Book Review: Sacha Darke, Conviviality and Survival: Co-Producing Brazilian Prison Order
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474520972468 |
| Author | Fabienne Emmerich |
| Date | 01 January 2022 |
| Published date | 01 January 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
and prosecutors in “off the record”moments, as well as to participate in revealing
exchanges while sharing the restroom with victim families.
Undergirding the book is the unwritten (and unproblematized) assumption that “death
is different”from life without parole. This is certainly true procedure-wise—capital trials
are bifurcated, receive automatic appeals, and feature sentencing by jury through “guided
discretion.”But in terms of the outcome, the stakes of the performance vary between
states in which executions are more common and states in which death sentences are
merely expensive versions of life without parole. Kaufman explicitly strives to portray
the commonalities in her geographically diverse ethnographic sites; devoting more
room and thought to the differences could enrich her narrative. But this is a minor
quibble against this important book, whose insights fill a gap in our understanding of
the death penalty and will be of immense value not only to scholars and practitioners
in the field, but to all potential “punitive citizens.”
ORCID iD
Hadar Aviram https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5674-7555
Hadar Aviram
University of California, Hastings College of the Law, Thomas E. Miller‘73 Professor of Law, USA
Sacha Darke, Conviviality and Survival: Co-Producing Brazilian Prison Order,
Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018;
ISBN 978-3-319-92209-6, ISBN 978-3-319-92210-2 (eBook)
Sacha Darke’s book is the culmination of ten years of fieldwork in Brazil. It maps out the
Brazilian prison system that is centred on co-governance and conviviality within its
unique historical, political, social, economic and cultural context. The particular focus
of this book is how order is co-produced by prisoners who have to collaborate, organize
and self-govern to fill a vacuum created by the systemic overcrowding, understaffing and
underfunding of the Brazilian prison system. In this wide-ranging book, Darke weaves
together a multilayered and detailed picture of the Brazilian prison system drawing on
rich data from prison ethnographies, prisoner biographies and his own fieldwork.
The book is divided into seven chapters. Darke begins his book with an introduction to
Brazilian prisons in which order is co-produced through self-governing communities. He
explains how decades of systemic underfunding and understaffing have led to a shared
understanding that prison staff need prisoner co-governance to run the institutions
(Chapter 1). In Chapter 2, he then takes a step back to provide the context for mass incar-
ceration and punitiveness in Brazil. Darke builds on postcolonial voices that critique the
homogenization of the ‘Global South’and argue that concepts and theories from the
‘Global North’are not easily transferable (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2012; Said, 1978).
In the post-colonial era, prisons and law in Brazil are understood as repressive institu-
tions. Brazil’s history of slavery, a largely agricultural economy until late
138 Punishment & Society 24(1)
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