Reporters are permitted to film, badger, and interview these detainees – without their authorization – in flagrant disrespect of legislation. In addition to footage filmed within police stations, a significant portion of coverage is filmed in low-income neighbourhoods and is related to specific crimes that have occurred or police operations. Critics suggest this naturalizes the occurrence of crimes – and paramilitary policing – in low-income neighbourhoods.

289 TV Globo is Brazil’s largest television network. 290 Notably, the amount of air time allocated to stories is not related to their social importance but rather to an item’s level of spectacular appeal.

305

Figure 31. Se Liga Bocão - Locations of Coverage.

In addition to its emphasis on crime and policing, Bocão also offers a kind of assistentialismo – a system of limited redistribution in which providers of resources and other forms of support lead the process and beneficiaries (“meekly”) receive whatever charity their benefactor (often the church) provides (Betances 2007, 177). Bahian media critics argue that TV programs, like Bocão, distribute prizes and other rewards as part of a strategy to build the loyalty of the audience (CCDC 2010). Figure 30 shows the proportion of the show dedicated to the provision of assistance. Please note that, here, the authors of the study have narrowly defined assistance as the distribution of: a) cash prizes to viewers selected to play a ‘wheel of fortune’ game and b) material goods to victims of natural disasters. This narrow definition of assistance is problematic insofar as it conceals the broad range of resources and supports provided by – or thought to be provided by – Bahian populist news programs in general and Se Liga Bocão in particular.

Figure 32. Most represented categories of content.

My research indicates that such programs are practically understood as avenues to social justice. Subjects of incarceration often appear on Bocão, call in, or invite reporters to their neighbourhoods to denounce perceived injustices such as: wrongful arrests; unlawful detention; abysmal conditions of confinement; removal of settlers from invaded land without provision of indemnity payments; extrajudicial police killings; insufficient or collapsing infrastructure; blocked access to public healthcare; unchecked violence perpetrated by drug trafficking

306 organizations; etc. In short, subjects of incarceration leverage policialescos to make claims on various state institutions. The following example poignantly illustrates how the same people harmed by these programs also view them as a rare source of (potential) justice.

Before Leleco’s televised arrest, he was one of several research participants who advised me to attend a live taping of Bocão in order to denounce the illegal adoption of the child of a presa (see chapter 3). Leleco also offered to accompany me to a taping. When I did not immediately accept his offer, he quickly assured me: “Don’t worry Rosa. I’ll wear roupas sociais.”291 Leleco ran a hand down his exposed bicep and forearm, promising to cover up his tattoos. In this moment, Leleco simultaneously expressed optimism that a policialesco could bring a just resolution to a major dilemma and acknowledged that his everyday self-presentation is likely to elicit discrimination, undermining any claims he might make. In fact, Leleco is aware that his everyday appearance threatens to jeopardize the strivings of the people with whom he is associated (in this case, me). Leleco admits, if not accepts, that access to justice through policialescos is conditional upon successful embodiment of a particular status. The irony is that policialescos play a part in criminalizing those attributes that Leleco displays. Moreover, I sense he is aware that his donning of a freshly pressed long-sleeved dress shirt will not conceal or erase all of the signs of marginality that he embodies. Clad in a dress shirt, he will remain a racialized youth of the urban periphery, precariously positioned as a quasi-citizen teetering the precipice of full-fledged criminalization. Leleco reminds us that those who turn to policialescos as a source of assistance are the same people who, all too often, are criminalized on air.

Importantly, research participants also view policialescos as a source of entertainment and enjoyment. This dimension is best embodied by programs’ inclusion of regular pagode segments. Bahian pagode is a variation of samba; it is an immensely popular style of dance music closely associated with Salvador’s peripheral neighbourhoods. Living in one such neighbourhood, this catchy energetic music filtered through my open (but barred) windows at all hours. Certain periods were saturated by particular songs; the most popular hits were played on repeat, in part,

291 Lit. social clothes – roughly translates to “dress clothes”. However, such distinctions are very much coloured by class. Moreover, clothing ‘choices’ may affect ethno-racial identifications.

307 so people could master each song’s own distinctive, and often sexually suggestive, choreography.

Televised Pagode

The 2.5-hour show,292 Se Liga Bocão, is broken into four blocks. During the first block ‘major’ stories are summarized and the host, Zé, chats with the host(s) of the preceding entertainment news program. The second and third blocks constitute the body of the show in which various segments filmed off site are presented. The next day’s features are announced during the final block. These four blocks are often bridged by musical performances by Bahia’s most popular bands (the same groups that play atop Bahia’s distinctive trios elétricos during Carnival and perform at Salvador’s major music festivals). While various styles of music are represented, the most common seems to be Bahian pagode. Pagode’s prevalence is somewhat counterintuitive given the Christian overtones of Bocão specifically and the justiceiro (righteous, severe, quasi- vigilante) zeal of policialesco hosts more broadly. Pagode, synonymous with sex and violence, widely considered to be a form of baixaria,293 connotes the drug trade. Below, figure 31 shows a popular pagode band performing on Bocão, in front of the live studio audience.

Figure 33. Parangolé performing on Se Liga Bocão

The inclusion of pagode and other musical acts is clearly central to the popularity of policalescos. Additionally, as suggested above, pagode has a deeply ambiguous relationship to hegemonic discourses of crime. Pagode celebrates an oppositional street culture of resistance and popularizes, as it commodifies, symbols of marginality. To bookend televised arrests with

292 http://www.bocaonews.com.br/noticias/entretenimento/entretenimento/15410,se-liga-bocao-estreia-em-novo- horario.html 293 Lit. depravity, vileness, disgrace; the term refers to “situations in which people lose inhibitions, yell, curse, and even transgress sexual mores” (Lima 2011, 273).

308 actuality footage of pagode performances, is to impact the meaning of these criminal justice events. An examination of a particular pagode text – Cadê Coco (Where’s “Coconut”) by Nosso Som (Our Sound) – sheds light on the productive imbrication of marginality, music, and television media.

Cadê Coco was immensely popular at the time I conducted dissertation fieldwork. In the waiting areas outside of prisons, I often heard caregivers singing this simple song, a cappella, to bored toddlers. The song’s origin story is telling. Cadê Coco emerged out of a crime-news segment aired on Na Mira,294 Se Liga Bocão’s major policialesco competitor. In the segment that gave rise to the song, reporters accompany police on an operation linked to the establishment of Salvador’s first Base Comunitária de Segurança295 (BCS) in the neighbourhood of Calabar (April 2011). The Na Mira segment opens with footage of a typical, vividly painted low-income house fronted by a decorative/protective iron gate (structurally, the domicile is identical to the Jardims’ Fazenda Coutos house). Behind the gate is a young Afro-Brazilian woman in a casual, affordable outfit that immediately indexes her class. An anonymous male voice (belonging either to a police officer or a reporter) asks if she knows the location of Coco (a suspected drug- trafficker wanted by the police who goes by the nickname ‘Coco’). In a sly voice, the young woman responds, “yeah – Coco is here, here is Coco.” Simultaneously, she pulls up her short, striped jersey dress and, revealing her flowered underpants, thrusts her pelvis toward the camera and audibly slaps her vulva several times. She then turns and bends over so that her buttocks fill the frame. She wags her bottom as she says: “Here, look, it’s Coco here.”

The young woman is defying authority and showing her derision for the police by cleverly playing on the multiple meanings of the term ‘coco’. Coco means coconut; cocô, with an accent, means feces or shit. Moreover, in the informal language of the periphery, coco can also refer to a man’s penis or, more specifically, his scrotum. Would she have so boldly derided her questioner

294 Na Mira means “in the crosshairs” – as in the crosshairs of a shooter’s weapon. 295 These bases are Salvador’s adapted version of Rio’s notorious UPPs. The rationale underlying this intervention is linked to the problematization of prison-based drug trafficking gangs that ostensibly threaten public security in general and state-sovereignty within low-income neighbourhoods in particular. The spectre of such gangs contributes to the legitimization of an oppressive brand of “community policing.” It is worth noting that Leleco’s own televised arrest occurred in the run-up to the establishment of a subsequent BCS (Salvador’s Xth) in the Jardims’ neighbourhood of Fazenda Coutos.

309 and refused to cooperate with police if the TV cameras had not been recording? Here, it is the cameras and the audience they anticipate, rather than the iron gate, that offer this woman and her family a modicum of protection. Disclosure of Coco’s location on camera would have amounted to a performance of the reviled status of X-9 (police informant). Whereas, by creating a subversive spectacle she made the news and captured the public’s attention, thereby potentially forestalling retributive police violence by making her household’s interactions with the police the focus of synoptic surveillance.

Very shortly after this scene was aired on Na Mira, the band Nosso Som released a song with lyrics and choreography inspired by the televised incident (and the term coco’s polysemy). The band even incorporated an audio clip of the young woman’s humorous response into their recording. This hit seems to have launched Nosso Som’s career, earning the two lead singers a great deal of publicity, including numerous live performances on policialescos, such as Bocão and Brasil Urgente. Below is an excerpt of the song’s lyrics: - Você que assiste Na Mira o programa que é - You who watch Na Mira the show that’s the a cara do povo face of the people - A pergunta que não quer calar - The question that doesn’t want to shut up - Todo mundo pergunta por Coco - Everyone asks about Coco ... … Cadê cadê côco Where, where is coco Cadê cadê côco Where, where is coco Cadê cadê Côco Where, where is coco Olha côco aqui Look at coco here ... … Disseram que ele esta na praia, They say he’s at the beach, disseram que esta na Tv they say he’s on TV Todo mundo pergunta por côco – cadê você? Everyone asks about coco – where are you? ... … Oi coisinha, coco esta aqui? Hey girl, is Coco here? “Veja que ele esta aqui, esta aqui” “Look, he’s here, he’s here” [recording of young woman’s reponse, slapping noises]

As stated in the above lyrics, policialescos, such as Na Mira, are, to some extent, “the face of the povo.” Ordinary poor people – including presumed and practicing criminals – populate scene after scene. The poor fill studios; call in to enter contests and comment on affairs; erect burning- tire roadblocks and alert the media to peacefully protest neighbourhood violence and police neglect/involvement; stand in front of landslide ruble, beseeching politicians to address housing insecurity; and are addressed by advertisers as potential consumers. Loyal viewers in the prison-

310 neighbourhood nexus are able to see themselves reflected, not as a homogenous criminalized mass, but in their diversity. I am not aware of any other Bahian television program that provides such a complex and multi-faceted portrait of the urban periphery. As mentioned above, policialescos also furnish the poor with pleasurable experiences by providing free entertainment and promoting leisure activities that are relatively accessible. Before moving on to an in-depth discussion of Leleco’s televised arrest, it is helpful to consider how the small pleasures he experienced in the months leading up to his arrest were tied up with pagode and policialescos. The following account also outlines familial dynamics salient to the matter of Leleco’s eventual televised arrest.

Each year, Salvador is host to several major outdoor music festivals which feature lineups of popular artists (many of whom are pagodeiros). During the lead-up to, and aftermath of, each concert, these events became major topics of conversation among most (non-evangelical) research participants, especially adolescents and young adults. I had the privilege of accompanying Leleco and a group of his friends to one such festival – Salvador Fest – a day-long event that attracts roughly 100 thousand spectators. Bocão and its host Zé help promote this event – offering contests to win VIP tickets that would allow anyone to attend the show like a “baron”. Salvador Fest is known for attracting residents of the most ‘popular’ (low-income) neighborhoods in the city by offering tickets at ‘accessible’ prices.296 There are different classes of tickets. The cheapest tickets (roughly R$ 75 for a couple), which we purchased, grant admission to the open area that sprawls in front of the stage.297 Spectators who dance, bounce, and sometimes brawl in this crowded zone are referred to as the pipoca (popcorn). Admission is sold in the form of neon coloured synthetic t-shirts featuring the event’s logo. During the festival, pipoca wear their shirts (which function as tickets). Peripheral neighbourhoods like Fazenda Coutos have seamstresses who customize these one-size-fits-all t-shirts for a few reias. Males

296 Leleco would not have had the resources to attend (although he desired to do so) if I had not purchased our tickets. Following his arrest, reflecting back on our time together, I interpreted this instance of extreme financial constraint as a sign of Leleco’s non-involvement in the relatively lucrative drug trade. 297 There are two classes of elite VIP ‘camarote’ tickets. The more basic option grants admission to a secure, elevated balcony overlooking the pista (R$ 176/person). The delux version is even more exclusive and includes an open bar (R$ 400/woman; R$ 460/man).

311 tend to have their shirts fitted and transformed into sleeveless tank tops while females’ modifications tend to be more elaborate and diverse.

Figure 34. Leleco (far right) and neighbourhood friends at a music festival.

Pagode bands typically emerge from Salvador’s peripheral neighbourhoods. However, as they gain success in the local music industry, the profile of their fan base expands “to include white consumers with higher levels of formal education and buying power” (Lima 2011, 272). According to Lima, it is widely suspected, though hard to prove, that when these groups achieve a modicum of popular success, their producers offer jabá (payola), a sum of money to radio stations to broadcast/promote their songs. Then, bands are more likely to receive contracts from record companies that also pay jabá. When groups have become famous, they are invited to appear on various television programs (viz. policialescos), perform in elite clubs, and parade with prestigious middle- and upper- class blocos during Carnaval (Lima 2011, 272). Given the progressive elitism associated with success, it is understandable why poor Bahians would want to join Bocão’s studio audience or at least watch televised performances by Bahia’s biggest pagodeiros – who are looked upon by youth of the periphery as heartthrobs and heroes. Figure 33 (below) shows a crowd gathered outside of the Bocão studio to catch a glimpse of Igor Kanário, lead singer of A Bronkka and self-pronounced príncipe do gueto (prince of the ghetto).

Figure 35. Crowd outside Bocão studio (performance by A Bronkka).

312

Listening to Pagode with the Jardims

The first night I stayed overnight at the Jardims’ rented house (in Catu), Leleco’s father and older brother (Joca), accompanied by two of Joca’s male friends, spent most of the night on the street, in front of the house, dancing to A Bronkka’s breakout hit Pancada. The name of the song translates to “a beating”; its choreography is frenetic and aggressive. They played the track on repeat, at maximum volume from a little red car with a souped-up sound system.298 Late into the night, the men danced, drank, and rebuffed neighbours’ noise complaints. The next day, seven of us piled into that same little car and drove to a shoe store. Joca bought himself a couple of pairs of stylish trainers and insisted on buying each of us shoes as well. Initially I demurred but was assured that he had received some sort of ill-defined bonus from his patrão and that I should partake in this act of conspicuous consumption. Eventually I accepted a pair of fashionable flip flops. But the signs of Joca’s criminality were beginning to mount: public drinking and dancing to this marginal anthem; large sums of disposable income; fragments of cryptic conversations about something hidden in the back bedroom that must be removed; and a warning.

The warning came on the second night of my stay. Joca’s father, Sr. Nilson, seemingly drunk, caught up with me during a quiet moment in the kitchen. He warned me to stay away from the two young men – Joca’s friends – with whom he had spent the previous night dancing in front of the house. Nilson whisper-gestured that they sniff cocaine and this could mean trouble. Powder cocaine is an expensive substance. Cocaine use by poor, underemployed youth therefore connotes involvement in illegal activities. It is notable that Nilson – the patriarch of the Jardim family – warned me about Joca’s friends but not Joca himself. During my week-long visit, which coincided with São João festivities, Joca spent most of his evenings with these young men. Interpreting Leleco’s appearance, comportment, and associates in order to (re)act well – e.g. maintain good relations with/within the family and avoid trouble – was not only a concern for me, the anthropologist.

298 The car belongs to Leleco’s father (a self-employed pedreiro – bricklayer). The old car is integral to his business. It stalled a couple of times during my visits and garnered a great deal of puttering attention from the men. Leleco’s father only recently managed to repossess it after a lengthy bureaucratic struggle with the criminal justice system. The car was seized by police around the time of Tucano’s arrest*. Police claimed the car was a proceed of illegal activities. Leleco’s father had to produce statements from his employers (which were difficult and degrading to obtain) to establish that he had received licit payments that could have enabled him to purchase and operate the vehicle.

313

Joca’s 12-year-old niece, Adrielle, was clearly concerned about him. At the big street party, she was visibly anxious, scanning the crowd for her uncle, asking after him whenever we ran into a common acquaintance. When we finally did encounter Joca, accompanied by the same two friends, she became very clingy, trying to convince him to stay with us or return home. But she was unsuccessful. After receiving a phone call, Joca and his friends headed off into the night. Disappointed and worried, Adrielle returned to the house. I asked her what exactly she was worried about. Her response was vague but telling: “Something could happen. People could hurt him. Anything could happen…”

Shortly after this tense evening, Joca began to spend less time with his family. The Jardims rarely mentioned him and did not reveal much when I asked after Joca. They told me that he was expecting another child (his second) but, otherwise, I sensed they either didn’t know or were unwilling to say what he was up to.299 When I first heard that one of the Jardims had been arrested on TV, I immediately assumed it was Joca. It did not occur to be that it was Leleco who had been arrested.300 Leleco is consistently cash poor; he would not have attended the music festival if I had not covered the cost of our admission. This is just one of the innumerable signs I interpreted to mean that Leleco is not a true bandido. Yet, as a brother of Joca and Tucano (a prisoner) who neither studies nor works, who shares a style of self-presentation – from hairdo to brand of clothing to tattoos – with representatives of Bahia’s oppositional street culture, Leleco is certainly susceptible to criminalization, and the real risks this entails. For Leleco’s neighbours, acquaintances, church brothers, friends, and family, the challenge become parsing a stylish version of marginality from criminality and determining how best to (re)act given a growing presumption of presumed criminality.

The dilemma of how best to secure self and others in light of affection and obligation toward dangerous and endangered intimates is a pressing question for subjects of incarceration.

299 As described in the previous chapter, Joca seems to have taken up residence in Pirajá. 300 I believe that Leleco’s arrest had to do with his brothers’ (and family’s) criminalized status. Police may have mistaken him for Joca or suspected that he had abetted Joca and Tucano in their criminal pursuits. Leleco’s arrest might have been an unsuccessful attempt by police to obtain information (or leverage) that would lead to the capture of Joca. This arrest might also have been the outcome of an anonymous tip made by Joca and Tucano’s enemies. Regardless, Leleco was released, without being charged, mere hours after his arrest.

314

Televised arrests, like the policialesco genre of which they are a part, constitute a pragmatic resource the poor may engage to negotiate life’s challenges. As newsmakers primed to approach policialesco content as an ongoing co-creation, the poor tend to practically understand televised arrests as actionable narratives or opportunities to intervene in processes of criminalization and possibly improve selves, deficient subjects, and situations. I suggest that this active orientation toward actuality footage intersects with policialesco representations of the poor and pagode to generate an emic conceptualization of identity – specifically citizenship status – as fluid and achieved. This non-binary vision of citizen/criminal identity – in which these statuses are arranged on a navigable spectrum rather than assigned to fixed and mutually-exclusive categories – is cultivated through policialescos.

Criminality has come to be practically understood as a possible outcome of a complex assemblage of material conditions, relationships, choices, and misfortune rather than as an immutable essence, a predetermined fate, or a mechanical response to particular circumstances. In short, criminality is not a fixed status. Cumulative life experience – including extreme vulnerability to televised arrest and social proximity to criminals – has led subjects of incarceration to conceptualize criminalization as a process that can be avoided, discouraged, mitigated, and reversed. Children raised in poverty in Salvador’s urban periphery may become citizens; criminal kin may be recuperated.

Over the course of my first stay with the Jardims, I began to suspect that Joca might be involvido (involved in illegal activities). In the next section, I explain how televised arrests incite and inform interpretation of, and responses to, signs of involvement, such as those exhibited by Joca. Note how Joca’s name comes up during coverage of the event.

The Televised Arrest

In this section I document the phenomenon of the televised arrest by providing a detailed description of a single illustrative case. Through this case study, I consider the significance of the televised and ‘live’ dimensions of these criminal justice events. That is, I investigate how penality is altered as it is televised. While the televised arrest may share certain features and effects with other mass-mediated accounts of crime (e.g. newspaper articles), it is unique in the sense that actuality footage of the preliminary detainment of recent arrestees both models and incites a distinct mode of relating to criminal suspects.

315

On one level, talk of crime and manifest social/penal policies criminalize residents of the urban periphery en masse. In particular, racialized male youth of the periphery are constituted as presumed criminals. However, at the level of personal experience, subjects of incarceration know that questions of criminal identification are far more complicated. It is neither pragmatic nor possible to presume (and then act as if) all neighbours and kin are criminals. Moreover, it is exceedingly difficult to sustain categorical classifications according to which select people/groups are disparaged as criminal Others while one’s self and intimates are uniformly identified as good citizens under threat. This tension plays out on screen in the form of the televised arrest.

The televised arrest is selective; only specific suspects are subjected to this penal ritual which both reflects and effects criminalization (the extent to which one is presumed to be a criminal). While a wide swath of the population may be vulnerable to this fate, it does not befall everyone and it is believed that there are measures that can be taken to protect people and households. The televised arrest, I suggest, functions both as a fate to be avoided and as a resource that may be mobilized to avoid such a fate. This carceral form is a source of information and an example of how vigilant residents of Salvador’s prison-neighbourhood nexus ought to navigate a perilous social landscape peopled with (un)known dangerous/endangered intimates.

In essence, the televised arrest involves the presentation of a suspect or suspects to an audience. Viewers quickly scan the images, searching for familiar faces (of arrestees, police, and others who are present). Absent this, audience members’ next move is to search for subtler personal connections to the televised criminal justice event. Viewers attend to a range of details necessary to situate the arrestee(s) within the shared social landscape of Salvador’s prison-neighbourhood nexus (e.g. neighbourhood of origin, family membership, gang affiliation, etc.). Policialesco coverage of criminal justice events is also an occasion for the collection of intelligence on personally pertinent events (e.g. police operations, violent feuds, prison uprisings, etc.). And, crucially, information is not only disclosed by journalists or the police they interview but also by criminal suspects. Televised arrests do provide criminal suspects with a platform to speak, thereby amplifying the voices of a class of people who are often silenced or ignored.

These observations point to two key features of televised arrests that I unpack below. First, the people involved in this televised criminal justice ritual – from police officers and reporters to

316 arrestees – are not distant and anonymous figures; they are known,301 or knowable, co-residents within a familiar social field. For example, even if arrestees are not already familiar, it seems probable that paths may cross (or have crossed) at some point. More abstractly, for subjects of incarceration, arrestees represent rather ominous visions of selves or intimates in the not-too- distant future. Televised arrest specifically, and criminalization more broadly, loom as real possibilities in research participants’ lives.

Second, the televised arrest represents a mass-mediated instance of “talk of crime” in which criminals speak for themselves. In some cases, arrestees’ contributions support dominant discourses on crime. In other cases, suspects’ televised actions and words contradict and complicate simplistic imaginaries of the evil criminal Other. This multiplicity of voices – combined with a more general equivocity of content – means that TV producers and editors are not able to fully determine the messages communicated in and through the actuality footage they air.

At this point, I turn to Leleco’s televised arrest.302 The following account exemplifies the salience of familiarity to this carceral form, supporting my contention that knowledge (conhecimento) is central to the meaning and effects of televised arrests. This account also attends to the voices of Leleco and his co-defendant Diego as well as the meaningful speech acts and embodied performances of other ‘characters’ in this social drama. I highlight the ambiguity of these communications.

301 In the sense of “conhecer” – to know personally or to be familiar with. 302 The segment under discussion aired on the policialesco Brasil Urgente in *November 2011. In total, the segment runs for 8 minutes and 12 seconds. I incorporate some quotations with my description of the segment; I do not provide a full transcript or account. However, I do represent the range of content contained within the segment. For example, the segment contains no discussion of the context of Leleco’s arrest – an early morning police operation in Fazenda Coutous in anticipation of the establishment of a new “Community Security Base”. Nor do police make a definitive statement regarding the origin of the ostensibly confiscated drugs that they display in the segment.

317

The Familiar Scene of the Criminal: “Live from the police station – Prisoners exchange barbs! Woman attacks reporter!”

Figure 36. A blond reporter introduces the segment while, in the background, a civil police officer assists with production.

As the segment begins (see figure 34) a blond reporter (BR) makes the following pronouncement regarding Leleco and other arrestees: “These arrested traffickers… have already had various passagems pelo policia.303

In Salvador, this invidious designation – to have or not to have passage – is widely though imprecisely used, essentially, to characterize a person as criminal. Bahians regularly assert innocence or respectability by claiming not to have passages. Importantly, however, passage is not equivalent to a criminal record. It means that a person has had an encounter with police and their name appears in a BO – boletim de ocorrencia (a police report). Such a report may – but does not necessarily – lead to a Inquérito Policial (a police investigation) which, in turn, may result in a processo (prosecution, charges being laid) and, ultimately, a conviction. In the context of Brazil’s inquisitorial justice system, prosecution often, but not always, yields a conviction (Kant de Lima 1995). In short, passage is not equivalent to having an antecedente criminal (criminal record). Nonetheless, media outlets regularly announce whether or not a given person is ‘known’ to police. In this case, familiarity is damning.

Scene One

In the first scene of the television segment, documented below, the two detainees are introduced and interviewed by the BR. While she attempts to establish a connection between Leleco and

303 Lit. to have had “various passages by police” – indicates that the person in question has a history of encounters with the police. Were the person to have a criminal record or history of imprisonment, it is likely these facts would be substituted for “passagem.”

318

Diego, Leleco contests this imputation precisely because he is familiar with Diego. The two young men live in the same neighbourhood where it is widely known that Diego is involved in the drug economy. Although Leleco would like to differentiate himself from Diego, he is hesitant to assert himself. To do so risks creating a dramatic scene – the stock and trade of policialescos. Perhaps if this actuality footage is uneventful enough it will not be aired. Leleco has watched enough of these TV shows to know that words and deeds that are spoken and enacted before the cameras are susceptible to amplified attention and (re)interpretation. Certainly, detained criminal suspects bear few illusions about the sovereignty of their speech; they can’t presume to mean what they say.

Figure 37. Leleco Looks Away Trying not to Engage

Scene One: The blond reporter approaches and begins to question the handcuffed arrestees. Although three young male arrestees are present, one underage minor (<18) is not included in the coverage – he faces the wall and does not engage with reporters or other prisoners. The other two prisoners are Leleco and Diego. Diego, who the reporter refers to by name, is also a minor so his face is blurred. Effectively, Leleco is the face of this arrest; if televised, he will be recognized by family, neighbours, casual acquaintances, and virtual others (e.g. prospective employers and girlfriends).

BR: Here is Diego… what were you arrested with this time?

Diego: I was arrested with nothing. It was him over there who was arrested with drugs. [Diego’s voice raises as he cocks his head to the side, indicating one of the other two arrestees].

Camera pans to Leleco – whose head is angled down to avoid the camera.

319

BR: You? You were arrested with drugs?

Leleco No, I was at home sleeping [Leleco’s voice is quiet; he is reluctant to respond and : keeps turning his face away from the camera; his tone is controlled, proper, respectful].

BR: What is your relation with your partner here – your partner Diego?

Leleco I don’t have anything to do with it. I don’t have anything to do with him. :

BR: You are [Diego’s] partner? [The BR thrusts her microphone towards Leleco’s face].

Leleco [Unmoving and silent, Leleco does not respond]. :

BR: Are you [Diego’s] partner? [Again, she thrusts her microphone as she repeats her question a third time].

Leleco [Finally provoked into engagement, Leleco raises his face and looks directly at the : reporter.] Whose partner Senhora? I’m not his partner. You [have to know] your work – understand? I have nothing to do with him… I was at home sleeping [Leleco tries to resume his previous posture of disengagement].

As the stills above and below illustrate, Leleco is shirtless. He is shirtless, at least in part, because the police invaded his house in the early hours of the morning. Leleco had been sleeping and was not permitted to dress. On another level, it is likely that a certain elective affinity exists between Leleco’s bare chest and the unauthorized publication of his image by multiple media outlets. Beyond signalling potential criminality, lack of appropriate clothing also reveals further bodily evidence of one’s marginal status – viz. tattoos and scars. Intentionally, or not, arrestees’ bare chests serve the needs of the media. Discussing a Guatemalan reality TV program about the “formalization” of ex-gang members, O’Neill writes: …the show’s participants [were] culled from dozens of eligible ex-gang members… the applicants’ bodies were also closely studied and fastidiously documented. Photographs of each eventual participant’s bare chest and back, his arms and his neck, pooled in a digital archive, allowing the selection committee to assess which

320

men had enough tattoos to look authentic and which had too many for a pressed shirt to hide. Which bodies, the archive begged producers to ask, looked sufficiently deviant to warrant concern but not too delinquent so as to seem forever lost? (2011, 347-348 – emphasis my own).

Figure 38. Split Screen - Drugs on the Table; Leleco is drawn into self-defensive debate

Scene Two

Scene two: The BR continues to press Leleco for a response. Employing a split- screen technique, segment producers counterpoise various pieces of ‘evidence’ (e.g. drugs, bodily markers, and Diego’s testimony) with Leleco’s protestations of non- involvement. The audience is invited to make sense of these contradictions, ask their own questions, and weigh the available evidence. Notably, neither police nor reporters present a coherent theory of the case. Televised arrests take the form of inquisitions in which reporters and policialesco hosts – rather than police – lead the interrogation. These performances are directed at television viewers invited to sit in judgement. In turn, audience assessments – which we can expect to be relatively heterogeneous – determine the extent to which specific detainees are constituted as presumed criminals by the televised arrest. The interplay of journalistic interrogation, suspect responses, mediation, and audience participation produces the truth of criminalization.

BR: And the [crack] rocks that were discovered? Who had them? Were they with you or with him?

Leleco: [Visibly agitated, audibly frustrated, looks back up towards the reporter.] He is the trafficker. It’s him who traffics. I was at home sleeping.

321

Diego: …[Leleco’s] relative doesn’t want to assumir [admit responsibility for] his drugs. Forty-eight rocks were confiscated with him [over there]. [Diego cocks his head in the direction of the third prisoner who is underage and who is not a focus of the journalists’ attention].

There is a CUT in the footage; it is subtle but unmistakable.

Diego: The police got the drugs and then they grabbed me – sleeping in the house… it’s him over there, that descarado [one who is shameless, dishonest looking – this is a common insult].

Because Diego’s face is blurred and there is another CUT it is difficult to ascertain whether he is referring to Leleco or the third prisoner.

Diego: The police grabbed them with the rocks… he [Leleco] wanted me to say they’re mine so that these two would be released. Arriving [here], what did his sister say?304 That she’ll order Tucano and Joca to kill me.

BR: [To Leleco] Who is Tucano and who is Joca?

Leleco remains stoic, still. He looks away and is non-responsive as Diego speaks from off screen.

Diego: [From off screen] He knows who they are… they’re the brothers of these guys…he knows, he’s Joca’s brother…that scorpion [tattoo] there is de facção, Pit, criminais.305

BR: Oh yeah? Show that tattoo…

304 Michelle, Leleco’s older sister, was present at the house in Fazenda Coutos during the police raid. Following Leleco’s arrest, she quickly made her way to the police station. 305 “De facção” means “gang related”; “Pit” is the name of the leader of one of Salvador’s two notorious prison- based ‘gangs.’ When Diego says “criminais” he is saying that Leleco’s scorpion tattoo signifies his criminality.

322

Figure 39. Close-up of one of Leleco’s many tattoos.

BR: [To Diego] Do you also have a gang?

Diego: I’m de facção de Perna.306

BR: You’re de Perna and he’s de Pit? Is that right?

Leleco: I don’t even know what this is… I work, stud…— [Leleco is cut off by Diego.]

Diego: – if you worked, studied you wouldn’t be in front of a camera like this— [He’s cut off by Leleco].

Leleco: …I was at home Diego! I don’t have anything to do with it Diego! You assuma [“admit it”] man! Go ahead! – [Leleco and Diego begin to raise their voices and speak simultaneously].

“Oooh Paaa!” [a sound effect plays – it’s an animated recording of the popular Bahian interjection “Opa!” (“whoops!”)]

CUT

306 In Perna’s gang. Perna is the name of the other leader of Salvador’s two rival prison-based ‘gangs.’

323

The reporter steps back to summarize and comment on the scene.

BR: A feud here… the two are fighting – he [Diego] just confessed. Each one is from a different gang… one blames the other but both of them are guilty. And “the system is brutal”307 for both of them – isn’t that right Diego?

Diego: That’s right. The system is really brutal. [Diego looks at Leleco and addresses him.] Sua casa caiu.308

BR: [To Leleco] Your house fell?

Leleco: [Remains silent but sniffs and blinks; he seems to be trying to contain himself, perhaps holding back tears].

BR: [To Leleco] Is the system brutal for you as well…?

Leleco: [Indicating Diego] [“This one”] here is a trafficker, a disgrace, a rapist.

BR: Rapist!? Is that true Diego?

Diego: No! You can go there [to the neighbourhood] and ask the population there. The population knows me as a trafficker, and only [as a trafficker] – really.

Sound effect – “Ooohh Paaa!”

Diego: [I’m] a trafficker. I sniff powder and smoke marijuana…I’m a user of these two drugs.

BR: Why are you in this life Diego?

307 This is a catchphrase associated with the policialesco Brasil Urgente Bahia or, more specifically, the program’s host Uziel Bueno. 308 Lit. “your house fell down” – this idiom means that things fell apart, “the roof caved in”’ on a precarious unstable situation, or one’s plans/chances of success were ruined.

324

Diego: Not because I want to, it’s the devil. The devil enters people’s minds. You know how he is. How the devil works in the lives of others.

BR: You know how things end for those who become involved in drug trafficking, don’t you?

Diego: Death.

BR: You know but you continue with this?

Diego: No. I’ll get out of this, with faith in God. You’ll see… [I’ll be], preaching in the prisons [for these] [indicates his fellow prisoners] guys who don’t want anything, who don’t know Jesus. [But] will know [Jesus].

‘Urgent’ music playing in the background.

Figure 40. Diego – his identity somewhat protected – begins to confess his sins.

Scene Two (continued): The BR changes the subject, saying that Diego has escaped death a couple of times. She points out a large scar on Diego’s stomach, asking if it’s related to crime (see figure 38). Diego confirms that it is a result of his involvement in drug trafficking. She encourages him to elaborate on the gory details of the incident. The topic of Pit and Perna’s notorious prison-based conflict is revisited. Diego recites key milestones of this well-known history: Pit’s death, Perna’s imprisonment, and the rise of Claudio Campanha. Diego answers some questions about who he currently works for – “Deco… he only kills using a big knife.” They continue to discuss Deco until there is another CUT. The scene resumes with Diego yelling at Leleco, calling Leleco’s masculinity into question.

325

Diego: …I really work. Because I’m a man I take responsibility for my acts. Now he [Leleco] doesn’t own up to his actions.

BR: Why deny it?

Diego: [audibly sucks his teeth – a sign of disdain]. He’s a woman. When they [the police] got him he started to cry in the police car. And here [at the police station], he already shit three times. That isn’t a man! He doesn’t take responsibility!... That’s mine, it’s only this here that’s mine [Diego is gesturing with his head at areas of the station that are not visible to television viewers. He is seemingly taking ownership of a specific portion of the evidence (viz. drugs) that police have displayed on a table].

BR: You [Leleco] don’t admit it?

Leleco: I don’t have anything to do with it.

BR: He [Diego] says you’re not a man, that you don’t take responsibility. Is that true?

Leleco: I don’t know anything about this war of theirs. I was sleeping at home.

It is worth pausing to discuss scene two. In it, a number of the patterns I have been identifying are thrown into sharp relief. To begin, the issue of familiarity is absolutely central. The ‘truth’ of the case seems to lie somewhere in the web of relationships that is uncovered and made manifest through this unfolding criminal justice event. While there is much debate about the specific origin and ownership of the drugs displayed by police (figure 36), the police do not make an authoritative pronouncement about this basic forensic ‘fact.’ Instead, speaking suspects trade accusations back and forth as a broader picture of their overlapping social circles, involvement in crime, and character (decency or lack thereof) is drawn. Their presumed criminality is constituted through their handling of this situation.

326

Interestingly, Diego does not directly or unambiguously attribute the pile of confiscated drugs to Leleco. Instead, he seems309 to say that the drugs belonged to the third, backgrounded arrestee, Gordo (who had been staying at the Jardims’ house). But this fact does not let Leleco and his family off the hook; Diego does not individualize Gordo’s culpability/criminality. He refers to Gordo as a “relative” of Leleco; at one point uses a third-person plural pronoun, “them,” to describe whom the police caught with the “rocks”; and also says that Michelle, Leleco’s sister, tried to pressure him to take the fall, suggesting her older brothers (Tucano and Joca) would harm him otherwise. Diego is speaking not of isolated criminal individuals, but of a violent criminal family with connections to one of Bahia’s two major prison-based drug trafficking organizations. Furthermore, the fact that Diego is able to refer to Leleco’s siblings – Tucano, Joca, and Michelle – by name indicates a relatively high level of familiarity with the family. And, his claims about them are made in the context of his own frank confessions of criminality. By admitting his general involvement in drug trafficking he appears both knowledgeable about this world and relatively truthful. In short, his statements about the Jardims carry a certain weight. In contrast, Leleco’s refusals to take responsibility for the confiscated drugs and confess to criminal involvement more generally, raise questions about his character (viz. his masculine uprightness) and exacerbates suspicion of criminality, especially in light of his scorpion tattoo and the dubious nature of certain claims. For example, Leleco’s responds to questions about his membership in Pit’s faction by claiming ignorance (“I don’t even know what this is…”) and asserting his status as an upstanding citizen (I work, stud…”). These claims raise doubts among viewers who cannot help but be acquainted with Salvador’s two main criminal factions and who subscribe to the “myth of personal security,” according to which favela residents who conform to local norms may feel safe in otherwise violent neighbourhoods (Arias and Rodrigues 2006). Leleco has found himself, publicly, in a predicament which, according to this myth, upstanding citizens should not expect to face. Diego echoes this perverse but pervasive logic when he interrupts Leleco: “—if you worked, studied you wouldn’t be in front of a camera like this”.

309 It is often unclear who exactly Diego is referring to. He cannot point because his hands are zip-cuffed behind his back. Instead, he uses other gestures (viz. head jerks) to direct his comments. However, the blurring of Diego’s face, the exclusion of Gordo from the foreground of the actuality footage, and film/production techniques such as zooming and quick cuts, make it very difficult to follow Diego’s account of events with real precision.

327

While Leleco is able to speak for himself, the paramount fact of his televised arrest undermines his claim to citizenship and resistance to the criminalization process. When it comes to contesting his (emergent) status as a presumed criminal, he (the detained criminal suspect) cannot mean what he says. In scene two, only one escape from criminalization is present: Christian salvation in the context of imprisonment (the future that Diego predicts for himself).

Scene Three

The third and final scene dramatically renders the extent to which the event is altered as it is filmed. Though the experience of arrest and temporary detainment would certainly be unpleasant under any circumstances, the involvement of television journalists transforms this moment into a spectacular penal ritual. The publicity is the punishment; like a mass-mediated pillory, the televised arrest exposes prisoners to punishment by public humiliation. However, unlike the prisoner secured and displayed in a public square, those who are shamed through footage of criminal justice events, have not been found guilty by a court of law (or another sovereign). In fact, their criminalization – their positioning as a presumed criminal – and their punishment occur quite independently of the criminal justice system. Scene three, which features the reaction of Leleco’s sister, Michelle, to his situation, illustrates how a person who has not even been designated as a criminal suspect by the police, nonetheless may be criminalized through the course of the televised event. Michelle’s appearance, (re)actions, and relationships become the focus of sustained attention. And it is the manner in which she is subjugated to this derogatory mass-mediated attention, in addition to the signs of marginality she always already embodied, that constitutes her as a presumed criminal. Because, in general, Michelle’s self-presentation and comportment is not radically different than that of other young female subjects of incarceration. However, when these common class-based identity markers are put on display and (re)contextualized within the social drama of the televised arrest, they take on a specific meaning. The resonance of this meaning is enhanced because interpretations are not dictated by criminal justice officials or media elites. Instead, TV viewers are permitted to watch a woman make choices under pressure and come to their own conclusions about what her performance signifies. The televised event provokes ‘live’ performances. In Michelle’s case, her performance represents an unsuccessful attempt to protect her beloved (and presumed-innocent) younger brother from becoming the starring suspect in yet another televised arrest. Unfortunately, for Michelle, Leleco, and other family members, her actions are open to more than one interpretation

328 and they are being enacted before an audience primed to detect signs of marginality, evaluate the available evidence, and assess degrees of dangerousness. Scene three: the scene opens as Leleco catches sight of his older sister, Michelle, who is off camera (recall that Diego has already mentioned Michelle’s name, when recounting her alleged threat). Leleco calls to Michelle. Clearly upset, with an unsteady voice and a quivering bottom lip, he tells her that the reporters are filming him against his will. There is an audible heated exchange between Michelle and a police officer – who orders her to sit down near where the crew is filming. Leleco’s brow is furrowed, his eyes are anxiously following Michelle. He pleads with her to stop causing a scene: “Don’t do it, don’t Michelle…”. The camera pans to capture Michelle who is waving her arms, trying to swat away the swarming journalists. The segment’s caption changes to read: “Brasil Urgente Bahia: Broken Microphone! Woman attacks the network’s team”.

Figure 41. Michelle, Leleco’s sister, arrives on the scene.

Michelle, very agitated, is screaming “Don’t film my brother! Don’t film him! Don’t film him!”. The camera zooms in as the blond reporter spews accusatory questions. Michelle rises from the bench where police have ordered her to be seated. She demands the reporters stop filming her and, again, swats inefficaciously at her pursuers as she tries to leave the room. In an authoritative tone the reporter prohibits her from “touching” the camera. We see Leleco, hands zip-tied behind his back, turning, impotently, to observe Michelle as she retraces her steps, exiting the room to speak with a police officer in the hallway. Michelle’s arms are outstretched towards reporters who are quickly closing in. Michelle begs the police to remove her brother from this situation. She repeats the same refrain several times in an increasingly frantic tone. A police officer briefly holds out an arm, indicating that the reporter should back off.

Throughout this sequence footage is slightly shaky. The cameraman is on the move, following the reporter as she trails and questions Michelle. The reporter pauses to ‘summarize’ the tense situation for her viewers: “There is a furious woman, hitting at the camera”. Then, the reporter proceeds to literally back Michelle against a wall,

329

into a corner (see figure 40). The police are now nowhere in sight and Michelle’s cries have caught the attention of a competing news crew.

Figure 42. Reporters from two separate policialescos corner Michelle.

The blond reporter, aggressively, moves even closer to Michelle. Michelle screams “get out of here!” and then strikes the blonde’s microphone. It falls to the ground (fig. 43).

Figure 43. Backed into a corner, Michelle lashes out.

Michelle seems to notice the second crew. Once again, she tries to cover her face as she flees down the hallway toward the police station’s main entry area. The chaotic pursuit continues; many different people are yelling: Leleco desperately calls Michelle’s name; the blond reporter exclaims “she broke the microphone!”; and the second reporter’s enthusiastic commentary is audible if barely comprehensible.310 At one point the second reporter reaches out, touching Michelle’s arm and her shoulder. He is trying to stop her for an interview. She brushes his hand away, addressing him by name: “Adelson, don’t film me.” Adelson Carvalho is a well-known police reporter who occasionally substitutes as the host of the aforementioned policialesco, Bocão. The segment continues with more of the same, culminating in another ‘attack’ (see figure 42).

310 The second reporter’s coverage of the ‘event’ was aired by a different network.

330

Figure 44. Indignant, the blond reporter shouts: "Não me pegue não!"

Following the ‘attack’, Michelle is physically ushered into the police chief’s office. The door is closed. The blond reporter positions herself in front of the door to ‘report’.

BR: [Addressing the audience and Uziel – the host of the show] …she attacked our team. She’s worked up, involved in drug trafficking as well. She’s the sister of one of the traffickers that was arrested. She’s in there… The press is here, Uziel, doing our work, we are recording, showing… and we were just attacked by this woman who is very revoltado….

A police officer emerges from the room, shutting the door behind him. He holds out his hands, as if controlling road traffic.

BR: It’s a generalized confusion here. There is a great deal of confusion here at the police station – the press team is being attacked…

The coverage is interrupted as the segment returns to the studio where the host briefly but dramatically responds to, and re-enacts, the situation (see figure 43).

Uziel: …The system is brutal!!!...

The show then re-plays a portion of the previously aired coverage – from when Michelle knocks down the microphone to the moment in which she and the blond reporter briefly scuffle – while Uziel provides some voiceover commentary and more cartoonish sound effects are played.

331

Figure 45. Back in the studio the host responds to the segment.

By broadcasting actuality footage of the criminal justice event, it is altered. Televised arrests provoke, punish, and produce lasting effects. We have seen how arrestees, along with their allies and enemies, are interrogated, encouraged to testify against one another other, and roused to react. In this sense, the televised arrest resembles a trial as well as a punishment. And, both evaluation and penalty are realized by people who are not criminal justice professionals (viz. journalists and subjects of incarceration). The exercise of judgement and the administration of punishment is thus disseminated throughout the social body. Many people participate in these processes and, in so doing, develop expertise in matters of criminal identification, diagnosis, and intervention. On one hand, televised arrests serve an immediate and pragmatic purpose as a source of valuable intelligence which can be mobilized to facilitate navigation of an excessively uncertain and violent social field. In many respects, this instrumental, empowering dimension is as significant as the punitive and constraining effects of televised arrest. On the other hand, these spectacular penal rituals underlie a more abstract vision of crime and criminals. This vision – which differs from dominant views – consolidates through the situated life experiences of subjects of incarceration who also happen to be avid viewers of policialescos. Within this divergent vision, criminal identities are achieved, criminalization is contestable, and presumed criminals may be recuperated. Central to this vision is the active participation of ordinary people in processes of policing and prevention of crime (as well as criminalization); identification, judgement, and castigation of criminals; as well as diagnosing and disciplining deviant subjects.

Televised arrests incite agentive responses by subjects of incarceration, in part, because so much is at stake. Whether the actuality footage criminalizes a presumed-innocent; confirms a pre- existing presumption of criminality; castigates those captured on film; or compounds processes of individual and familial criminalization that were already underway, one thing is clear to

332 policialesco consumers in Salvador’s prison-neighbourhood nexus: televised arrest both reflects and effects precarious social positioning and vulnerability to harm. But, crucially, televised arrests also provide creative social actors with room and resources to maneuver.

In the final section, I discuss a range of responses to, and consequences of, Leleco’s televised arrest. More generally, I explore how the institution of the televised arrest as it manifests within the policialesco genre, incites perpetual interpretation of signs of presumed criminality and shapes approaches to decriminalization, a crucial if often overlooked local-level crime reduction strategy. Although Michelle’s efforts to interrupt and forestall Leleco’s criminalization ultimately failed rather spectacularly, this case encourages us to attend to the way televised arrests do not simply punish and criminalize but are also integral to everyday struggles to resist and reverse criminalization.

The Aftermath of the Arrest A Warning

It’s Friday – intimate visiting day at PLB (the men’s prison). I am outside Modulo II observing and chatting with arriving visitors. Barbara (who readers encountered in Chapters 3 and 5) arrives juggling her newborn and bags of food. Today she is just here to make a delivery. Her son, only 25 days old, must be at least one month old before he is permitted to enter the prison. After dropping off her bags in the vestibule Barbara pulls me aside. Looking concerned, she tells me she was hoping to see me, she has news:

Did you see Michelle on television? She went totally crazy, hit a reporter, broke her microphone! Her brother was arrested…for drugs – you know the one, he’s covered in tattoos. See Rosa [Hollis], I warned you, that family não presta! [is no good]. You shouldn’t be going there, sleeping there – anything could happen to you in that house (emphasis my own).

Initially at least, I did not know which brother had been arrested. I wrongly assumed it must have been Joca, who is also covered in tattoos and already a presumed criminal in my eyes. Like my research participants, I do not categorize entire classes of people as presumed criminals, though I am constantly alert to signs of criminality which reveal particular people as dangerous/endangered intimates and which I can put to use in my everyday decision making. Watching policialescos, exchanging gossip, and talking about crime is part of this ongoing

333 investigative and precautionary process. Over the course of my fieldwork I came to accept the basic truism that figurative and physical closeness with criminals is perilous, regardless of whether they are practicing lawbreakers or merely presumed to be. I effectively subscribed to the conventional view, as expressed by Barbara, that “anything could happen” to me in the presence of (presumed) criminals—I could be caught in the crossfire of a shootout; swept up in police raid; victimized; etc. Minimally, experience of televised arrests and conversations about them had convinced me that my personal reputation and research access could be irreparably damaged if I were caught on film, revealed to be overly familiar with the wrong people, unwittingly performing presumed criminality. This perception that “anything could happen” shaped a multitude of my everyday decisions regarding what to do, where to go, and who to associate with. Crucially, however, it did not cause me to cut all ties with possible criminals (to do so would be socially isolating if not impossible) but do redouble my interpretive efforts. Both vigilance and discernment are of the utmost importance in the prison neighbourhood nexus.

Shortly after receiving Barbara’s warning, I am approached by another concerned visitor-friend, Katia, who also warns me that I should not spend any more time at the Jardims’ house. However, Katia’s warning contains an additional dimension. She complains that Michelle has failed to pay for intimate products (sex toys) that were purchased from Katia on credit. Katia’s inclusion of this fact is significant; it demonstrates how subjects of incarceration make connections between in/formal, im/moral, and il/legal acts. Or, more accurately, it hints at how quotidian classification of acts is fluid, ongoing, dynamic, deeply personal, mutually re-enforcing, situated, and contestable. Acts are polyvalent. The meaning of Michelle’s failure to repay her debt to Katia is (re-)interpreted in light of her mass-mediated violent show of solidarity with a presumed bandit. Leleco’s televised arrest is significant to both Barbara and Katia precisely because of their prior familiarity with the Jardim family. And, while they and other policialesco viewers, may learn something about crime/criminals in general through their consumption of this brand of actuality footage, it is important to consider the way in which these scenes, and the retrospective reflections they inspire, help subjects of incarceration get to know (conhecer) particular people and families better.

Michelle’s failure to compensate Katia (in a timely fashion) might have been interpreted in a number of different ways – e.g. as an instance of relatively ‘open’ reciprocity that implies a relation of uneven, ongoing mutual commitment. Such perpetually unfinished exchanges

334

(re)produce social relationships and status differentials. Katia has this kind of quasi-cliental relationship with Sheyla, a relatively young, poor, and low-status visitor. Katia, periodically, ‘sells’ Sheyla products on credit. Sheyla reciprocates by showing Katia a great deal of respect, making occasional miniscule cash payments, and providing services and gifts (that somewhat and sometimes resemble in-kind payments). Sheyla’s returns never seem to ‘balance’ reciprocity; a sense of debt and obligation prevails and is irregularly re-animated when Katia continues to sell to Sheyla on credit, imprecisely and indefinitely extending the young woman’s indebtedness and elevating her own status as a patron-benefactor of sorts.

When, however, Michelle’s indebtedness is viewed in relation to her televised performance, it is interpreted as a symptom of Michelle’s immoral tendency to exploit (“that family is no good”). In the wake of Leleco’s televised arrest, Michelle appears to be engaged in a form of theft or graft. On TV, Michelle is ostensibly revealed as the kind of person who would willfully and maliciously disregard an implicit contract governed by norms of ‘closed’ reciprocity or market exchange. In this case, non-payment does not perpetuate relatedness. Instead, Katia is motivated to cut her losses as well as her social ties to an apparently threatening figure/family. Furthermore, Katia urges me to follow suit and cease to associate with the Jardims.

It may seem strange that prison visitors – wives of convicted criminals – are evaluating other kin of convicts as “no good” and advocating that I distance myself from them and, specifically, that I avoid spending time in their houses. It should be noted that Barbara and Katia’s warnings do not reflect a general taboo against visiting the homes of prison visitors or a blanket bias against all kin of criminals. I have spent time at both Barbara and Katia’s homes. I have also accompanied them on home visits to other kin of criminals. Moreover, Barbara and Katia have sanctioned my independent socialization with other prison visitors. However, for a variety of reasons, including the television segment that prompted Barbara and Katia’s warnings, the Jardims and their houses are categorized as problematic and understood to pose a particular threat. While the nature of this threat is not entirely clear, familiarity with Barbara’s personal history enables me to interpret her concern that “anything could happen” were I to spend time at the Jardims’ home.

Barbara was the first prison visitor to take me under her wing. Though we are the same age she assumed the role of mentor and guide, patiently explaining idioms; advising me on life in the neighbourhood; and introducing me (and my research) to other visitors. Were it not for my

335 connection with Barbara I would not have had the courage to approach and eventually get to know the younger, more intimidating companheiras (see chapter 4). Several months into our relationship, during a casual conversation about the struggles of several foreign national women imprisoned at Feminina, I wondered out loud how I would manage were I to be imprisoned. Barbara jumped in with a definitive statement: “You would be fine. You get along with people. That’s all it takes. You just have to converse and get along.” When I asked her how she knew about the dynamics of women’s prison – whether she had ever visited one – I was truly surprised to hear that she herself had been imprisoned for several months.

A few years ago, shortly after the arrest of her husband, the situation in Mata Escura, Barbara’s home neighbourhood, was tense. Alemão,311 in the form of both police and gang opponents, seemed to pose a threat to Barbara’s wellbeing. Unavailable to offer direct protection, Barbara’s imprisoned husband sent her away (out of the city) until things settled down. Specifically, Barbara headed to the interior of the state to stay with a cousin. Shortly after her arrival, police invaded the house, arresting all of its occupants. This police action was entirely unrelated to tensions back home in Mata Escura. Recounting her arrest, Barbara laughs sardonically: “Ha! I didn’t even know they were involved [in crime]. I went there to hide out, stay safe… Sandro [her husband] didn’t know, he never would have sent me to stay with them if he knew. You just never know with people…” Barbara is still struggling to “clean” her criminal record.

When Barbara warned me not to spend time at the Jardims’ house (because “anything could happen”) she was expressing a reasonable and widespread concern: that it is dangerous to visit houses occupied by bandits (as well as criminalized folk). Such houses are particularly vulnerable to police raids which can lead to the long- or short-term imprisonment of residents if, for example, illegal drugs are found on the premises. A common complaint among presas of, and visitors to, Feminina is that ‘innocent’ mothers/wives have been ‘unjustly’ arrested and charged after drugs, belonging to their children/husbands, were found in their home by police. Likewise, the imprisonment of daughters is often explained by stating: “She is in prison because of friendship; she was in a place she shouldn’t have been.” Households that include known bandits – or that have come to be known as criminal – are also perceived to be dangerous places because

311 Lit. Germans. Used locally to refer to one’s enemies.

336 of their increased susceptibility to violence associated with drug trafficking (see Arias and Rodrigues 2006).

Leleco’s televised arrest does not simply announce, to Barbara and others, that this particular individual is a bandit. The scene of his arrest, including Diego’s comments about Leleco’s brothers and Michelle’s dissent, both constitutes and reveals the family – as well as the broader configuration of houses they occupy – as criminal. Part of the violence of the televised arrest (in its function as punitive mass-mediated pillory) is that, even if Leleco and Michelle had managed to establish his status as “a worker/student” (i.e. as a non-bandit) the event, namely the fact of its publicity, would reinforce the practical understanding that those who associate with bandits (especially co-resident kin) are, themselves, vulnerable to processes of criminalization and their harmful effects.

Within a group that is broadly criminalized as the result of, for example, “territorial stigmatization” (Wacquant 2007) and a hegemonic “repertoire of derogation” (Caldeira 2001, 86), I have found, in contrast to Caldeira, that people do not tend to mechanically re-use “against others the same stereotypes that are used against themselves” (2001, 86). To do so would not help them navigate an insecure world in which the criminalization of self and intimates constitutes a primary concern. A nuanced view of shades of criminalization, and a sense that criminalization is not necessarily a fait accompli, leaves room to maneuver and intervene. In this context, stereotypes become grist for the mills of discerning subjects of incarceration like Barbara and Katia, who have to know better if they hope to get by relatively unscathed. Televised arrest brings the labour of penal judgement home, enlisting the poor in informal and decentralized procedures of criminal investigation, assessment, and intervention.

Among subjects of incarceration, two causes of criminalization are particularly salient.312 First, through institutions such as televised arrest, independent of the perpetuation of any crime, one may become a presumed criminal. That is, televised arrests engender performances of

312 These are both “socially relevant causes” in that they allow intervention and determine social behavior (Evans- Pritchard 2010 [1937], 253). Whereas these “socially relevant causes” were clearly important to research participants, they contrast with the relatively intransigent causes found in dominant theories of crime – namely, “improper places” (i.e. favelas), “social conditions” (i.e. hunger, poverty, unequal distribution of wealth), and “failure of police and justice system to punish crime” (see Caldeira 2001, 93-99).

337 marginality and thus transform ordinary neighbours and acquaintances into de facto members of the criminal category who, as such, are particularly dangerous and endangered. Although personal innocence of direct involvement in bandidagem does not insulate one from such a fate, steps may be taken to reduce the chances of being caught on film. Second, according to the relational view of deviance discussed in chapter 1, social and spatial proximity to bandits can cause one to actively take o caminho errado (the wrong path) and begin to practice crime, thereby exposing self and others to a range of undesirable consequences, including (televised) arrest.

These two possibilities are reflected in the following oft cited maxim: “Quem anda com porcos farelo come!” (He who walks with pigs eats husks). The meaning of this maxim is similar to the less-common English-language proverb: “If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas”. Whenever I heard my Brazilian friends repeat a version of the pig maxim I would ask them to explain what they meant. I was able to discern at least two interrelated meanings: 1) if we keep bad company we could fall victim to those with whom we associate or to their enemies; and 2) we end up behaving (and even becoming) like those with whom we maintain daily relationships – bad behavior is contagious. In both cases, association “with pigs” is considered to be risky behaviour. However, the risk is not uniformly understood as a matter of self-transformation or moral degeneration. Notably, among speakers of the pig maxim, and those whose actions are shaped by its logic, there appears to be a great deal of slippage between the two undesirable outcomes – victimization and criminalization – that can stem from proximity to “pigs”. My contention in this chapter, is that policialescos – specifically the institution of the televised arrest qua actionable narrative – contribute to people’s identification of, with, and potentially as “pigs”, threats, or people who não presta (are no good). Below, I explore each of these possibilities in turn.

In terms of identification of threatening others, subjects of incarceration watch policialescos, in part, to learn who has been (or is being) criminalized and, therefore, who ought to be approached as dangerous/endangered, not least because such “pigs,” themselves, threaten to function as a vector of criminalization. Insecurity and uncertainty encourage poor people to react to televised arrests as if those captured on film against their will are, for all intents and purposes, criminal. For example, if a friend’s arrest is broadcast on television, continued association with that friend

338 will likely be interpreted as acutely risky – even marginal – behavior of the sort that signifies or anticipates criminality.

Crucially, the televised arrest does not merely expose criminals for what they are. It constitutes arrestees, and often their intimates (i.e. friends and family members), as criminals. This productive power (in the sense of subjectification) of the mass-mediated pillory is not lost on viewers. Subjects of incarceration are acutely aware of their own “ontological insecurity,” or the instability of their social positioning as worker-citizens as opposed to criminal-marginals; categorical mixture313 is integral to lived experience. This especially deep sense of precarious positioning, I suggest, promotes widespread identification with those televised arrestees. As I watched and re-watched Leleco’s arrest, I thought: The Jardim house could have been raided on a night that I was sleeping there. I could have been arrested, filmed, and made the object of extensive commentary and speculation. I could have been transformed into a (presumed) criminal in the eyes of research participants and gatekeepers.

Katia and Barbara’s responses to the televised arrest cannot be understood without considering how, to at least some extent, they identify as (presumed) criminals. They embody derogatory stereotypes that, on one level, criminalize and discriminate against social groups to which they clearly belong. These women are poor, under-employed Afro-Brazilians of the urban periphery who are involved in Candomblé (rather than evangelical churches) and married to prisoners. While their warnings about the Jardims may imply an effort of displacement – directing stereotypes (made up of prejudices that especially affect the poor) toward a worse place, these women live with a palpable sense of their own criminalization which does not dissipate with

313 Caldeira (2001) documents Brazilians’ (viz. Paulistanos’) feelings of uncertainty about their social position in the midst of an economic crisis and new democratic practices transforming political life in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In her account, people of all social classes deal with this uncertainty by emphasizing and elaborating social differences. According to Caldeira, they mark social distance both materially (e.g. through use of walls and other mechanisms of physical enclosure) and through derogatory conceptions of the poor which “form a kind of symbolic fence, both marking a boundary and enclosing a category, and therefore avoiding dangerous categorical mixtures” (68-9). It is my contention that, for those at the bottom of the social hierarchy, avoidance of categorical mixture is not a tenable strategy. Whereas, according to Caldeira, real proximity to the stereotype of the criminal requires the poor to regurgitate a dominant if relativized discourse of crime in order to differentiate themselves and other “honest, working people” from the image of the criminal (2001, 74, 78, 80, 85, 90), I have observed that the poor do in fact contest the category of the criminal and its repertoire of prejudices and derogations. Their responses to televised arrests, for example, reveal an operational and experientially grounded conceptualization of the criminal(ized) that does not generalize and simplify, posing clear-cut distinctions between that which belongs and that which does not, between good and evil.

339 displacement. I interpret their warnings more as efforts to police conduct, to pre-empt (further) criminalization and cultivate citizenship while protecting their own family and friends from future problems (the “anything” that could happen), than to police social boundaries and maintain an undesirable position in the social hierarchy. Their response is both pragmatic and visionary. The recognize their own presumed criminality while striving to diminish this burden in a manner that is not injurious to others.

In the literature on policing and crime in Brazil, there is often talk of “misrecognition” (e.g. Caldeira 2001, 32). For example, the paradox of police violence formulation asserts that sectors of the population most likely to be misrecognized as bandits nonetheless support a violent police. While being misrecognized (as a bandit) is certainly a concern for poor people who value their lives and liberty, it is important that we also attend to their fear of criminalization. That is, subjects of incarceration like Katia, Barbara, Leleco, and Michelle must grapple with the anxious awareness that they are always already – or are at least disproportionately susceptible to becoming – (presumed) criminals. This injurious positioning may be realized abruptly, through extralegal processes such as televised arrest, or, more incrementally, through actual enactments of criminalized activities and association/collaboration with active bandits. Fear of the contaminating consequences of the mass-mediated pillory, along with the fact that all televised arrestees are not represented/interpreted as fully-fledged “true” bandits who have decisively chosen the wrong path (like Diego), renders perceptible the productive power of the broadcast itself and the processual nature of criminalization more generally. In turn, this (re)produces a troubling sense of ontological insecurity but also gives rise to a view whereby criminal status is achieved (not ascribed), incomplete/partial, and mutable. Thus, possibilities of intervention vis-à- vis processes of (de)criminalization are opened up.

Relational interventions, such as severing ties – permanently or temporarily, are one tactic available to subjects of incarceration seeking to police selves and intimates to forestall criminalization. But, as I have shown throughout this dissertation, the production of unrelatedness (i.e. social abandonment at the level of household and neighbourhood) is certainly not the exclusive, or even primary, response of research participants seeking to resist (or reverse) criminalization. Subjects of incarceration also engage in creative practices aimed at

340 decriminalization of selves314 and intimates. This can involve relational interventions that cultivate consideration between dangerous/endangered intimates (criminalized-kin) and citizen- kin or other people on the “right path” through extensions of care, co-presence, and encouragement (see chapters 2 and 5). Such re-workings of relatedness are risky in the sense that they involve close association with criminals. These criminals, however, may be recognized as criminalized Selves, kin, or intimates, towards whom one feels a deep sense of obligation and affection.

Through televised arrests, subjects of incarceration do not simply recognize evil criminal Others to be excluded or even exterminated. They see themselves in those familiar figures enduring the penalization and subjectification of the mass-mediated pillory. Hand-cuffed and tattooed Afro- Brazilian bodies scantily clad in surf-wear, hailing from the urban periphery, appear as specters of future selves and intimates. The recognition that “we are the others” (Rotker 2002) – or ‘are potentially the others’ – coexists with extensive operational knowledge of how criminals may be made and, crucially, unmade (c.f. Moodie 2010).

Barbara and Katia’s warnings, and the underlying theory of criminalization’s causes and effects that I have outlined above, help us to understand the range of responses incited by televised arrest. Katia and Barbara’s responses do not reflect or reinforce simplistic, essentialized categories that eliminate the ambiguities of everyday life. In place of mutually exclusive categories of citizenship and criminality, there is evidence of categorical mixture and an acknowledgement that fluctuation between these states is probable and at least somewhat agentive. Barbara and Katia cultivate social distance from the Jardims, and encourage me to do the same, in order to defend us all against our own looming criminalization. Following Leleco and Michelle’s policialesco performances, and the Jardims’ public consolidation as a presumably criminal family, continued association with the Jardims means that “anything could happen,” including our own televised capture. In short, Barbara and Katia’s response may be thought of as a proactive attempt to resist compounded criminalization and, thus, bolster their own fragile positioning as (quasi-)citizens. I now turn to the Jardims’ response to the incident, exploring how televised arrests cause people, as individuals and collectively, to identify as presumed criminals.

314 O’Neil (2010, 2011) has explored technologies of the self enacted by Guatemalan former gang members.

341

How do Leleco and Michelle respond to televised criminalization? What is the relationship between their sense of self-identity and their emergent status? How is the category of (presumed) criminal inhabited and contested?

The Jardims’ Responses

Shortly after receiving Barbara and Katia’s warnings, I call Leleco who is relieved to hear from me. Following his arrest, he had tried but failed to reach me; he thought I might have been avoiding him. Leleco invites me to come for a visit, to see him sing with his evangelical church choir later that evening. I agree, eager to hear his version of events and show my support.

It takes over an hour to get from the prison to Fazenda Coutous by bus. Leleco is waiting at the bus stop when I finally arrive. We join the crowd, picking our way across muddy terrain. Although there hasn’t been much rain lately, water is flowing down the main road. Apologetically, Leleco says he will not be singing with the choir after all. He’s sorry I’ve come all this way; he tried to call but his phone was out of credit. He asks: “Do you want to come to the house anyway?” I do. As we make our way through a commercial area and down into the residential portion of the neighbourhood, Leleco expresses his disappointment and frustration about the church choir.

Leleco had already paid for a new long-sleeved dress shirt (the performance uniform of choir members). However, earlier today, when he called to arrange pickup, he was asked not to participate in this evening’s service. The pastor said that, given recent events, he is “unsure” about Leleco. He requires a meeting before Leleco will be permitted to represent the church and take part in public performances reserved for congregants who are fiel (faithful). The pastor refused to accept Leleco’s assurances that he is committed to the church and to Jesus. Leleco tried to explain that he has just been busy lately – “resolvendo negocios” (taking care of affairs): “I had to go to the interior with my father to pick up clothing [for re-sale]. I’ve been away…”

The topic of the televised arrest (which occurred only three days ago) was not directly broached by either Leleco or his pastor. Nor did Leleco explicitly attribute his pastor’s “uncertainty” to the arrest when recounting the situation to me. However, I sense that Leleco is painfully aware of the consequences this event has had and will have in his life. I ask Leleco if he wants to drop by the church to speak with his pastor again, but he declines. He has given up on the hope of signing;

342 now, he is singularly focused on the matter of reimbursement (for the cost of the shirt). I don’t bring up the arrest. Leleco is mainly talking about money, or lack thereof, and work. He is determined to get a home-based business – a family-run beauty parlor/barbershop – up and running as soon as possible.

When we reach the house, Leleco proudly shows off the still-unfinished salon the Jardims have been busy creating. It has shiny tile floors and has just been painted. Leleco has mounted little display shelves that sit empty, awaiting products. Michelle’s big carrier of polishes and other nail supplies is neatly stowed under the staircase. There is a hair wash station and a mirror/drawer console. Leleco says he’ll get a barber chair as soon as he has the money and that, tomorrow, he is going to buy an electric razor for R$ 60 (though, as of yet, he hasn’t managed to accumulate all the money). He periodically shouts through the window at familiar passersby, informing them that he’ll have a razor by tomorrow and will be offering men’s hair cuts. The walls of the pristine salon are decorated with pretty wall decals of trees and birds. I notice that the new decals are already beginning to peel away from the wall. As we sit side-by-side in two plastic patio chairs a bird decal becomes fully detached and falls onto the floor. Leleco fetches it and carefully lays it on a shelf. He shakes his head and says: “They won’t stick. I keep putting them back up. I’ll have to buy some glue…”. He trails off. We sit in silence and then he asks: “Did you see it?” I shake my head no, saying: “I only heard about it. I was so worried about you and your family. What happened?”

Leleco begins his account by showing me his thin wrists. They still bear the raw, red traces of plastic zip-cuffs. He rubs these wounds as he speaks: It happened Tuesday morning – Adrielle had already left for school and Mãe was out. Michelle answered the door. I heard a commotion and then the police came into the room where I’d been sleeping. I was sleeping without a shirt. They wouldn’t let me get a shirt. They cuffed me with those plastic ties…

The police put me in the trunk [of their SUV] along with Gordo.315 Gordo’s been to Salvador to visit but never overnight, this was his first time staying over…

315 Gordo is the underage minor who stood facing the wall in the background of the actuality footage of Leleco’s arrest.

343

Michelle rode in the backseat [of the police car]. The police kept trying to pressure her to assumir as pedras (take responsibility for the drugs), saying that if she did, me and Gordo would be released. They just wanted an arrest to make their numbers, get paid.

The police took us to the 5th Delegacia (police station) in PeriPeri. The police had already called the reporters. They were all there. The delegado (police chief) hit me here [Leleco reaches up and rubs the back of his neck] and pulled my hair, pulled my head up, to get me on film.

Eu Errei (I messed up).

Leleco repeats this lament several times as he discusses his television appearance. I messed up because I argued… It’s difficult when someone just keeps repeating things that aren’t true – accusing you of something that isn’t true. But I messed up. They didn’t even look to see my ficha (record, history) – that it’s clean. They didn’t investigate. They didn’t ask anyone about me. And [the host of the policialesco] was badmouthing me – saying I’m a trafficker…

Leleco pulls out his cell phone and shows me photos he has taken of the little TV in the Jardims’ living room. Leleco has captured images of his own televised arrest – the pictures are blurry but he is recognizable. His head is angled downwards, away from the TV cameras, but his face is still visible. Leleco was picked up by the police during the early morning of Tuesday December 6th. He was released a few hours later; no charges were laid. However, multiple networks continued to broadcast footage of the chaotic criminal justice event throughout the week, failing to disclose that that Leleco was quickly released without charges. They showed it again today [Friday]. It’s because I messed up. Michelle heard me calling her. She saw me crying, heard me saying that they were filming me. I messed up…

Leleco blames himself for causing a scene and, effectively, giving the story legs. But he also feels that an injustice has been perpetrated against him and, indeed, his family. He tells me that he is considering submitting an official complaint to the public prosecutor: “it’s against the law to film me in the police station, isn’t it?” We move inside the house and join others in the living room. Michelle, spewing vitriol, describes her involvement: I was so revoltada (angry). I could have killed someone – seeing my brother crying there… on TV. I went and attacked the reporter. They didn’t show it on TV because the police chief was right there.

As Michelle rants irately, other family members seem to shrink away; they do not engage. Their body language indicates that they are uncomfortable. Whereas Leleco clearly regrets his

344 televised comportment (arguing with another prisoner, addressing the cameras to dispute accusations, calling for his older sister, etc.) Michelle seems almost victorious – satisfied with her combative display of resistance, whatever its result. Michelle proudly shows off scratch marks on her forearm, explaining that the reporter clawed her during their fight. Michelle, almost frantic at this point, gleefully brags: “Then I grabbed her microphone and broke it! They showed that part.”

Michelle’s excitement subsides abruptly, giving way to bitter rancor. She begins to complain about the destruction of her new cell phone: “Somebody threw water on it and now it’s fried. Who would do something like that?”. Initially I don’t understand what has prompted this tangent. I assume the police must have damaged her phone when they searched the house. However, Michelle disabuses me of this notion. It was somebody inside the house; it happened after the police were here. The phone was there – in my room on the shelf. I went to the macumbeiro [practitioner of black magic] and she said it was one person who poured the water and wrecked my phone. She said she’ll tell me who it is and I can have that person killed [through the use of black magic]. They deserve it. If they could do that to a cell phone imagine what else they might do…

As Michelle continues in this vein, I observe her gestures, allusions, and the way she is raising her voice and angling her head as if she is trying to communicate with someone in the back of the house. Gradually, I pick up on the passive aggressive subtext of Michelle’s story. We are sitting in the living room (Michelle, Adrielle, Leleco, Gordo, and I). Laine, Michelle and Leleco’s sister-in-law, and her daughter Yasmine are in the back bedroom, quietly watching television. They only emerge to use the bathroom and brush their teeth. Their bedroom has a curtain, rather than a door, so I am sure Michelle’s loud and hostile diatribe is audible. Laine, who was introduced in the previous chapter, is married to Tucano (a prisoner). I am relieved when a neighbour drops-in to have her nails done and Michelle shifts into different performative mode.316 She transforms into the charismatic and chatty young woman I first got to know outside the prison, smiling readily and cracking jokes.

316 Though, I did find myself wondering what kind of young woman would spend time in this notorious house of ill repute.

345

Michelle is known around the prison as an expert manicurist. Tonight, the fleshy ‘L’ of skin between her left thumb and forefinger is speckled with colour – she uses it as a palette to ‘sharpen’ the tip of her brushes and remove excess polish from the cuticle sticks with which she etches tiny designs. Michelle pours a drop of remover into the red polish bottle, caps it, and gives it a shake. She’s making this bottle last, extracting every useable bit. After Michelle meticulously paints the neighbour’s toes with black, red, and white stripes (the colours of Vitória – one of the city’s two rival football teams), she moves on to me. In the end, she does not accept payment for either job. The neighbour does not pay because she regularly does Michelle’s hair. My repeated offers of payment are waived away. Perhaps maintaining these relationships of reciprocity is more important to her than cash in hand. Certainly, this performance of generosity, of decency contrasts with the image of Laine that Michelle has been presenting, as well as Barbara and Katia’s recent assessments of Michelle’s own character.

When the neighbour leaves it is, again, tense inside the house. Finances, relations, and composures are strained.317 During this particular visit to the Jardims’ house, I arrived in the late afternoon and departed the next morning. Throughout this period, we consumed only bread318 and many small glasses of sweet black coffee. The household does not appear to be sustainable in its current formation. It seems like a change – e.g. of household membership – is inevitable. But who will leave? Who will be excluded? While Michelle rages against an unjust system, casts aspersions against Laine, and stabilizes her position within a fraying mutual support network, Leleco expresses regret, contemplates his rights and protections as a (quasi-)citizen, and strives to get a new family enterprise up and running that could consolidate his identity as a worker. But the salon is an ambiguous symbol. It can be interpreted as a sign of Leleco and Michelle’s determination to work in the legal, if informal, economy. Alternatively, or simultaneously, it can raise suspicions and function as a sign of criminal involvement. “Where did a poor family get the money for this renovation, these amenities? The sister-in-law visits the prison every weekend;

317 I approach this house – and the houses of low-income peripheries more generally – as places where “necessary intimacies” of livelihood and social reproduction create risks of betrayal, contamination, and ‘collateral damage’. Within such spaces of uncomfortably close (and non-optional) cohabitation, certain people may emerge as scapegoats (proxies for broader experiences of subordination). In this case, Michelle targets Laine, the only member of the household to whom she is not related by shared blood. 318 A bag of roughly 14 small white buns cost R$ 2.

346

Tucano is still running things from inside. Did you see the brother and sister on television – his scorpion tattoo? Her rage? What about that other brother, Joca, I haven’t seen him around. He’s on the run. They’re all involved…”319 I am hungry and uneasy as I sit in the Jardims’ living room drinking coffee. Anything could happen. There is some stilted conversation but, mainly, we watch television.

Conclusion

This chapter has taken us into the everyday context of a house – the home of presumed criminals – in order to explore televised criminal justice events and their intersection with subjectivities, practices of relatedness, and claims to social belonging. Televised arrests connect domestic and carceral spaces as well as intimate knowledge of specific, familiar people with abstract theories of crime and punishment. Televised arrests provide a window onto the operations and effects of talk of crime.

I have considered a group (subjects of incarceration) that has been understudied by scholars analyzing talk of crime. While subjects of incarceration have a notable relationship to the talk of crime, their voices and experiences have been remarkably absent from the literature. Members of this group speak of crime as concerned citizens at the same time as they are spoken of as criminals. They occupy an ambiguous social position which is not determined by injurious criminalizing speech. It has been theorized that members of this group articulate and consume crime narratives which ostensibly (re)produce a symbolic order that contributes to the subordination of the poor (see, for example, Caldeira 2001). However, closer examination of this group has led me to the conclusion that situated life experience and the equivocity of language (Butler 2012) condition a distinctive orientation to talk of crime.

As illustrated in my discussion of televised arrests, subjects of incarceration are neither passive consumers nor mechanical reproducers of hegemonic discourses. My research participants – ‘talking (presumed) criminals’ – tend to approach enunciations about crime as actionable narratives which enable them to better navigate a landscape in which criminalization, as well as

319 This set of fragmentary questions and notions is a composite of things I heard around the prison and some of my own reflections.

347 crime victimization, is a pressing concern. Talk of crime is actionable in at least two senses. First, it is put to use (e.g. qua intelligence) by pragmatic actors coping with concrete dilemmas. Second, as crime discourse is iterated and employed within the context of the prison- neighbourhood nexus, its core categories (viz. citizen and criminal) are destabilized and reimagined. Processes of criminalization are rendered amenable to intervention; rehabilitation becomes thinkable (again). Though, tasks such as policing, adjudication, and rehabilitation (or decriminalization) are not to be carried out by experts (criminal justice sector actors) alone.320 Success and security are seen to depend on the efforts of ordinary people and families. As the crime-control work of police, judges, and prisons is distributed throughout the population its means and ends may be challenged or transformed. Perhaps the “invariable penitentiary technique” (Foucault 1977, 268-271) is better realized in homes, by intimates, than in prisons.

Within this emergent vision of (de)criminalization, familiarity displaces socially-distant expertise as a key condition of crime control. Theories of the causes of crime, like stereotypes of criminals, must constantly be grappled with and applied to specific cases in order to secure selves and dangerous/endangered intimates. For subjects of incarceration, the most socially relevant meanings of the talk of crime only manifest in relation to particular performances and familiar performers. In Salvador’s prison-neighbourhood nexus, I have found that talk of crime does not only or primarily operate to police social distance. More importantly, it is central to local efforts to govern, judge, know, and discipline.

Within the literature on talk of crime, the ‘fortress city’/ ‘divided city’/ ‘city of walls’ is conceptualized as “brutally divided between “fortified cells” of affluent society and “places of terror” where the police battle the criminalized poor” (Davis 1990, 223-4 as cited in Caldeira 2001, 322). As Prentice (2012) points out, such a bifurcation of the city encourages certain omissions. In particular, emphasis on socio-spatial segregation (characterized as an effect of talk of crime) may leave the experiences and practical understandings of a certain “middle stratum” under-theorized. Prentice, building on Caldeira (2001), helpfully defines this “middle stratum” as

320 This analysis is inspired by Foucault’s observation that “[t]he whole machinery that has been developing for years around the implementation of sentences, and their adjustment to individuals, creates a proliferation of the authorities of judicial decision-making and extends its powers of decision well beyond the sentence” (1977, 21 – emphasis my own). There is no singular sovereign whose speech does what it says.

348 a group that “feels vulnerable to crime yet does not possess the wealth to construct a ‘fortified enclave’ for personal protection” (2012, 48). Certainly, those who inhabit Salvador’s prison- neighbourhood nexus feel – and are – disproportionately vulnerable to conventional street crime as well as extralegal police violence, yet are unable to effectively secure themselves within a gated condominium or even an iron-barred house. Take the Jardims’ house in Fazenda Coutos as an example. Iron bars might protect the household from property crime but they do nothing to alleviate the threat of criminalization stemming from within and without the house. And, once the Jardims have become presumed and/or practicing criminals, they are vulnerable to a range of corollary injuries linked to that status.

Members of Prentice’s “middle stratum” are present within the anthropological literature on Brazil, specifically in the context of discussions of the “paradox of police violence” and “parallel politics.” However, within these important discussions, these people often appear as embodiments of a puzzle to be solved or pawns trapped between the two ‘real’ objects of analysis – drug trafficking gangs and the state. Their practical understandings – daily struggles, hopes, and concerns – as well as micro-level intra-class inequalities rarely seem to be the primary focus of scholarly inquiry. As Goldstein points out in reference to analyses of Brazilian citizenship in the context of democratic consolidation: the lives of the poor are both underdescribed and undertheorized, and thus viewed as homogeneous groupings that respond to public politics in ways that work against their own self- interest (such as the suggestion made by Holston and Caldeira that presents them as favoring military and police actions) (2003, 199).

I would add that, once textualized, residents of low-income neighbourhoods appear as firmly, always already, worker/citizen/victim/-selves or bandit/marginal/trafficker/criminal-Others.321 The exception to this rule is the figure of the police-bandit that is notable precisely because of the way he uncomfortably straddles a categorical divide (Goldstein 2003). Rotker’s (2002) provocative formulation – “We Are the Others” – highlights the possibility that a sector of the population talking about crime runs a real risk of being criminalized, or being relationally obligated to those who are criminalized. Within this sector, policing physical and symbolic boundaries is not tenable.

321 I have shown the very local, intimate nature of criminalization and focused on people who precariously occupy a liminal position between worker-citizen-victim and bandit-marginal-criminal.

349

According to Arias and Rodrigues, “where insecurity is acute, people tend to focus on creating their own spaces of safety within their particular neighbourhoods” (2006, 57-58). The home is a key site in which discussions of crime, central to high-stakes status negotiations, are commonplace. Like those who dwell in gated condominiums, many residents of low-income neighbourhoods seek to secure their homes, as well as they can, in order to protect themselves and their families. Visibly, this involves installing iron bars over windows/doors and around gardens.322 Discussing these tactics, one prison visitor expressed a common sentiment when she remarked: “We’re really the prisoners, in our own houses.” It is significant, vis-à-vis my observation that subjects of incarceration are as threatened by criminalization as crime victimization, that parents, particularly mothers, use iron bars and locks to confine their children at home, away from the criminalizing domain of the street (see fig. 9).

On a subtler level, beyond bars and locks, household security is highly dynamic and personal. It involves the collection of intelligence, the interpretation of evidence, and the capacity to act wisely upon the delicate and often uncertain knowledge that has been acquired. Televised arrests play an important role here as criminal justice spectacles that model, facilitate, and provoke these practices. But, their effect is not inevitably exclusion, or the subversion of substantive democratic consolidation (c.f. Caldeira 2001, 35). Caldeira’s landmark work, City of Walls (2001), explores a series of strategies of protection and reaction – several of which are accomplished through the everyday discourses she calls the talk of crime – that emerged in Brazil, viz. São Paulo, since the mid-1980s. “Both symbolically and materially,” she writes, “these strategies operate by marking differences, imposing partitions and distances, building walls, multiplying rules of avoidance and exclusion, and restricting movement” (2000, 2).

The Jardim house may be viewed as a microcosm of the prison-neighbourhood nexus. Inhabitants of these domains experience such a high degree of proximity with the category of the criminal that other strategies and tactics tend to prevail. These strategies and tactics, I suggest, are premised on categorical mixture and a destabilization of the categories of criminal and citizen. When the household cannot be purged of criminalized elements – when intimates seem

322 One afternoon, on a visit to the ground-level rented house of my friends Cassia and Gilvan, he gestured at a newly installed iron gate in the narrow lane that leads down from the main road and joked: “Look, now we live in a closed condominium.”

350 dangerous and endangered as a result of their (imminent) criminalization – a possibility becomes making do with categorical mixture and re-conceptualizing crime, and appropriate responses to it, in this light.323 The Jardims do not relinquish a sense of citizenship and social belonging in light of their criminalization. Instead, they experiment with avenues of social inclusion which include: participation in evangelical churches; exchanges of gifts constitutive of mutual support networks; establishment of a respectable family business; and denunciation of rights violations to government officials. Members of the Jardim family self-police conduct and relationships in order to cultivate a brand of citizenship capable of co-exiting with some degree of criminalization. Yes, the Jardims were injured by the televised arrest. However, they do not respond by discriminating against and excluding the most criminal among them. Where exclusion occurs, it stems from interpretation and assessment of particular, familiar people and their accumulated performances. Exclusion is not best understood as the result of the uncritical replication and displacement of prejudicial stereotypes.

The stakes of status negotiations

In Brazil, the right to security is not evenly distributed; access to most rights is hierarchical and personalistic. Poor Brazilians must navigate this inequality knowing that the right to security – the right to have rights – is reserved for certain groups and is achieved through processes of demarcation of and membership in these groups (Arias and Rodrigues 2006, 55). People who have no choice but to live in dangerous places deal with the ongoing fear of physical violence, at least in part, by distinguishing themselves from other groups that they see as truly dangerous (Caldeira 2001; Goldstein 2003; Arias and Rodrigues 2006) and endangered. Residents of low- income neighbourhoods – and specifically those who inhabit the prison-neighbourhood nexus – are often the focus of discourses of deviance. As Caldeira observes: Crime and criminals are associated with the spaces that supposedly engender them, namely favelas and cortiços (tenements). . . .[F]avelas and cortiços are considered unclean and polluting. . . Excluded from the universe of the proper, they are symbolically constituted as spaces of crime, spaces of anomalous, polluting, and

323 As in the prison, residents of a crowded houses are not sovereigns of their domestic domains. They are seriously constrained in terms of their ability to determine insiders and outsiders. They, like prisoners, often experience “coercive intimacy.” Survival and social reproduction in the face of scarcity necessitates perilous relationships. Coercive intimacy refers to the way in which subjects of incarceration are often required to live with and depend upon blood relatives, in-laws, friends, neighbours, and colleagues who are also vectors of (compounded) criminalization through which violence may infiltrate the house.

351

dangerous qualities…Predictably inhabitants of such spaces are also conceived of as marginal…Their behavior is condemned: they are said to use bad words, to be immoral, to consume drugs, and so on. In a way, anything that breaks the patterns of propriety can be associated with criminals, crime, and its spaces (2001, 78–82)

Thus, precariat and working-class people confront special challenges in distinguishing themselves from the ‘truly’ dangerous and improving their sense of security. Unlike the middle- class and elite Paulistas described by Caldeira (2001), the poor cannot readily retreat to fortified enclaves though they may support policing and penal policies that contribute to the criminalization and victimization of the poor (Caldeira 2001; Paes-Machado and Noronha 2002). In short, favela residents establish their (relative) non-marginality through the “marginalization” of others or avoidance of association with (and proximate contamination by) those who have been identified as marginal.

352

Works Cited

Acker, Joan. 1990. “Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies: A Theory of Gendered Organizations.” Gender and Society 4(2): 139-158.

-----. 1996. "Gendering organizational theory." Classics of Organizational Theory: 463-472.

Adorno, Sérgio. 1999. "Racial discrimination and criminal justice in Sao Paulo." Race in Contemporary Brazil: From indifference to inequality. Rebecca Reichmann ed. Penn State University Press: 123- 137.

Agénor, Pierre Richard, and Otaviano Canuto. 2013. “Gender Equality and Economic Growth in Brazil.” Poverty Reduction and Economic (PREM) Network. http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EXTPREMNET/Resources/EP109.pdf

Aguiar, Ubirajara Batista de. 2001. “O Sistema Penitenciário Baiano: A Ressocialização e as Práticas organizacionais.” Dissertação apresentada ao Curso de Mestrado Profissional da Escola de Administração da Universidade Federal da Bahia.

Althusser, L. 1971. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In L. Althusser, Ed., Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Allison, Anne. 2013. “Indebted Intimacy.” In Life in Debt: Times of Care and Violence in Neoliberal Chile. Clara Han ed. Berkeley: University of California Press: 221-224.

Almeida, Odilza Lines de, and Eduardo Paes-Machado. 2015. “No place to run, no place to hide: Socio- organizational processes and patterns of inmate victimization.” Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology 48(2): 175-199.

Alves, Jaime Amparo. 2015. “On Mules and Bodies: Black Captivities in the Brazilian Racial Democracy.” Critical Sociology 42(2): 229-248

Amado, Diana. 2007. “Desenvolvimento Social na Mata Escura: uma abordagem a partir do LTECS.” IV Simpósio de Excelência em Gestão e Tecnologia Associação Educacional Dom Bosco. Web. 29 Nov. 2012.

Amann, E. and Baer, W. 2002. “Neoliberalism and its Consequences in Brazil.” Journal of Latin American Studies, 34(4): 945-959.

Ansell, Aaron Michael. 2014. Zero Hunger: Political Culture and Antipoverty Policy in Northeast Brazil. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 353

Arias, Enrique Desmond and Corinne Davis Rodrigues. 2006. “The Myth of Personal Security: Criminal Gangs, Dispute Resolution, and Identity in Rio de Janeiro's Favelas.” Latin American Politics and Society 48(4): 53–81.

Avritzer, Leonardo. 2010. “Democratizing urban policy in Brazil: participation and the right to the city.” Citizen Action and National Policy Reform: Making Change Happen. Eds. John Gaventa and Rosemary McGee. London: Zed.

-----. 2012. “Aspectos Históricos e Ambientais.” Laboratório de Desenvolvimento de Tecnologias Sociais, n.d. Web. 29 Nov. 2012.

Bakker, Isabella, and Stephen Gill eds. 2003. Power, Production, and Social Reproduction: Human In/security in the Global Political Economy. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

Barkan, S.E. and G.J. Bryjak. 2014. Myths and Realities of Crime and Justice. Jones & Bartlett Publishers. Second edition.

Barreto ML, Genser B, Strina A, Teixeira MG, Assis AMO, Rego RF, et al. 2007. “Effect of city-wide sanitation programme on reduction in rate of childhood diarrhoea in northeast Brazil: assessment by two cohort studies.” Lancet 370(9599): 1622–1628.

Bartlett, Lesley. 2007. “Human Capital or Human Connections? The Cultural Meanings of Education in Brazil. Teachers College Record 109(7): 1613-1636.

Beattie, Peter. 2011. “The Jealous Institution: Male Nubility, Conjugality, Sexuality, and Discipline on the Social Margins of Imperial Brazil,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 53(1): 180-209.

Beccaria, Cesare. 1995[1764]. On Crimes and Punishments and Other Writings, Richard Bellamy, Virginia Cox and Richard Davies, eds.. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Becker, H. 1973 [1963]. Outsiders. New York: Free Press.

Beer, Marit de. 2010. “Locked up in the Tropics.” Dissertation. Uretcht University.

Betances, B. 2007. “Vidas vividas enriesgo”: Caraterizando el vincula entre Wiolencia Contra La Mujer y el VIH/SIDA en la República Dominicana. New York: Planned Parenthood.

Bezanson, Kate and Meg Luxton. 2006. Social Reproduction: Feminist Political Economy Challenges Neo- Liberalism. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Biehl, João. Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

-----. 2016. “The Postneoliberal Fabulation of Power: On statecraft, precarious infrastructures, and public mobilization in Brazil.” American Ethnologist 43(3): 437-50. 354

Biehl, J.G., Good, B. and A. Kleinman, eds. 2007. Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations (Vol. 7). University of California Press.

Biondi, Karina. 2010. Junto E Misturado: Uma Etnografia Do Pcc. Editora Terceiro Nome.

Bloom, B., and M. Chesney-Lind. 2000. “Women in prison: Vengeful equity.” In Roslyn Muraskin (Ed.), It’s a crime: Women and Justice. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Boiteux, L. 2011. “Drugs and Prisons: The repression of drugs and the increase of the Brazilian penitentiary population.” In Systems Overload: Drug Laws and Prisons in Latin America. Amsterdam/Washington: Transnational Institute/Washington Office Latin America: 30-8.

Bourgois, Philippe I., and Jeff Schonberg. 2009. Righteous Dopefiend. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bourgois, Philippe I. 1995. In Search of Respect: Selling crack in El Barrio. Cambridge University Press.

-----. 2011. “Lumpen Abuse: The Human Cost of Righteous Neoliberalism.” City & Society (Washington, D.C.), 23(1), 2–12.

Bourdieu, P. et al. 2000. Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Bosworth, Mary. 1996. ‘‘Resistance and Compliance in Women’s Prisons: Towards a Critique of Legitimacy.’’ Critical Criminology 7: 5–19.

-----. 1999. Engendering Resistance: Agency and Power in Women’s Prisons. Aldershot, United Kingdom: Ashgate.

-----. 2000. ‘‘Confining Femininity: A History of Gender, Power and Imprisonment.’’ Theoretical Criminology 4: 265–84.

Bosworth, Mary and Eamonn Carrabine. 2001. "Reassessing Resistance." Punishment & Society 3(4): 501-515.

Braga, Célia Maria Leal. 1986. Prisão Feminina. Salvador: UFBA.

Brasil. 1988. Constituição da República Federativa do Brasil de 1988. Web. Jan. 1, 2017 http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/constituicao/constituicao.htm

Brennen, Denise Denise. 2004. “Women Work, Men Sponge, and Everyone Gossips: Macho Men and Stigmatized/ing Women in a Sex Tourist Town. Anthropological Quarterly 77(4): 705-733.

Brenner, N., & N. Theodore. 2002. “Cities and the geographies of “actually existing neoliberalism.”” Antipode, 34(3): 349-379. 355

Britton, Dana. 1997. "Gendered Organizational Logic: Policy and Practice in Men's and Women's Prisons." Gender & Society 11(6): 796-818.

-----. 2005. Gender and Prisons. Manhattan: Kansas State University.

Brinks, Daniel. 2008. Police violence in the Americas: The Judicial Response to Police Killings in Latin America: Inequality and the Rule of Law. Cambridge University Press.

Brooke, James. 1991. “‘Honor’ Killing of Wives is Outlawed in Brazil.” New York Times. March 29, 1991.

Brown, Alexandra K. 2000. " ‘A Black Mark on Our Legislation’: Slavery, Punishment, and the Politics of Death in Nineteenth-Century Brazil.” Special Issue, State, Society, and Political Culture in Nineteenth- Century Brazil, Luso-Brazilian Review 37(2):95-121.

Buraway, Michael. 1998. “The Extended Case Method.” Sociological Theory 16(1): 4-33.

Burdick, John. 1998. Blessed Anastácia: Women, Race, and Popular Christianity in Brazil. New York: Routledge.

Butler, Judith. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge.

-----. 2012. “Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26(2): 134-151.

Caldas, Alcides et al. 2007. “Tecnologia Social: Cooperação Universidade/Comunidade Para o Desenvolvimento Urbano Regional e Local Sustentável.” Revista de Desenvolvimento Econômico 16: 16-25.

Caldeira, C. 2003. “Bangu 3: desordem e ordem no quartel-general do Comando Vermelho.” Insight Inteligência 22: 91-115.

Caldeira, Teresa. 2001. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo. Berkeley: University of California Press.

-----. 2002. "The Paradox of Police Violence in Democratic Brazil." Ethnography 3(3): 235-263.

Caldeira, Teresa and James Holston. 1999. “Democracy and violence in Brazil.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41(4): 691–729.

-----. 2004. “State and Urban Space in Brazil: From Modernist Planning to Democratic Intervention.” In Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics and Ethics as an Anthropological Problem. Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier, eds. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing: 393-416.

Calhoun, Craig, ed. 2002. Dictionary of the Social Sciences. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 356

Cardoso, Ana Rute and Dorte Verner. 2006. “School Drop-Out and Push-Out Factors in Brazil: The Role of Early Parenthood, Child Labor, and Poverty.” Discussion Paper No. 2515. http://ssrn.com/abstract=955862

Carsten, Janet. 2000. Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

-----. 2013. “What Kinship does-and how.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3(2): 245-51.

Carsten, Janet, and Stephen Hugh-Jones. 1995. About the House: Lévi-Strauss and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Carvalho, Everaldo Jesus de. 2013. “Escola Penitenciária: Por uma gestão da educação prisional focada na dimensão pedagógica da função do Agente Penitenciário.” Dissertação apresentada ao Programa de Pós-Graduação em Gestão e Tecnologias Aplicadas à Educação da Universidade do Estado da Bahia (GESTEC/UNEB).

Carvalho, Milton Junho. 2010. Personal Meeting. UFEBA. March 20, 2011.

Carvalho, Ináia M..M & PEREIRA , Gilberto Corso (Org). 2005. Como anda Salvador e sua Região Metropolitana. EDUFBA: Salvador.

Carvalho, Salo. 2013. "Theories of Punishment in the Age of Mass Incarceration: A Closer Look at the Empirical Problem Silenced by Justificationism (the Brazilian Case)." Open Journal of Social Sciences 1(4): 1-12.

Cerqueira, D.R., Carvalho, A.X., Lobão, W.J. and Rodrigues, R.I. 2007. “Análise dos custos e conseqüências da violência no Brasil.” http://www.ipea.gov.br/portal/images/stories/PDFs/TDs/td_1284.pdf. Web. July 10, 2017

Certeau, Michel de, and Steven Rendall. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Chazkel, Amy. 2009. “Life and Civic Education in the Rio De Janeiro City Jail.” Journal of Social History 42(3): 697-731.

Chesney-Linds, Meda and Marc Mauer. 2013[2002]. Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment. New York: New Press.

Chesney-Lind, Meda, and Lisa Pasko. 1997."The Female Offender: Girls." Women and Crime. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Chesnut, R. Andrew. 1997. Born again in Brazil: the Pentecostal boom and the pathogens of poverty. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. 357

Cheliotis, L.K. 2014. “Our violence and theirs: Comparing prison realities.” South Atlantic Quarterly 113(3): 443-446.

Chevigny, P. 2003. “The populism of fear: Politics of crime in the Americas.” Punishment & Society 5(1):77-96.

CIPÓ - Comunicação Interativa e Intervozes. 2011. “A construção da violência na televisão da Bahia: Relatório de análise sobre os programas Se Liga Bocão e Na Mira.” Coletivo Brasil de Comunicação Social, Facom/UFBA, Fundação Ford.

Clear, T.R., Rose, D.R., Waring, E. and Scully, K. 2003. “Coercive mobility and crime: A preliminary examination of concentrated incarceration and social disorganization.” Justice Quarterly 20(1): 33-64.

Clemmer, Donald. 2004[1940]. “Prisonization.” In Classics of Criminology. 3rd edition. Joseph Jacoby, ed. Long Grove: Waveland Press.

Collins, John. 2008. “‘But What if I Should Need to Defecate in Your Neighborhood, Madame?’: Empire, Redemption and the 'Tradition of the Oppressed' in a Brazilian Historical Center.” Cultural Anthropology 23(2): 279-328.

Combessie, Philippe. 2002. "Marking the Carceral Boundary." Ethnography 3(4): 535-55.

Comfort, Megan. 2002 “‘Papa’s house’: The prison as Domestic and Social Satellite.” Ethnography 3(4): 467-499.

-----. 2003. “In the Tube at San Quentin: The ‘Secondary Prisonization’ of Women Visiting Inmates.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 32(1): 77-107.

-----. 2008. Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Corva, D. 2008. “Neoliberal globalization and the war on drugs: Transnationalizing illiberal governance in the Americas.” Political Geography 27(2): 176-193.

Crapanzano, Vincent. 1986. "Hermes' dilemma: The masking of subversion in ethnographic description." Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography: 51-76.

-----. 1992. Hermes' dilemma and Hamlet's desire: On the epistemology of interpretation. Harvard University Press.

-----. 2013. Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan. University of Chicago Press.

Crewe, Ben. 2005. “Prisoner Society in the Era of Hard Drugs.” Punishment and Society 7(4): 457-481. 358

-----. 2014. Not looking hard enough: Masculinity, emotion, and prison research. Qualitative Inquiry 20(4): 392-403.

Cunha, Manuela Ivone P. 2004. “From Neighbourhood to Prison: Women and the War on Drugs in Portugal.” In Global Lockdown: Race, Gender and the Prison Industrial Complex. Julia Sudbury, ed. New York: Routledge.

-----. 2008. “Closed Circuits: Kinship, Neighbourhood and Incarceration in Urban Portugal.” Ethnography 9(3): 325-50.

-----. 2014. “The Ethnography of Prisons and Penal Confinement.” Annual Review of Anthropology 43: 217-233

Da Col, Giovanni and Caroline Humphrey. 2012. “Introduction: Subjects of Luck-Contingency, Morality and the Anticipation of Everyday Life.” Social Analysis 56(2): 1-18.

Daly, Kathleen, and Meda Chesney-Lind. 1988. "Feminism and criminology." Justice Quarterly 5(4): 497-538.

DaMatta, Roberto. 1985. A Casa & a Rua: Espaço, Cidadania, Mulher E Morte No Brasil. São Paulo- SP: Brasiliense.

-----. 1987. “The quest for citizenship in a relational universe,” In State and Society in Brazil: Continuity and Change. J.D. Nunes and T.E. Bogenschil, eds. London, UK: Westview. 307-355.

-----. 1991. Carnivals, rogues, and heroes: an interpretation of the Brazilian dilemma. Notre Dame, Ind: University of Notre Dame Press.

Darke, Sacha. 2013a. “Entangled staff-inmate relations.” Prison Service Journal 207: 16–22.

-----. 2013b. "Inmate Governance in Brazilian Prisons." The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 52(3): 272-284.

-----. 2014. “Managing without Guards in a Brazilian Police Lockup.” Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 68: 55-67.

Das, Veena. 1995. Critical Events: an anthropological perspective on contemporary India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

-----. 2012. “Ordinary Ethics.” In A Companion to Moral Anthropology, Didier Fassin ed. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-`well, 2012.

-----. 2015. Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty. New York: Forham University Press. 359

Das, Veena, Jonathan M. Ellen, and Lori Leonard. 2008. “On the modalities of the domestic.” Home Cultures 5.3: 349-371.

Davis, Mike. 2006. Planet of Slums. London: Verso.

De Castro, Eduardo Viveiros, Marcio Goldman and Ashley Lebner. 2008. "Slow Motions. Comments on a Few texts by Marilyn Strathern.” Cambridge Anthropology 28(3): 23-42.

De Giorgi, Alessandro. 2006. Re-thinking the political economy of punishment: perspectives on post- Fordism and penal politics. Aldershot, England: Ashgate.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 2011[1987]. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Brian Massumi, trans.

De Oliveira Almeida, Maria Lúcia. 2006. “Vozes de Dentro… De Mulheres… e De Muralhas: Um estudo sobre jovens presidiárias em Salvador, Bahia.” Diss. Universidade Federal da Bahia,

Deleuze 1995. Negotiations, 1972–1990. New York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.

Dent, Alexander S. 2012. "Piracy, Circulatory Legitimacy, and Neoliberal Subjectivity in Brazil." Cultural Anthropology 27(1): 28-49.

DEPEN/MJ. 2005. “Sistema Penitenciário no Brasil - Diagnóstico e Propostas.” Ministério da Justiça. www.mj.gov.br.

Doyle, Aaron. 2003. Arresting Images: Crime and Policing in Front of the Television Camera. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Doyle, Aaron. 2006. “How Not To Think About Crime in the Media” Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice 48(6): 867-886.

Doyle, Aaron and Richard Ericson. 1996. “Breaking Into Prison: News Sources and Correctional Institutes.” Canadian Journal of Criminology 38(2): 155-90.

Drybread, Kristen. 2006. “Sleeping with one eye open: The perils of fieldwork in a Brazilian Juvenile Prison.” Dispatches from the Field: Neophyte Ethnographers in a Changing World. Andrew Gardner and David M. Hoffman, eds., 33-52.

-----. 2009a “Rights-Bearing Street Kids: Icons of Hope and Despair in Brazil’s Burgeoning Neoliberal State.” Law & Policy 31.3: 330-50. 360

-----. 2009b. Sleeping with One Eye Open. In Violence: Ethnographic Encounters. Parvis Ghassem- Fachandi, ed. Berg Publishers.

----. 2014. “Murder and the Making of Man-Subjects in a Brazilian Juvenile Prison. American Anthropologist 116(4): 752-764.

Dumont, L. 1980. Homo Hierarchicus: The caste system and its implications. University of Chicago Press.

Ericson, Richard V. 1991. "Mass media, crime, law, and justice: An institutional approach." The British Journal of Criminology: 219-249.

Englund, H., Leach, J., Davies, C.A., Gupta, A., Meyer, B., Robbins, J., Sangren, P.S., Englund, H. and Leach, J. 2000. “Ethnography and the meta-narratives of modernity.” Current Anthropology 41(2): 225- 248.

Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1937. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Evens, T.M.S. and don Handleman. 2005. “Preface: Extended Case-Studies – Place, Time, Reflection. Social Analysis 49(3): 185-88.

Farmer, P. 2004. Pathologies of Power: Health, human rights, and the new war on the poor. University of California Press.

Ferguson, James. 1990. The Anti-Politics Machine: 'Development', Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. CUP Archive.

-----. 2006. Global shadows: Africa in the neoliberal world order. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Fleetwood, Jennifer. 2014. “Keeping out of trouble: Female crack cocaine dealers in England.” European Journal of Criminology 11: 91.

Foucault, Michel. 1977[1975]. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Alan Sheridan, trans. New York: Pantheon

-----. 1980. The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction. Robert Hurley, trans. New York: Vintage Books.

-----. 1981. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. New York: Pantheon/Random House.

-----. 1982. “The subject and power.” Critical inquiry 8(4): 777-795.

-----. 1991. The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality : With Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault. G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller, eds. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. 361

-----. 2003[1994]. The Essential Foucault: Selections from the Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, Paul Rabinow, Nikolas S. Rose and Michel Foucault eds. New York: New Press.

Fonseca, Claudia. 1986. “Orphanages, Foundlings, and Foster Mothers: The System of Child Circulation in a Brazilian Squatter Settlement.” Anthropological Quarterly 59(1).

-----. 1991 “Spouses, Siblings and Sex-linked Bonding: A Look at Kinship Organisation in a Brazilian Slum” Family, Household and Gender Relations in Latin America, UNESCO Publication: 133 – 60.

-----.2000 Família, fofoca e honra: etnografia de relações de gênero e violência em grupos populares. Federal do Rio Grande do Sul.

-----. 2002 “The Politics of Adoption: Child Rights in the Brazilian Setting.” Law & Policy 24: 199-227.

-----. 2003. “Patterns of shared parenthood among the Brazilian poor.” Transnational Adoption. Spec. issue of Social Text 21(1): 111-127.

-----. 2006. “Da circulação de crianças à adoção internacional: questões de pertencimento e posse.” Cadernos Pagu 26: 11-43.

-----. 2009. “Family Belonging and Class Hierarchy: Secrecy, Rupture and Inequality as Seen Through the Narratives of Brazilian Adoptees. Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 14(1): 92-114.

-----. 2011. “The De-Kinning of Birthmothers: Reflections on Maternity and Being Human.” Vibrant: Virtual Brazilian Anthropology 8(2): 306-339.

Fonseca, C. L. W., Biondi, F. C., Maricato, G. C., & Schuler-Faccini, L. 2015. “Project REENCONTRO: ethical aspects of genetic identification in families separated by the compulsory isolation of leprosy patients in Brazil.” Journal of Community Genetics, 6(3), 215–222.

Fontein, Joost. 2014. “ ‘She appeard to be in some kind of trance’: Anthropology and the question of unknowability in a criminal trial.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4(1): 75-103.

Fox Piven, Frances, and Richard A. Cloward. 1971. Regulating the Poor: The functions of public welfare. New York: Vintage.

Freedman, Estelle B. 1981. Their Sisters’ Keepers: Women’s Prison Reform in America, 1830-1930. University of Michigan Press.

Feely, Malcolm M. and Jonathan Simon. 2006. “The New Penology: Notes on the Emerging Strategy of Corrections and its Implications.” Criminology 30(4): 449-474. 362

French, Jan Hoffman. 2013. "Rethinking Police Violence in Brazil: Unmasking the Public Secret of Race." Latin American Politics and Society 55(4): 161-181.

Garces, Chris. 2010. “The Cross Politics of Ecuador’s Penal State.” Cultural Anthropology 25(3):459-496.

-----. 2014a. “Denuding Surveillance at the Carceral Boundary.” South Atlantic Quarterly 113(3):447-473.

-----. 2014b. “Ecuador’s ‘Black Site’: On Prison Securitization and its Zones of Legal Silence.” Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 68: 18-34.

Garcia, Maria Lúcia T., and Cristiane B. Fernandez. 2009. “The Care and Shelter of Children and Adolescents in Brazil: Expressions of Social Issues.” Social Work and Society 7(1):

Garland, David. 1985. Punishment and Welfare: A History of Penal Strategy. Vermont: Gower Publishing Co.

-----. 1990. Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

-----. 1995. “Penal Modernism and Postmodernism.” In Punishment and Social Control: essays in honor of Sheldon L. Messinger. Thomas G. Blomberg and Stanley Cohen, eds. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

-----. 2001a. “Introduction: The Meaning of Mass Imprisonment.” Theme issue, “Mass Imprisonment: Social Causes and Consequences,” Punishment & Society 3(1): 5-7.

-----. 2001b The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gartner, Rosemary and Candace Kruttschnitt. 2004. “A Brief History of Doing Time: The California Institution for Women in the 1960s and the 1990s.” Law & Society Review 38(2): 267-304.

Gay, Robert. 2010[2005]. Lucia: Testimonies of a Brazilian Drug Dealer’s Woman. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Genders, Elaine, & Elaine Player. 1990. ‘‘Women Lifers: Assessing the Experience,’’ The Prison Journal 80: 46–57.

Gershon, Ilana. 2011. "“Neoliberal Agency”." Current Anthropology 52(4): 537-555.

Giddens, Anthony. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

Giallombardo, Rose. 1966. Society of Women: A Study of a Women’s Prison. New York: Wiley.

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. 1999. “Globalisation and US prison growth: from military Keynesianism to post- Keynesian militarism.” Race & Class 40(2-3): 171-188. 363

-----. 2007. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Girshick, Lori. 1999. No Safe Haven: Stories of Women in Prison. Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press.

Glaser, B. and A. Strauss. 1967. “Grounded Theory: The discovery of grounded theory.” The Journal of the British Sociological Association 12: 27-49.

Gledhill, John. 2005. “Citizenship and the Social Geography of Deep Neo-liberalization.” Anthropologica 47(1): 81–100.

Gledhill J. and M. Hita. 2009a. “Anthropologies of the Urban Periphery: Salvador, Bahia.” BWPI Working Paper 97. University of Manchester, Brooks World Poverty Institute.

-----. 2009b. “New Actors, New Political Spaces, Same Divided City? Reflections on Poverty and the Politics of Urban Development in Salvador, Bahia.” Brooks World Poverty Institute Working Paper Series 10209. The University of Manchester. http://www.bwpi.manchester.ac.uk/medialibrary/publications/working_papers/bwpi-wp- 10209.pdf

Gluckman, Max. 1958. Analysis of a social situation in modern Zululand. Manchester: Published on behalf of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute by the Manchester University Press.

Goffman, Alice. 2014. On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Goffman, Erving. 1961. Asylums; Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Anchor Books.

-----. 1963. Stigma; notes on the management of spoiled identity. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Goifman, Kiko. 2002. “Killing Time in the Brazilian Slammer.” Ethnography 3(4):435-441.

Goldstein, Donna M. 1998. “Nothing Bad Intended: Child Discipline, Punishment, and Survival in a Shantytown in Rio de Janeiro.” In Small Wars: The Cultural Politics of Childhood. Nancy Scheper- Hughes and Carolyn Sargeant, eds. Berkeley: University of California-Berkeley Press: 389-415.

-----. 2003. Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown. University of California Press, 2003.

Goldstein, Daniel M., and Fatimah Williams Castro. 2006. "Creative violence: how marginal people make news in Bolivia." Journal of Latin American Anthropology 11(2): 380-407.

Gomes, Ana Virgínia Moreira, and Patrícia Tuma Martins Bertolin. 2010. “Regulatory Challenges of Domestic Work: The Case of Brazil.” LLDRL Working Paper Series, WP#3. 364

Goode, Judith and Jeff Maskovsky, eds. 2001. The New Poverty Studies: The Ethnography of Power, Politics, and Impoverished People in the United States. New York: New York University Press.

Goody, Jack. 1982. Cooking, cuisine and class: a study in comparative sociology. Cambridge University Press.

Godoy, Angelina Snodgrass. 2006. Popular injustice: violence, community, and law in Latin America. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.

Gowan, Teresa. 2002. “The Nexus: Homelessness and Incarceration in two American Cities.” Theme issue, The Ethnography of the Prison, Ethnography 3(4): 500-534.

Gregg, Jessica L. 2003. Virtually virgins: sexual strategies and cervical cancer in Recife, Brazil. Stanford University Press.

Greenhouse, Carol J. 2002. “Introduction: Altered States, Altered Lives” in Greenhouse, Carol J., Elizabeth Mertz, and Kay B. Warren. 2002. Ethnography in unstable places: everyday lives in contexts of dramatic political change. Durham: Duke University Press.

Hagan, J. and Dinovitzer, R. 1999. “Collateral consequences of imprisonment for children, communities, and prisoners.” Crime and Justice 26: 121-162.

Han, C. 2013. Suffering and Pictures of Anthropological Inquiry: A response to comments on Life in debt.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3(1): 231-240.

Haney, Lynne A. 2010. Offending Women: Power, Punishment, and the Regulation of Desire. University of California Press.

Han, Clara ed. 2012. Life in Debt: Times of Care and Violence in Neoliberal Chile. Berkeley: University of California Press.

-----. 2013. “Suffering and Pictures of Anthropological Inquiry: A Response to Comments on Life in Debt.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3: 231-240.

Hannah-Moffat, Kelly. 1995. ‘Feminine Fortresses: Woman Centred Prisons’, The Prison Journal special issue on Women and Alternative Sanctions, 75 (2): 135-164.

-----. 1999. “Moral Agent or Actuarial Risk Subject: Risk and Canadian Women's Imprisonment.” Theoretical Criminology 3(1):71-94.

-----. 2000. “Prisons that Empower.” The British Journal of Criminology 40: 510-531.

-----. 2010. “Sacrosanct or flawed: Risk, Accountability and Gender-responsive Penal Politics.” Current Issues in Criminal Justice 22(2): 193-216. 365

Hannah-Moffat, K. and M. Lynch. 2012. “Theorizing Punishment’s Boundaries: An Introduction.” Theoretical Criminology 16(2): 119 –121.

Harcourt, Bernard. 2010. "Neoliberal Penality." Theoretical Criminology 14(1): 74-92.

-----. 2013. “Beccaria's 'On Crimes and Punishments': A Mirror on the History of the Foundations of Modern Criminal Law.” Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper No. 648 (2nd Series). file:///C:/Users/Hollis/Downloads/SSRN-id2296605.pdf.

Harris, O. and Miller, R.R. eds. 2003. Impacts of incarceration on the African American family. Transaction Publishers.

Hautzinger, Sarah. 2007. Violence in the City of Women: Police and Batterers in Bahia, Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hayes, Kelly E. 2011. Holy Harlots: Femininity, Sexuality, and Black Magic in Brazil. University of California Press.

Hecht, Tobias. 1998. At Home in the Street: Street Children of Northeast Brazil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Heffernan, Esther. 1972. Making It in Prison: The Square, Cool and the Life. New York: Wiley.

Heidensohn and Silvestri. 2012. “Gender and Crime.” In The Oxford Handbook of Criminology. Mike Maguire, Rod Morgan, and Robert Reiner eds. New York: Oxford University Press: 381-420.

Heilborn, Maria Luiza and Cristiane S. Cabral. 2011. “A New Look at Teenage Pregnancy in Brazil.” Obstetrics and Gynecology: 1-7. International Scholarly Research Network. Web. 5 Feb. 2013.

Hess, David J. 1995. “Hierarch, heterodoxy, and the construction of Brazilian religious therapies” in Hess, David J., and Roberto da Matta eds. The Brazilian puzzle: culture on the borderlands of the Western World. New York: Columbia University Press.

Hindess, Barry. 2001. "The Liberal Government of Unfreedom." Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 26: 93.

Hirsch, E. 2014. “Melanesian Ethnography and the comparative project of anthropology: reflection on Strathern’s analogical approach.” Theory, Culture & Society 31(2-3): 39-64.

Hita, Maria Gabriela. 2008. “Ownership, Appropriation and the Reproduction Cycle of Afro-descendent Houses in Salvador, Bahia.” Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth Conference, University of Auckland, 2008.

Holbraad, M. and M.A Pedersen. 2009. “Planet M: The intense abstraction of Marilyn Strathern.” Anthropological Theory 9(4): 371-394. 366

Holston, James. 2008. Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Howe, A. 1994. Punish and Critique: Towards a feminist analysis of penality. Psychology Press.

Huggins, Martha. 1985. From slavery to vagrancy in Brazil: Crime and social control in the Third World. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

-----. 2000. “Urban Violence and Police Privatization in Brazil: Blended Invisibility.” Social Justice (Summer): 113-134.

Human Rights Watch. 1998. “Behind bars in Brazil.” Washington: Human Rights Watch.

Hutchinson, Sharon Elaine. 2000. “Identity and Substance: the Broadening Bases of Relatedness among the Nuer of Southern Sudan.” In Carsten, Janet ed. Cultures of relatedness: new approaches to the study of kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ignatieff, M. 1978. A Just Measure of Pain: The penitentiary in the industrial revolution, 1750-1850. Macmillan.

-----. 1981. “State, Civil Society, and Total Institutions: A critique of recent social histories of punishment.” Crime and Justice 3: 153-192.

International Bar Association, Brazil. 2010. “One in Five: The Crisis in Brazil’s prisons and criminal justice system. An International Bar Association Human Rights Institute Report.

Irwin, John and Donald Cressey. 1962. “Thieves, Convicts and the Inmate Culture.” Social Problems 10(2): 142-155.

Jacobs, James. 1977. Stateville: The Penitentiary in Mass Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Jackson, J.A.C., 2011. “Off the Books in Salvador: State regulation, business strategies, and informal employment.” Latin American Perspectives 38(5): 46-61.

Jameson, Fredric. 1974[1971]. Marxism and Form: Twentieth-century dialectical theories of literature. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Jefferson, A.M. 2010. “Traversing sites of confinement: Post-prison survival in Sierra Leone.” Theoretical Criminology 14(4): 387-406.

-----. 2014. “Conceptualizing confinement: Prisons and poverty in Sierra Leone.” Criminology & Criminal Justice 14(1): 44-60.

Jesus, Carolina Maria de. 1962. Child of the dark; the diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus. New York: Signet Books. 367

Kant de Lima, Roberto. 1995. “Bureaucratic rationality in Brazil and in the United States: Criminal justice systems in comparative perspective” in Hess, David J., and Roberto da Matta eds.. 1995. The Brazilian puzzle: culture on the borderlands of the Western World. New York: Columbia University Press.

Kelly, Patty. 2008. Lydia's Open Door: Inside Mexico's most modern brothel. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kottak, Conrad Phillip. 1983. Assault on paradise: social change in a Brazilian village. New York: Random House.

-----. 1990. Prime-time Society: An anthropological analysis of television and culture. Belmont, Calif: Wadsworth Pub. Co.

Králová, Jana. 2015. “What is Social Death.” Journal of the Academy of Social Science 10(3): 235-248.

Kruttschnitt, Candace, Rosemary Gartner and Amy Miller. 2000. “Doing Her Own Time? Women’s Responses to Prison in the Context of the Old and the New Penology.” Criminology 38: 681-718.

Kulick, Don. 1998. Travesti: Sex, gender, and culture among Brazilian transgendered prostitutes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Laing, R. D. 1960. The Divided Self: A Study of Sanity and Madness. Chicago: Quadrangle Books.

Lakoff, Robin Tolmach. 1975. Language and woman's place. New York: Harper & Row.

Lambek, Michael. 2011. “Kinship as Gift and Theft: Acts of Succession in Mayotte and Ancient Israel. In American Ethnologist 38(1): 2-16.

Landes, Ruth. 1994. The City of Women. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Latour, B. 1996. “On Actor-Network Theory: A few clarifications.” Soziale welt: 369-381.

Leeds, Elizabeth. 1996. “Cocaine and Parallel Polities in the Brazilian Urban Periphery: Constraints on Local-level Democratization.” Latin American Research Review 31(3): 47–83.

Leinaweaver J. 2007. The circulation of children: Kinship, adoption, and morality in Andean Peru. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Li, Tania. 1998. “Working seperately but eating together: personhood, property, and power in conjugal relations. American Ethnologist 25(4): 675-694. 368

Lima, A. 2011. Modernity, Agency, and Sexuality in the Pagode Baiano. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Lindert, K., Linder, A., Hobbs, J. and B. De la Brière. 2007. “The Nuts and Bolts of Brazil’s Bolsa Família Program: Implementing conditional cash transfers in a decentralized context” (Vol. 709). Social Protection Discussion Paper.

Linger, Daniel Touro. 1992. Dangerous Encounters: Meanings of violence in a Brazilian city. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.

Lourenço, CLuiz Claudio, and Odilza Lines de Almeida. 2013. “ ‘Quem quer manter a ordem, quem quer criar desordem’ - dinâmicas das gangues prisionais no estado da Bahia.” In 35o Encontro Anual da ANPOCSGT 38 – Violência, Criminalidade e Punição no Brasil.

Lovell, Peggy A. 2006. "Race, gender, and work in São Paulo, Brazil, 1960-2000." Latin American Research Review: 63-87.

Macauley, Fiona. 2007. “Knowledge Production and Criminal Justice Reform in Latin America.” Journal of Latin American Studies 39(3): 627-651.

-----. 2013. “Modes of prison administration, control and governmentality in Latin America: Adoption, adaptation and hybridity.” Conflict, Security & Development 13(4): 361-392.

Maher, Lisa. 2000. Sexed Work: Gender, Race, and Resistance in a Brooklyn drug market. Oxford University Press.

Maia, C.N., Sá Neto, F.D., Costa, M. and M.L Bretas. 2009. História das prisões no Brasil. Volume 1. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco.

Marcellin, Louis Herns. 1999. “A Linguagem da Casa entre os negros no recôncavo baiano.” Mana 5(2): 31-60.

Marchetti, Anne-Marie. “Carceral Impoverishment: Class Inequality in the French Penitentiary.” The Ethnography of the Prison Spec. issue of Ethnography 3.4 (2002): 416-34.

Marteleto, Leticia J. 2012. "Educational inequality by race in Brazil, 1982–2007: Structural changes and shifts in racial classification." Demography 49(1): 337-358.

Martin, T.M., Jefferson, A.M. and M. Bandyopadhyay. 2014. “Sensing Prison Climates: Governance, survival, and transition.” Focaal 2014(68): 3-17.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1967. Capital: A critique of political economy. New York: International Publishers. 369

Matos, Carolina. 2012. Media and Politics in Latin America: Globalization, Democracy and Identity. New York: I.B. Tauris Publishers.

Mauer, Marc and Meda Chesney-Lind, eds. 2002. Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment. New York: New Press.

Mayblin, Maya. 2010. Gender, Catholicism, and morality in Brazil: virtuous husbands, powerful wives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Mayer, Margit. 2010. "Punishing the Poor—a Debate." Theoretical Criminology 14: 93-103.

McCallum, Cecilia. 1999. “Restraining Women: Gender, Sexuality and Modernity in Salvador da Bahia.” Bulletin of Latin American Research 18.3: 275– 93.

-----. 2005. “Racialized bodies, naturalized classes: Moving through the city of Salvador da Bahia.” American Ethnologist 32.1: 100-17.

McCallum, Cecilia and Vania Bustamante. 2011. “Kinship and Houses in a low income neighborhood served by the Family Health Program in Salvador Bahia, Brazil.” Salud Colectiva (December 2011): 365-376.

-----. 2012. “Kinship, gender and individuation in the day-to-day life of the house in a working-class district of Salvador da Bahia.” Ethnográfica 16(2): Varia.

McCallum, Cecilia and Ana Paula dos Reis. 2005. “Childbirth as Ritual in Brazil: Young Mothers’ Experiences. Ethnos Journal of Anthropology 70(3): 335-360.

McConville, Seán. 1995. “The Victorian Prison: England, 1865-1965.” In The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society. Norval Morris and David J. Rothman, eds. New York: Oxford University Press: 117-150.

McCorkel, Jill A. 2003. “Embodied Surveillance and the Gendering of Punishment.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 32(1): 41-76.

Mele, C. and T. Miller eds. 2005. Civil Penalties, Social Consequences. Psychology Press.

Mendes, Henrique. “Coluna Palpite: Solidariedade “macabre” dos programas populares da TV.” A Tarde. 12 de junho de 2012.

Mendonça, Andrey Borges de. 2013 “The Criminal Justice System in Brazil: A Brief Account.” In United Nations Asia and Far East Institute for the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders Newsletter. Resource Material Series No. 92. Web. http://www.unafei.or.jp/english/pages/RMS/No92_07PA_Andrey2.pdf 370

Messerschmidt, James W. 1993. Masculinities and Crime: Critique and Reconceptualization of Theory. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

-----. 1995a. “From Patriarchy to Gender: Feminist Theory, Criminology and the Challenge of Diversity.” in Nicole Hahn Rafter and Frances Heidensohn eds. International Feminist Perspectives in Criminology: Engendering a Discipline. Philadelphia: Open University Press: 167–88.

-----. 1995b. “Managing to Kill: Masculinities and the Space Shuttle Challenger.” Masculinities 3(4): 1-20.

-----. 1999. “Making Bodies Matter: Adolescent Masculinities, the body and varieties of violence.” Theoretical Criminology 3(2): 197-220.

-----. 2010. "Masculinities and Crime." In Francis Cullen and Robert Agnew eds., Criminological Theory: Past to Present, Essential Readings. New York: Oxford University Press.

Millar, Kathleen M. 2014. "The Precarious Present: Wageless Labor and Disrupted Life in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil." Cultural Anthropology 29(1): 32-53.

Miller, Jody. 2002. “The strengths and limits of ‘doing gender’ for understanding street crime.” Theoretical Criminology 6(4): 433-460.

Miller, Daniel. 2010. “Anthropology in Blue Jeans.” American Ethnologist 37(3): 415-428.

Miller K.W., G. Cavender and K. Grey. 2010. “Enron’s Perp Walk: Status Degradation Ceremonies as Narrative.” Crime, Media, Culture 6(3): 251-266.

Mitchell, T. 2006. “Society, economy, and the state effect.” The Anthropology of the State: A Reader, Sharma, A. and Gupta, A. eds. John Wiley & Sons, 169-186.

Moodie, Ellen. 2010. El Salvador in the Aftermath of Peace: Crime, Uncertainty, and the Transition to Democracy. University of Pennsylvania Press. Print.

Moore, Linda and Phil Scraton. 2014. The Incarceration of Women: Punishing Bodies, Breaking Spirits. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Moore, Hollis. 2015a. “Do you have my son?”: Imprisonment and the production of (un)relatedness in Brazil. In Criminalized Mothers, Criminalizing Motherhood. Bryan Hogeveen and Joanne Minaker, eds. Toronto: Demeter Press: 264-291.

-----. 2015b. “Intervening in the Future: An exploration of Brazil’s development-security nexus from the vantage point of a subject of hyperincarceration.” for the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology [unpublished manuscript].

-----. 2016 “Immanent and imminent ethical experiences of prison visitors in Brazil: Prison visitation as 371

ethical and criminal practice.” [unpublished manuscript].

Moreira de Carvalho, Inaiá Maria and Vanda Sá Barreto. 2007. “Segregação residencial, condição social e raça em Salvador.” Cadernos Metrópole 18(2): 251-273.

Mumola, Christopher J. 2000. “Incarcerated Parents and their Children.” Bureau of Justice and Statistics Special Report. National Criminal Justice Reference Service. Web. 5 Mar. 2013.

---.2011. “O Brasil atrás das grades.” Veja 24: 105-9.

Müller, Markus-Michael. 2012 . “The Rise of the Penal State in Latin America.” Contemporary Justice Review 15(1): 57-76.

Munck, Ronaldo. 2013. "The Precariat: A View from the South." Third World Quarterly 34(5): 747-762.

Murray, Joseph, Daniel Ricardo de Castro Cerqueira and Tulio Kahn. 2013 “Crime and Violence in Brazil: Systemic Review of time trends, prevalence rates and ricks factors.” Aggressive Violent Behaviour 18(5): 471-483.

Naffine, Ngaire. 2003. “The ‘man question’ of crime, criminology and criminal law.” Criminal Justice Matters 53(1): 10-11.

Nobre, Eduardo. 2002. “Urban regeneration experiences in Brazil: Historical preservation, tourism development and gentrification in Salvador da Bahia.” Urban Design International 7(2): 109-124.

Nuttal, M. 2000. “Choosing kin: Sharing and subsistence in a Greenlandic hunting community.” in Dividends of Kinship: Meanings and Uses of Social Relatedness. Peter P. Schweitzer ed. London: Routledge.

O’Donnell, Guillermo. 1993. “On the State, Democratization and some Conceptual Problems: A Latin American View with Glances at some Postcommunist Countries.” World Development 21(8): 1355-1369.

Oliveira Almeida, Maria Lúcia de. 2006. “Vozes de Dentro…De Mulheres…E De Muralhas: Um Estudo Sobre Jovens Presidiárias em Salvador, Bahia.” UFBA Programa de Pós-graduação em Ciéncias Sociais.

Oliveira, Bruno Araújo. 2012. “Presos na Fé: Ethos de um trabalho evangélico dentro da Penitenciária Lemos Brito, de Salvador.” Dissertação de Mestrado. Universidade Federal da Bahia.

O’Neil, Kevin. 2011. “Delinquent Realities: Christianity, Formality, and Security in the Americas.” American Quarterly 63(2): 337-365.

Ortner, Sherry. 1984. “Theory in Anthropology since the sixties.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26: 126-66. 372

Owen, Barbara. 1998. In the Mix: Struggle and Survival in a Women’s Prison. Albany: SUNY Press.

-----. 1999. ‘‘Women and Imprisonment in the United States: The Gendered Consequences of the U.S. Imprisonment Binge,’’ in S. Cook & S. Davies, eds., Harsh Punishment: International Experiences of Women’s Imprisonment. Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press.

Paes-Machado, Eduardo and Ceci Noronha. 2002. "Policing the Brazilian Poor: Resistance to and Acceptance of Police Brutality in Urban Popular Classes (Salvador, Brazil)." International Criminal Justice Review 12(1): 53-76.

Paes Manso, B. 2009. “Um debate sobre o PCC: entrevista com Camila Nunes Dias, Gabriel de Santis Feltran, Adalton Marques e Karina Biondi” [A debate about the PCC: interview with Camila Nunes Dias, Gabriel de Santis Feltran, Adalton Marques and Karina Biondi]’. Revista de Antropologia Social dos Alunos do PPGAS-USFCar [Social Anthropology Journal of PPGAS-USFCar Students], 1(2): 154–75.

Page, Joseph A. 1996. The Brazilians. Da Capo Press.

Pattillo, M., Western, B. and D. Weiman, eds. 2004. Imprisoning America: The social effects of mass incarceration. Russell Sage Foundation.

Peck, J. 2003. “Geography and Public Policy: Mapping the penal state.” Progress in Human Geography 27(2): 222-232.

Peletz, Michael. 2000. “Ambivalence in kinship since the 1940s.” In Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies, edited by Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon, 413–44. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Pereira, A.W. and Davis, D.E. 2000. “Introduction: New patterns of militarized violence and coercion in the Americas.” Latin American Perspectives 27(2): 3 - 17

Perlman, P. 2009. “Megacity’s violence and its consequences in Rio de Janeiro.” In K. Koonings and D. Kruijt (Eds.), MegaCities: The Politics of Urban Exclusion and Violence in the Global South, London: Zed Books.

Penglase, Ben. 2005. "The Shutdown of Rio De Janeiro." Anthropology Today 21(5): 3-6.

-----. 2007. “Barbarians on the beach: Media narratives of violence in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.” Crime, Media, Culture 3(3): 305 – 325.

-----. 2008. “The Bastard Child of the Dictatorship: The Comando Vermelho and the Birth of “Narco- Culture” in Rio de Janeiro.” Luso-Brazilian Review 45(1): 118-145. 373

-----. 2009. "States of Insecurity: Everyday Emergencies, Public Secrets, and Drug Trafficker Power in a Brazilian Favela." PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 32 (1): 47-63.

-----. 2014. Living with Insecurity in a Brazilian Favela: Urban Violence and Daily Life. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Pina-Cabral, J. 2013. “The Core of Affects: Namer and Named in Bahia (Brazil).” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19(1): 75-101.

Piven, Frances Fox and Richard A. Cloward. 1971. Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare. New York: Pantheon Books.

Poorman, Elisabeth. 2008. “The Legacy of Brazil’s Leper Colonies.” Cad. Saúde Colet. 16.2: 307-26.

Portes, A. and Hoffman, K. 2003. “Latin American class structures: Their composition and change during the neoliberal era.” Latin American Research Review 38(1): 41-82.

Portes, A. and B.R. Roberts. 2005. “The Free-Market City: Latin American urbanization in the years of the neoliberal experiment.” Studies in Comparative International Development (SCID) 40(1): 43-82.

Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2011. Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

-----. 2011. Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

-----. 2012. “The Will to Be Otherwise/The Effort of Endurance.” Atlantic Quarterly 111(3): 452-475.

-----. 2014. “Geontologies of the Otherwise. Fieldsights – Theorizing the Contemporary.” Cultural Anthropology Online (January). https://culanth.org/fieldsights/465-geontologies-of-the- otherwise

Prentice, Rebecca. 2012. “‘Kidnapping go Build back we Economy’: Discourses of Crime at Work in Neoliberal Trinidad.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18(1): 45-64.

Rafter, Nicole Hahn. 1985. “Gender, Prisons, and Prison History.” Social Science History 9(3): 233-247.

-----. 1990. Partial Justice: Women, Prisons, and Social Control. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.

Rebhun, L.A. The Heart is Unknown Country: Love in the Changing Economy of Northeast Brazil. Stanford University Press, 1999.

Reece, Koreen. 2016. “A Familiar Crisis: Kinship & Intervention in Botswana's Time of AIDS.” Paper delivered at AAA 2016 Annual Meeting for the Kinship and Crisis Panel. 374

Reed, Adam. 1999. “Anticipating Individuals: Modes of Vision and Their Social Consequence in a Papua New Guinean Prison.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5(1):43-56.

-----. 2003. Papua New Guinea's Last Place: Experiences of Constraint in a Post Colonial Prison. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Reed, Adolph Jr. and Merlin Chowkwanyun. 2011. “Race, Class, Crisis. The Discourse of Racial Disparity and Its Analytical Discontents.” Socialist Register 33:149-175.

Rhodes, Lorna. 2001. “Toward and Anthropology of Prisons.” Annual Review of Anthropology 30: 65-83.

-----. 2004. Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison. Berkeley: University of California Press.

-----. 2009. “Ethnography in sites of total confinement.” Anthropology News 50(1): 6-6.

Rierden, Andi. 1997. The Farm: Life Inside a Women’s Prison. Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press.

Rizzini, Irene and Irma Rizzini. 2009 “Children and Youth in Institutional Care in Brazil.” Residential Care of Children: Comparative Perspectives. Ed. Mark E. Courtney and Dorota Iwaniec. Oxford University Press. Oxford Scholarship Online: 1-26. Web. 15 Feb. 2012.

Rose, Nikolas. 1999. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Roth-Gordon, Jennifer. 2009. “The Language that Came Down the Hill: Slang, Crime, and Citizenship in Rio de Janeiro.” American Anthropologist 111(1): 57-68.

Rothman, David. 2005[1971]. “The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic.” In Correctional Contexts: Contemporary and Classical Readings. 3rd edition. Edward J. Latessa and Alexander M. Holsinger, eds. Los Angeles: Roxbury Pub.

-----. 1995. “Perfecting the Prison: United States, 1789-1865.” In The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society. Norval Morris and David J. Rothman, eds. New York: Oxford University Press: 100-116.

Rotker, Susana. 2002. “We Are the Others.” In Rotker and Goldman. 224–39.

Ruediger, Marco Aurélio. 2013. "The Rise and Fall of Brazil’s Public Security Program: PRONASCI." Police Practice and Research 14(4): 280-294.

Pina-Cabral, João de. 2013. “The Core of Affects: Namer and Named in Bahia.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19(1): 75-101.

Sahlins, Marshall. 2013. What Kinship Is - and Is Not. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 375

Salvatore, R.D. and Aguirre, C. eds., 2010. The birth of the Penitentiary in Latin America: Essays on criminology, prison reform, and social control, 1830-1940. University of Texas Press.

Santos, Karine Alves. 2012. “Teenage Pregnancy Contextualized: Understanding Reproductive Intentions in a Brazilian Shantytown. Cad Saude Publica 28(4): 655-64.

Sarti, Cynthia. 1995a. “Morality and transgression among Brazilian poor families : exploring ambiguities.” In Hess, David J., and Roberto da Matta eds. The Brazilian puzzle: culture on the borderlands of the Western World. New York: Columbia University Press.

-----. 1995b. “Família e individualidade: um problema moderno”, em M. do C. B. de Carvalho (org.), A Família Contemporânea em Debate. São Paulo, Educ, 39-49.

-----. 2003. A Família como Espelho: Um Estudo sobre a Moral dos Pobres. São Paulo, Cortez, 2.ª edição.

Schafer, N. E. and A. B. Dellinger. 1999. “Jailed Parents: An Assessment.” Women and Criminal Justice 10(4): 73-118.

Schatzki T. R. 2005. “Peripheral Vision: The sites of organizations.” Organization Studies 26(3): 465-484.

Schuster, Caroline. 2015. Social Collateral: Women and Microfinance in Paraguay’s Smuggling Economy. University of California Press.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1993. Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkley: University of California Press.

-----. 2015. “Death Squads and Vigilante Politics in Democratic Northeast Brazil.” In Violence at the Urban Margins. Javier Auyero, Phillipe Bourgois and Nancy Scheper-Hughes eds. New York: Oxford University Press: 266-304.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy and Daniel Hoffman. 1994. “Kids out of Place.” NACLA Report on Americas. May/June.

-----. 1999. “Brazilian Apartheid: Street Kids and the Struggle for Urban Space.” Small Wars: The Cultural Politics of Childhood. Ed. N. Scheper-Hughes and C. Sargent. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press: 219-237.

Schept, Judah. 2015. Progressive Punishment: Job Loss, Jail Growth, and the Neoliberal Logic of Carceral Expansion. New York: NYU Press.

Scott, James C. 2008 [1985]. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday forms of peasant resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press. 376

Scott, Parry, 1996, “Matrifocal males: gender, perception and experience of the domestic domain in Brazil”, em M. J. Maynes et al. (orgs.), Gender, Kinship, Power: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary History. Londres e Nova Iorque: Routledge: 287-301.

-----. 2005. “A família brasileira diante de transformações no cenário histórico global”, Anthropológicas, 16(1): 217-242.

Selka, Stephen L. 2005. “Ethnoreligious Identity Politics in Bahia, Brazil.” Latin American Perspectives 32: 72-94.

-----. 2007. Religion and the politics of ethnic identity in Bahia, Brazil. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Serpa, Ângelo (org). 2001. Fala Periferia! Uma reflexão sobre a produção do espaço periféricometropolitano. Salvador: EDUFBA.

Shapiro, M. 2013 “Invisibility as Ethics: Affect, Play and Intimacy in Maranhão, Northeast Brazil.” Doctoral Thesis, UCL.

Simon, Jonathan. 2000. “The `Society of Captives' in the Era of Hyper-Incarceration.” Theoretical Criminology 4(3):285-308.

Skidmore, Thomas E. 2009. Brazil: Five Centuries of Change. New York: Oxford University Press.

Soares, B.M. and I. Ilgenfritz. 2002. Prisioneiras: vida e violência atrás das grades. Rio de Janeiro: Garamond.

Souza-Araujo. 1948a. Antileprosy institutions in Brazil present situation of the Federal, State and private organizations. Int. J. Lepr. 16(3):369-80

-----. 1948b. História da Lepra no Brasil Volume II: Período Republicano (1889-1946). Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Nacional.

Spitzer, Steven. 1975. “Toward a Marxian Theory of Deviance.” Social Problems 22(5): 638–51.

Steffensmeier, Darrell J., Jennifer Schwartz and Michael Roche. 2013. “Gender and Twenty-First-Century Corporate Crime: Female Involvement and the Gender Gap in Enron-Era Corporate Frauds.” Sociological Review 78: 448-477.

Straubhaar, J. D. .2004. “Brazilian and Portuguese Television.” In. Sinclar, J. & Turner, G. Eds. Contemporary World Television (90-93). London: BFI Publishing.

Strauss, A. and J. Corbin. 1994. “Grounded Theory methodology.” Handbook of Qualitative Research 17: 273-85. 377

Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with women and problems with society in Melanesia (Vol. 6). University of California Press.

-----. 1989. “Between a Melanesianist and a deconstructive feminist.” Australian Feminist Studies 4(10): 49-69.

-----. 1995. The Relation. Prickly Pear Pamphlets (North America).

-----. 1999. Property, Substance and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things. London: Athlone Press.

-----. 2006. “A community of critics? Thoughts on New Knowledge.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12(1): 191-209.

-----. 2014. “Reading Relations Backwards.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20(1): 3-19.

Street, A. and J. Copeman. 2014. “Social Theory after Strathern: An Introduction.” Theory, Culture & Society 31(2-3): 7-37.

Strong, Thomas. 2016. “The Axiom of Enmity: A Papua New Guinea Example.” Paper delivered at AAA 2016 Annual Meeting for the Kinship and Crisis Panel.

Sudbury, J. 2005. Global Lockdown. Race, Gender and the Prison Industrial Complex. New York et al.: Routledge.

Sykes, Gresham. 1958. The Society of Captives: A Study in a Maximum Security Prison. New York: Rinehart.

Sykes, Gresham and Sheldon Messinger. 1960. “The Inmate Social System.” In Theoretical Studies in Social Organization of the Prison. R. Cloward et al., eds. pp. 5–19. New York: Social Science Research Council.

Taussig, Michael T. 1999. Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford University Press.

Tewksbury, Richard, and Matthew DeMichele. 2005. “Going to Prison: A Prison Visitation Program.” The Prison Journal (September) 85: 292-310

Travis, J. and M. Waul, eds. 2003. Prisoners Once Removed: The impact of incarceration and reentry on children, families, and communities. The Urban Institute.

Trindade, Cláudia Moraes. 2007. "A casa de prisão com trabalho da Bahia, 1833-1865." Dissertation.

-----. 2008. "A reforma prisional na Bahia oitocentista." Revista de história 158: 157-198. 378

-----. 2011. "O nascimento de uma penitenciária: os primeiros presos da Casa de Prisão com Trabalho da Bahia, 1861-1865." Revista Tempo.

Turner, Victor W. 1957. Schism and Continuity in an African Society: A Study of Ndeumbu Village Life. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Vasconcelos, Pedro de Almeida. 2006. “Pobreza urbana e a formação de bairros populares em Salvador na longa duração.” GEOUSP - Espaço e Tempo 20: 19-30.

Veloso, Leticia. 2012. “Child Street Labor in Brazil: Licit and Illicit Economies in the Eyes of Marginalized Youth.” South Atlantic Quarterly 111(4): 663–79.

Wacquant, Loïc. 2000. “The new ‘peculiar institution’: On the prison as surrogate ghetto.” Theoretical Criminology 4(3): 377-389.

-----. 2001. “Deadly Symbiosis: Rethinking Race and Imprisonment in Twenty-first-century America.” Boston Review April/May.

-----. 2002. “The Curious Eclipse of Prison Ethnography in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” Ethnography 3(4):371-397.

-----. 2003. “Towards a Dictatorship over the Poor? Notes on the Penalization of Poverty in Brazil.” Punishment and Society 5(2):197-205.

-----. 2007. “Territorial Stigmatization in the Age of Advanced Marginality.” Thesis Eleven 91(November): 66-77.

-----. 2008a. Urban Outcasts: A comparative sociology of advanced marginality. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press

-----. 2008b. “The Militarization of Urban Marginality: Lessons from the Brazilian Metropolis.” International Political Sociology 2: 56-74.

-----. 2009. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

-----. 2010a. "Class, Race & Hyperincarceration in Revanchist America." Daedalus 139: 74+.

-----. 2010b. “Crafting the Neoliberal State: Workfare, Prisonfare, and Social Insecurity.” Sociological Forum 25(2): 197-220.

-----. 2011/12. “The Wedding of Workfare and Prisonfare Revisited.” Social Justice 38(1-2): 203-221.

Waldram, James. 1998. “Anthropology in Prison: Negotiating Consent and Accountability with a “Captured” Population.” Human Organization 57(2): 238-244. 379

-----. 2009. Challenges of Prison Ethnography. Anthropology News 50(1): 4-5.

-----. 2012. Hound Pound Narrative: Sexual Offender Habilitation and the Anthropology of Therapeutic Intervention. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Walmsley, Roy. 2003. “Global Incarceration and Prison Trends.” Forum on Crime and Society 3(1&2): 65-78.

-----. 2006. World Female Imprisonment List. London: King’s College International Center for Prison Studies.

-----. 2010. World Prison Population List. London: King’s College International Center for Prison Studies.

-----. 2012. “World Female Imprisonment List (second edition).” London: King’s College International Centre for Prison Studies. Web. 29 Nov. 2012.

Ward, David A., & Gene Kassebaum (1963) ‘‘Patterns of Homosexual Behavior Among Female Prison Inmates,’’ Los Angeles, CA: School of Public Health, Univ. of California.

-----. 1965. Women’s Prison: Sex and Social Structure. New York: Aldine.

Warren, Kay. 2002. “Toward and Anthropology of Fragments.” In Ethnography in Unstable Places, edited by Carol Greenhouse, Elizabeth Mertz, and Kay Warren. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Wesely, Jennifer K. 2006. “Considering the Context of Women’s Violence: Gender, Lived Experiences, and Cumulative Victimization.” Feminist Criminology 1(4): 303-328.

Whitehead, A. 1984. “Women's solidarity – and divisions among women.” IDS Bulletin 15: 6–11.

Williams, R. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford University Press.

-----. 1983[1976] Keywords (revised ed.). London: Fontana.

Woortman, Klaus. 1987. A Família das Mulheres. Tempo Brasileiro: Rio de Janeiro.

World Bank, 2000. World Development Report 2000-2001: Attacking Poverty. World Bank Group.

World Factbook. 2017. Central Intelligence Agency. Web. 20 July 2017.

Zaluar, Alba. 1994 [1985]. A Máquina e a Revolta: As Organizações Populares e o Sinificado da Pobreza. 2nd edition. Editora Brasiliense, Sao Paulo.

Zedner, Lucia. 1995. “Wayward Sisters: The Prison for Women.” In The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society. Norval Morris and David J. Rothman, eds. New York: Oxford University Press 380

Zorzo, Francisco Antônio. 2005. “A Modernização dos Transportes, Fluxos Mercantis e Crescimento de Feira de Santana.” ANPUH – XXII Simpósio Nacional de História – Londrina.