Mass incarceration in times of economic growth and inclusion? Three steps to understand contemporary imprisonment in Brazil
| Published date | 01 November 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13624806231169727 |
| Author | Luiz Dal Santo |
| Date | 01 November 2023 |
Mass incarceration in times of
economic growth and
inclusion? Three steps to
understand contemporary
imprisonment in Brazil
Luiz Dal Santo
University of Oxford, UK
Abstract
Mass incarceration is a phenomenon that emerged in the USA in the 1970s. Since then,
this pattern of imprisonment has taken shapein all other continents. Nowadays, many
‘core countries’have been able to neutralize it and, in some cases, even reverse it.
This, however, is not the case in Latin America. In this region, the increase of imprison-
ment rates has remained intense even in times of economic growth, in contrast to the
main theories on punishment developed in the Global North. Drawing on primary and
secondary data, I analyse the Brazilian case and indicate three necessary steps to under-
stand contemporary imprisonment in the country. This article is structured in three
main sections. I argue first that Brazilian criminologists have asked the wrong question:
rather than asking why we have high imprisonment rates now, we should first under-
stand why we had imprisonment rates comparable to Nordic countries up to the
1980s. I then argue we should stop uncritically reproducing northern theories and
understand the local conditions of possibility for mass incarceration in times of social
inclusion. I finally claim we should change the focus on the players: rather than pointing
out to the Executive and Legislative dimensions, we ought to better understand internal
struggles in the criminal justice system, considering in particular the pivotal role of judges
in the Brazilian mass incarceration.
Corresponding author:
Luiz Dal Santo, Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford, St Cross Road, Oxford, OX1 3UL, UK.
Email: Luiz.dalsanto@crim.ox.ac.uk
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2023, Vol. 27(4) 597–618
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/13624806231169727
journals.sagepub.com/home/tcr
Keywords
Colonialism, detention, judges, mass incarceration, penal policy, political economy, punishment
and society, punitiveness, southern criminology, state-building
Introduction
For decades now, scholars in the ‘punishment and society’field have researched mass
incarceration from many different perspectives. This includes, for example, accounts
based on the ascendancy of late-modernity, neoliberalism, post-Fordism, actuarial
justice and variations of political economy. If there is any common element among
them, it is their western-centric approach. Dominant criminological knowledge has essen-
tially been centred on the experiences of core countries (Agozino, 2003; Carrington et al.,
2016; Cunneen, 2011), even when comparative studies are considered (Brangan, 2020;
Dal Santo, 2021). Realities in global peripheries have been overlooked, and their role
is at best limited to be sources of data or examples of the diffusion of North American
crime control strategies, such as sentencing guidelines and zero-tolerance policing (e.g.
Pavarini, 2002; Wacquant, 2014).
Peripheral realities are not only overlooked by northern criminologists, though.
Theory importation is a common trend in knowledge production (Castro, 1987; Olmo,
1981; Varsavsky, 1969; see also Sozzo, 2001). Criminologists from the Global South
often apply a northern lens to analyse their own region. This is illustrated by the fact
that the neoliberal penalty thesis and the penal populism argument are the dominant per-
spectives applied to make sense of mass incarceration in Brazil.
1
However, their applica-
tion to the Brazilian reality is problematic and very limited (Dal Santo, 2020a, 2020b;
Sozzo, 2016a). This scenario suggests that even scholars from the Global South may
look at their countries and ‘read it from the centre’(Connell, 2007: 44–46).
In this article, I show why scholars have failed to understand the rise of mass incarcer-
ation in Brazil and its reproduction in times of economic growth and inclusion. In so
doing, I indicate three pivotal steps to understand contemporary punishment in Brazil.
I highlight elements, conditions, trends, and actions that tend to be ignored in northern
literature and overlooked by Global South scholars too. In the first section, I argue we
have posed the wrong question: before asking why we currently have one of the
highest rates of imprisonment worldwide, we should ask why we did have low imprison-
ment rates until 1990. In the second step, I claim we have misread recent elements of pol-
itical economy, focusing too much on economic indicators while not paying enough
attention to state-building processes. In the third, I argue that when agency is considered,
scholars tend to overestimate the role played by politicians and underestimate the efforts
of judges to reproduce mass incarceration.
Changing the question: Why Nordic imprisonment rates in a
peripheral setting?
My first claim is that criminologists trying to understand mass incarceration in Brazil
have been asking the wrong question. The first step to comprehend why Brazilian
598 Theoretical Criminology 27(4)
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