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Modes of prison administration, control and governmentality in

Latin America: Adoption, adaptation and hybridity
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DOI: 10.1080/14678802.2013.834114
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Modes of prison administration, control

and governmentality in Latin America:
adoption, adaptation and hybridity
a
Fiona Macaulay
a
Senior Lecturer in Development Studies in the Division of Peace
Studies, University of Bradford , Her research focuses on criminal
justice sector reform, human rights and gender politics in Latin
America, especially Brazil. She is co-editor of the Journal of Latin
American Studies
Published online: 24 Sep 2013.
To cite this article: Fiona Macaulay (2013) Modes of prison administration, control and
governmentality in Latin America: adoption, adaptation and hybridity, Conflict, Security &
Development, 13:4, 361-392, DOI: 10.1080/14678802.2013.834114
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Conflict, Security & Development, 2013
Vol. 13, No. 4, 361–392, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14678802.2013.834114
Analysis
Modes of prison
administration, control and
governmentality in Latin
America: adoption,
adaptation and hybridity
Fiona Macaulay
This article analyses processes of security); and governmentality (the ethos
international policy transfer and diffusion underpinning state and societal treatment of
in an understudied aspect of security sector offenders as subjects and objects of penal
reform: prisons. It looks at how Latin discipline). It also examines how Brazil has
American countries, especially Brazil, have produced its own home-grown models of
responded to a growing security crisis of penal governance—prisons run by civil
capacity, effectiveness and violence within society in partnership with the state—which
their prison systems by adopting, adapting challenge some of the current dominant
and even resisting reform models available tropes in prison reform. The globalisation
globally in three reform areas: prison of neoliberal modes of governance may
administration (state-run versus forms often aim at institutional monocropping,
of privatisation and public-private and isomorphism certainly occurs, yet
partnerships); control (the technologies of examination of actual practices confirms
super-max versus the intelligence- and that Brazil, and the region, have adopted a
relationship-centred approach of dynamic hybridised diversity of penal reforms.
Dr Fiona Macaulay is Senior Lecturer in Development Studies in the Division of Peace Studies, University of
Bradford. Her research focuses on criminal justice sector reform, human rights and gender politics in Latin
America, especially Brazil. She is co-editor of the Journal of Latin American Studies.
q 2013 King’s College London

362 Fiona Macaulay
Introduction
For many observers, Latin America’s prisons have become synonymous with chaos,
egregious human rights abuses, and incubation of violence and (potentially) transnational
criminal networks. Many are costly and ineffective in reducing fear and insecurity, failing
to rehabilitate prisoners or even contain them and prevent further crime and violence
within, and without, the prison walls. Although this remains a relatively neglected aspect of
security sector reform, over the last two decades Latin American states have been forced, by
circumstance or external pressure, to reconsider their prison policies. Just as the region’s
prison systems emulated European and North American models at their birth in the
nineteenth century, so policy-makers are looking to, or being offered, current paradigms in
penal theory and practice. This article examines the reform models available internationally
in the areas of prison administration (state-run versus forms of privatisation and public-
private partnerships), control (the technologies of super-max versus the intelligence- and
relationship-centred approach of dynamic security) and governmentality (the ethos
underpinning state and societal treatment of offenders as subjects and objects of penal
discipline). It looks at how such models have been transferred to Latin America, especially
Brazil, and been adopted but also adapted and resisted by local actors, with the region
producing its own hybrid and even entirely indigenous forms.
The literature on the globalisation of neoliberal modes of governance suggests a
uniformity in the menu of options from that local policy-makers can choose that might
result in an ‘institutional monocropping’ that overrides local circumstances and debates,
and is developmentally harmful.1 Indeed, some organisational studies suggest that, in any
case, ‘institutional isomorphism’, that is, homogeneity, is more likely than heterogeneity,
through either exogenous processes (‘coercive’ isomorphism created by dependency on
external bodies, and the rules and conditions they impose) or endogenous processes
(‘mimetic’ isomorphism, when organisations respond to ‘a problem with ambiguous
causes or unclear solutions’ by looking for an off-the-shelf, apparently viable solution).2
However, analysis of actual reforms suggests that the ‘incoherence’ and ‘volatile and
contradictory character’ of neoliberal penal policy and crime control since the 1980s has
found its expression in Latin America in a diversity of reforms.3
It is, as Newburn notes,4 one thing to observe the emergence of a dominant mode of
penal governance/governmentality (in this case the USA’s experience with hyper-
carceration, prison privatisation and supermax prisons) and quite another to understand
Modes of prison reform in Latin America 363
how these are taken up in local contexts, creating ‘convergences and divergences in penal
practices under advanced liberalism’.5 Indeed, historically complex processes of
appropriation, reinvention and even resistance towards globalised ‘cultures of
confinement’ have always characterised penal developments in the global South since
the rise and colonial export of the penitentiary ideal of the nineteenth century.6 Different
literatures—on policy transfer, on international and comparative criminology, on the
imposition of the ‘liberal peace’ in peace-building—now concur that ideas and practices of
governance from the global North inevitably encounter ‘friction’ in the form of local
institutions and actors,7 producing ‘hybrid’ formations, adopted and adapted to local
conditions and priorities.8
Latin America’s prison crisis

Crime, (in)security and incarceration
A burgeoning academic and policy literature now addresses the factors behind the sharp
rise in criminality, social violence and insecurity in recent years in Latin America.
Explanations vary from the historical and anthropological (legacies of recent civil wars and
military rule, historical patterns of social exclusion and state violence), to the
criminological/economic (the rise of trafficking in, and consumption of, illegal goods),
to the institutional (incomplete territorial control by the state, incompetent or corrupt
rule of law institutions).9 Prison populations have also expanded in tandem, inviting
another set of explanations. The data in Table 1 show the continuous increase in both
absolute prison populations and in the incarceration rate (the number of prisoners per
100,000 population) over the last two decades, although there is important diversity of
experience across the region.10 In some cases, this rise has been relatively modest, in others,
alarming but steady. Until five years ago, Brazil had the highest rate of increase, with
prisoner numbers almost quadrupling between 1992 and 2007.
Explaining changes in incarceration rates, at a country, provincial, even city level,
requires analysis of multiple criminogenic, socio-legal and political variables (such as
objective crime levels),11 judicial practices and procedures (such as use of custodial or
‘alternative’ sentences and of pre-trial or preventive detention), and the ideological
inclinations of governments and regimes. These are all interlinked and related to some
degree to forms of international policy prescriptions and discourses around rule of law,
including police and judiciary reforms, such as the switch to Anglo-Saxon style oral
Table 1. Changing prison populations and incarceration rates in Latin America 1992 –2012
364
No. of prisoners Imprisonment rate
Current
Rate of occupancy Per cent pre-trial 1992 2010 – 12 Rate of
Country 1992 (a) 2010 –2012 (b) increase b/a rate * prisoners (a) (b) increase b/a
Fiona Macaulay
Argentina 21,016 59,227 (end 2010) 2.82 101.0% 52.6% 63 145 2.30
Bolivia 5,412 (1996) 11,516 (end 2011) 2.13 185.1% 83.6% 71 112 1.57
Brazil 114,377 549,577 (June 2012) 4.80 178.0% 34.7% 74 288 3.89
Chile 20,989 46,982 (end 2012) 2.24 138.5% 23.1% 155 269 1.73
Colombia 33,491 113,884 (end 2012) 3.40 150.4% 30.4% 100 238 2.38
Costa Rica 3,346 14,963 (July 2012) 4.47 117.0% 22.4% 105 314 2.99
Ecuador 7,998 11,800 (July 2010) 1.47 139.2% 46.0% 74 86 1.16
El Salvador 5,348 26,639 (Aug. 2012) 4.98 253.5% 26.7% 99 425 4.29
Guatemala 5,476 12,835 (2011) 2.34 184.0% 54.4% 56 87 1.55
Honduras 5,717 12,336 (2011) 2.16 143.0% 50.1% 110 159 1.44
Mexico 85,712 239,941 (Sept 2012) 2.80 126.3% 40.3% 98 207 2.11
Nicaragua 3,375 7,200 (2011) 2.13 128.0% 21.2% 85 122 1.43
Panama 4,428 14,238 (Sept 2012) 3.21 164.6% 65.3% 178 392 2.20
Paraguay 2,972 (1995) 6,300 (2011) 2.12 118.9% 71.2% 60 97 1.62
Peru 15,718 59,451 (Sept 2012) 3.78 207.4% 58.8% 71 197 2.77
Uruguay 3.037 9,450 (April 2012) 3.11 119.9% 64.6% 97 279 2.88
Venezuela 23,200 (1993) 50,000 (July 2011) 2.15 270.1% 66.0% 111 169 1.52
Source: ICPS World Prison Briefing.12

Argentina: 1992 figures included prisoners in police custody, 2010 data do not; Brazil data calculated from figures from the National
Penitentiary Department; El Salvador: prison capacity data from 2009 and prisoner numbers from 2012, so occupancy rate may not be accurate.
*Occupancy rates ¼ number of detainees relative to the official capacity of the prison system. Over 100 per cent indicates overcrowding.
proceedings that can end up increasing the number of arrest warrants, detentions and
convictions resulting in a prison term, even as they improve due process guarantees. The
different actors in the system—media, politicians, police, prosecutors and judges—are also
all capable of influencing the penalising behaviour of the others (the first two by fuelling
‘moral panics’ and supporting knee-jerk ‘tough’ legislation) or acting as spoilers to block
reforms they do not support.
Although there is wide variation in the use of incarceration as a penalty for different
types of offences, many Latin American countries have seen justice sector and political
actors increasingly criminalise and securitise a number of social phenomena, including
relatively minor social offences, as the conscious export and adoption of the US anti-crime
policy known as zero tolerance merged with much older practices of repressing ‘vagrancy’
and controlling suspect and marginal populations.13 Incarceration then becomes a means
of containing various forms of social disorder, and responding to citizen anxieties about
‘security’.14 It has also been the chief response to illegal narcotic production, use and
trafficking.15 Bolivia’s Law 1008, passed in 1988 under US pressure as part of its war on
drugs in the Andean region, criminalised those involved in coca production in rural areas.
US funding directly expanded the court and prison system, although they are both
struggling under the burden, as Bolivia has four fifths of its inmates in pre-trial detention
(Table 1), creating both an ethical/legal and control problem.16 Drug offences continue to
account for around one third of Bolivia’s prison inmates. The transnationalised narcotics
trade and its attendant violence account for El Salvador’s and Venezuela’s prison
populations doubling in just four years (2008 – 2012), and have caused spillovers into the
two ‘Switzerlands’ of Central and South America, traditionally associated with social and
political stability and relatively low crime. The imprisonment rate jumped from 204
(2009) to 314 (2012) in Costa Rica and from 193 (2006) to 279 (2012) in Uruguay.17
The drugs trade is also linked to other vectors of violence such as gangs/crime networks
capable of threatening state security (Mexico, Central America, Brazil) and armed
insurgency (Peru and Colombia).18 The governments of Honduras, Guatemala and El
Salvador responded to the problems of youth gangs (some home-grown, some ‘exported’
back from the isthmus by the US government)19 with strong arm policies known as ‘mano
dura’ (lit. hard hand) that included the creation of new offences in the penal code,
increased prison terms and the application of maximum penalties. In 2003 El Salvador
legislated to imprison individuals bearing visible signs of gang affiliation and extend
prison terms for members and leaders. Honduras also raised its maximum penalties for
366 Fiona Macaulay
gang membership to 30 years imprisonment.20 By the mid-2000s gang members made up

21.6 per cent of prisoners in Honduras and 32 per cent in El Salvador.21
In Colombia, as in Bolivia, the USA’s security agenda to wage war on narco-terror in its
Plan Colombia included expansion and reorganisation of the prison system. In 2000 the
two governments signed an agreement to create ‘a new prison culture’, by building several
high-security prisons, funded by USAID and their design, building, functioning,
regulation and guard training overseen directly by personnel from the US federal Bureau
of Prisons.22 These two countries offer the clearest cases of coercive isomorphism, now
expanding into the USA’s nearer sphere of influence in Mexico and Central America
through Plan Mérida and the Central American Regional Security Initiative. This has
resulted in what Iturralde terms ‘authoritarian liberalism’ and ‘penal exceptionalism’.23
These two terms encapsulate the fusions and contradictions of neoliberal penal influence
on deeply divided, conservative societies, and the willingness, for security-related reasons
of force majeure, to create categories of legal abandonment.
Security impacts of failing prison systems
However, although both international and regional actors have turned to incarceration as a
security technology, in contemporary Latin America prisons are neither ‘total’ nor secure
institutions, as the constant traffic of inmates, staff and visitors through the prison gates
creates a complex interplay between the jail and the wider community. Arguably the failure to
meet even the first of the three primary purposes of a prison system (containment,
punishment and rehabilitation) has directly and indirectly increased insecurity for local
populations. The levels of overcrowding—Venezuela’s and El Salvador’s rates of over-
occupancy are now the fourth and seventh highest in the world—forced the authorities to use
police lock-ups for holding offenders, often for prolonged periods, in both the pre-trial and
post-sentencing phases. This diverted police resources from their core institutional task of
tackling crime and tempted them to use detainees as a source of rent. Resultant systemic
human rights violations included lack of medical care, unchecked contagious disease (HIV,
tuberculosis, scabies) and insufficient space for inmates to lie down and sleep, or get fresh air
and exercise. Prisoner-on-prisoner violence, for perceived violation of interpersonal codes,
debts or gang rivalries, resulted in many deaths and injuries. Understaffing meant the state
effectively lost control of many prison facilities, with prisoners, both in and outside gangs,
left in charge.
In the second half of the 1990s, prison riots, escapes and hostage-taking episodes were a
weekly occurrence in Brazil’s jails,24 putting prisoners as well as staff and the local
community at high risk. Where the authorities re-exerted control, they often deployed
excessive use of force, imposed collective punishment and tortured and beat inmates.
Sometimes authorities stood back and colluded in the consequences of disorder, such as
fires with mass fatalities. All this, added to lack of access to legal assistance and minimal
rehabilitative services, helped fuel the sense of grievance among prisoners that fed gang
membership and collective resentment against the penal state.
The prison system has been at best a poor container, at worst an active incubator, of
more serious crime and violent disorder, providing gangs and crime networks with an
institutional resource and space that has allowed them to emerge as cohesive entities,
consolidate their control of prison units, propagate their presence throughout the prison
system and project power beyond the prison walls.25 The mass imprisonment of the
Central American maras, used to repress an externally generated source of insecurity, was
largely unsuccessful as the imported inter-gang rivalry turned the prisons into a conflict
zone in 2002 – 2005, killing hundreds in riots, assaults and fires. However, it is unclear to
what extent the maras inside prisons have been able to orchestrate criminal activity outside
the prisons,26 or achieve some kind of ‘reverse infiltration’ into the USA by collaborating
with transregional and US-based criminal networks.27
By contrast, in Brazil, the major criminal syndicates are actually ‘native’ to the prison
system, having hatched and consolidated there before developing illegal businesses beyond.
The Comando Vermelho, the first of several such groups in Rio de Janeiro, was formed by
criminals imprisoned alongside political detainees in the 1970s, from whom they learnt the
principles of clandestine network organisation. São Paulo state’s major criminal network,
Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), was founded in the early 1990s as an inmates’ union to
demand better conditions of detention after the extra-judicial execution of 111 prisoners by
military police following a riot in the notorious Carandiru prison in 1992 and in response to
the informal super maximum security conditions and brutality in Taubaté prison, São
Paulo.28 Now, although many prisoners still regard it as a form of inmates union that
monopolises power and sets the social rules in those prisons where it operates,29 the PCC is
also heavily involved in drugs and arms trafficking, kidnap and robbery, with connections to
crime syndicates across Brazil and, allegedly, Latin America. It orchestrated the largest
prison riots in Brazilian history in February 2001, seizing control of nearly 30 prisons in the
state and taking hostage 25,000 inmates and thousands of family members on visitors’ day.
368 Fiona Macaulay
The state’s subsequent policies of containment within supermax regimes in state or federal
prisons (see below) failed to reduce the group’s power—indeed, may well have bolstered it—
and in May 2006, the PCC repeated the same spectacle across 82 prisons across São Paulo and
neighbouring states, and extended the violence into the city, killing dozens of police and prison
guards, and attacking criminal justice and economic targets. The Comando Vermelho carried
out similar attacks in Rio de Janeiro in 2002 and 2006, aimed at intimidating the incoming state
government. In 2011 and 2012 the number of killings of police officers rose sharply, suggesting
that the PCC was executing them in a tit-for-tat pattern. These events dramatically reshaped
public and political perceptions of the security risks posed by the prison system.
National governments and the transnational security community have begun to

securitise the region’s prisons, that is, frame them as a security threat,30 on two
dimensions. Firstly, their failure to deter crime threatens economic growth because this
discourages inward investment and creates considerable negative externalities. Secondly,
their inability to repress prison-based gangs has led to the more apocalyptic analyses of the
US Army War College, which frames the activity of a very widely defined range of
‘transnational criminal organisations’ as a threat to ‘national, regional and global security,
national state sovereignty’, a path to failing and failed states and a ‘clash of civilisations’,
lack of evidence notwithstanding.31 Both the realities and perceptions of prisons as a
security threat as well as a solution have pushed governments in the region to try and find
plausible, quick solutions in a process that combines both mimetic isomorphism and
hybridisation/adaptation. As Russell notes in relation to police reform, ‘[r]eform
proponents advance a preferred model as if it were wholly independent from other reform
options [ . . . ] and tend to attempt to attach their solution to the problem of the day’.32
Security sector reform, neoliberal penality and policy

diffusion
So, where might reform models come from? The prison system has been the Cinderella of
security sector reform, with scant academic literature on prison reform in post-conflict
and transitional settings of insecurity, whilst the policy literature, with few recent
exceptions,33 tends to bundle this into the wider issues of security sector reform. Although
many bilateral and multilateral development and financial institutions poured ample
resources into rule of law and governance reform in post-conflict and post-authoritarian
situations, they tended to focus first on judicial reform, as an institutional element of the
package of neoliberal reforms aimed at rebooting and opening economies and, then,
secondarily on military and police reform.34 Attention to non-economic judicial functions
such as criminal justice management came much later and tended to focus on reform of
legal codes and procedures and the institutional oversight mechanisms, not the sentencing
and management of criminal offenders, although the former clearly affected the latter, as
noted above. The latter was regarded as too politically sensitive, an unwarranted
interference in domestic governance and an infringement of judicial autonomy.
Despite the development of initiatives aimed at diversion and decarceration, such as
fast-track local courts, community dispute resolution and alternative sentencing
approaches (fines, community service), they have been largely unable to counterbalance
the centre of gravity of penal systems in Latin America, the prison system, which remains
something of a policy void. Nor does there yet exist in relation to prison issues a global,
multilateral policy community35 or a knowledge base akin to those produced around
policing. The make-up of the stakeholders is also rather different. DiMaggio and Powell’s
third form, normative isomorphism through professionalisation, is much more likely in
the field of police reform, which sometimes comes from within the corporation itself, than
in prisons where training and career hierarchies, as well as corporate sensibility, are far less
developed among prison guards or administrators, who are still often political appointees
with a military, police or judiciary background.
Given the lack of interest of international organisations, ‘competing donor approaches’
promoting specific prison management or reform technologies are less discernible than for
post-conflict/transitional police reform.36 There are competing prison policies
internationally, but these have diffused in Latin America through other factors, mainly
ideational (shifts in predominant consensuses in relation to penal policy) and commercial
(the search by both local and international corporations involved in private security and
running prisons for new markets and clients). Bilateral contacts with both governmental
and non-governmental agencies in countries (mainly the USA) that have offered technical
assistance for other aspects of rule of law reform have enabled this diffusion. As already
noted, the USA’s influence where it wields coercive power through security/development
aid is predominant.
One of the key analysts of the global spread of the ‘punitive common sense’ forged in the
United States is sociologist Loı̈c Wacquant.37 In order to understand the adoption of US
penal formulas in his native France, he sought first to explain the USA’s globally
anomalous incarceration rate (716 per 100,000 in 2012): as the neoliberal consensus
370 Fiona Macaulay
hardened in the 1980s, cuts in the social welfare budget were accompanied by ever harsher
discourses on crime and a criminalisation of more minor offences (zero tolerance, ‘three
strikes and you’re out’). This neoliberal penal state has since used punitive containment as
a means of disciplining the marginal sections of the post-industrial working class,
especially ethnically discriminated groups, and shoring up the authority and legitimacy of
the state and political elites. In Latin America neoliberal policing practices of zero
tolerance towards activities that in themselves are low ‘risk’ in security terms, but which
designate individuals as a ‘risk’ to society (for example drug users), have reinforced
existing social divisions.38
Wacquant’s attention was also caught in the late 1990s by Brazil’s exploding prison
system. With over half a million inmates, by mid-2012 it held approximately 44 per cent of
Latin America’s prison population and in absolute numbers ranked behind only the USA,
China and the Russian Federation.39 Both he and Müller have extended the analysis to the
region, the latter suggesting that in Latin America ‘the prison has become the central state
institution in charge of warehousing urban marginality’.40 Wacquant also sees the logic
underpinning policing and sentencing expressed in the forms of prison administration,
control and governmentality that the state deploys (supermax, privatisation, obligatory
prison work that mirrors workfare policies for the poor outside prison).
However, the process of transfer across different policy domains dominated by
corporate actors with their own distinctive professional ethos, interests and technologies,
from welfare entitlements, to policing practices of detention, to legislative changes
introduced by politicians, to sentencing practices by judges, to prison management
decisions, means that the diffusion is uneven, diversified and complex. This ‘stratified
process of differential and diffracted Americanization’ encounters different levels of
resistance depending on the receiving country’s vulnerability to coercive isomorphism, and
the strength of its bureaucratic and social fields.41 Certainly the eager reception in Latin
America to his book, Prisons of Poverty, which Wacquant describes in the afterword,
confirms the existence of significant communities, both intellectual and bureaucratic,
desperate to contest the import of neoliberal penal prescriptions in both Brazil
and Argentina.
This article focuses on Brazil as a case study of how North American/Anglo-Saxon
penal orthodoxies have been transferred, adopted, adapted or discarded, for a number of
reasons. The first is the sheer size of the prison population and speed of its penal
expansion, driven by many of the factors noted above.42 The second is that the
decentralised, federal management of the criminal justice system means that a multiplicity
of penal formations have developed there, particularly notably when state governors with
distinctive ideological or policy agendas enter or leave office.43 The third is that Brazil’s size,
peaceful democratic transition, distance from the USA and bureaucratic strength in certain
fields (such as the judiciary) have rendered it relatively immune to policy exports by bi- and
multilateral actors in the criminal justice field. It also has well organised civil society groups
(human rights groups and a Catholic church with historic social justice engagement, and
experience with formalised state-civil society partnerships in other, ‘softer’ fields of social
policy) and ‘uncivil’ society groups (the PCC, Comando Vermelho and other criminal
networks), all capable of finding space within the prison system to articulate and implement
alternative visions of order, control, morality, governmentality and sociability. It is also the
country I know best. This article draws on 15 years of research, which began with a 1999
report I wrote for Amnesty International on prison conditions in Brazil. I have visited some
40 prisons and police lock-ups across Brazil, carried out interviews over this period with
prisoners, guards, local and national prison administrators and policy-makers, NGOs and
international bodies involved in reform efforts, conducted one of the first evaluations of the
novel state-NGO partnerships in prison administration, and initiated the UK bilateral
prison reform project (both analysed below).
This paper draws on this experience, these conversations, observations and, where
necessary, restricted documentation. It also relies on the outputs of a new generation of
researchers mapping the human and bureaucratic complexities and contradictions of
Brazil’s prison system from a range of legal, sociological, historical, criminological and
ethnographic perspectives.44 This article will not be able to do justice to the
nuanced discussion within that growing epistemic community, nor can it fully
represent the diverse experiences around Latin America, but aims rather to contribute
to a broader debate about prison reform within security sector management, and how
we understand local experiences and policy choices within the context of global currents
in penality.
Administration models
The primary policy response to rising crime and insecurity has been to build more prisons.
Before the federal government began to develop a more coherent prison system policy in the
last decade, Brazil’s 27 state-level governments embarked on a huge construction programme
372 Fiona Macaulay
in partnership with the federal government.45 However, this proved extremely expensive,
placed a considerable financial burden on those states with the highest inmate populations
and still failed to meet demand.46 In São Paulo state, which currently holds 36 per cent of the
country’s inmates, the prison population was at one point increasing by around 500 a month,
which in theory meant opening a new penal facility every month just to keep up.47 The state
has also had, for several years, a programme of removing prisoners from police custody into
new, purpose-built penal facilities under the command of the prison authorities rather than
the police. This has forced policy-makers to look for alternatives, if not to incarceration then to
the financing and administration of the prison estate.
Forms of privatisation and commercial public-private partnerships
Many countries in the global North have responded to rapidly rising prison populations, and
resultant poor prison conditions, loss of state control and high costs, by inviting in the private
sector to manage or provide diverse aspects of the carceral regime, perhaps the neoliberal
penal policy par excellence. In 1984 the Tennessee state prison system was declared
unconstitutional due to overcrowding and violence and the Corrections Corporation of
America (CCA) offered to run it.48 At a time of ideologically driven state retrenchment, this
failure of state governance opened the door to major corporations such as the CCA and
Wackenhut (now GEO group), which expanded their operations throughout the USA’s
decentralised prison system, and opened up new markets in the Anglophone world: in 2011
they were valued at U$2.3 billion and U$1.5 billion respectively.49 This North American
version of privatisation places all aspects of prison administration, that is, (a) building of
infrastructure (b) administration and management (including financial control, external and
internal security and discipline) and (c) service provision (of food, rehabilitative and other so-
called ‘hotel’ services) in the hands of a commercial company.
However, this policy, which was driven both by fiscal pragmatism (the promise of cost-
saving) and by an ideological preference for the private sector over the state, was modified
when it encountered continental European welfare-state culture. The so-called ‘French
model’ of prison semi-privatisation allowed the private sector to be involved in functions
(a) and (c), but not (b), as a monopoly on coercive force and security provision continued
to be regarded as a core function of the state. Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are a
newer variant in which, rather than the state paying a private company twice, first to build
a prison and then to provide ongoing services, the private sector provides capital upfront
for construction, and ‘leases’ the infrastructure to the state which buys it back through the
service payments over a period of two to three decades.
Traditionally, Brazil’s prisons have been run directly by the state and until the 1990s the
majority of legal opinion was against any form of private sector involvement in running
prisons, aside from the normal tendering arrangements in which the state contracted
construction firms to build state-financed prisons, or provide goods and services such as
food. However, different parts of the state’s penal apparatus have held contradictory views
on the matter. In 1992 guidelines for private prisons issued by the National Council for
Criminal and Penal Affairs, an advisory group of leading jurists who set policy for the
Brazilian Penitentiary Department (DEPEN) within the Ministry of Justice, prompted a

storm of protest from the Church and judiciary and in 2002 they reversed their position,
opposing private involvement on constitutional and moral grounds.50 However, when the
Ministry of Justice itself commissioned a 2001 study on prison privatisation, most of the
state-level secretaries responsible for prisons declared themselves in favour of private
involvement.51 As in Brazil’s federalised system of government the prison system is
governed primarily by the 27 constituent states. DEPEN is able to offer only financing and
guidelines, lacking any direct control over the policies of subnational governments. This,
in part, explains the mosaic of prison policies now visible.
The first prison governed under the distinctively Brazilian form of public-private prison
co-administration, the Industrial Penitentiary of Guarapuava, opened in 1999 in the state
of Paraná under conservative moderniser, Governor Jaime Lerner. By 2005 there were 13
facilities in five states under such joint administration, which increased to 17 by 2013.52
Under this model, the state provides the finance for construction of the prison (split
between the federal and state governments), retains ownership of the infrastructure and
contracts the private firm to provide the in-prison services and rehabilitative work on a
renewable basis, typically for periods of up to five years at a time. Guards are contracted by
the private company, but the state maintains a supervisory presence inside the prison,
appointing at least the warden, deputy warden and head of discipline, who are all state
employees. External security is supplied normally by the state military police. Cabral,
Lazzarini and Azevedo identify this as a hybrid arrangement that sits somewhere between
the US model (private guards) and the European model (state-employed guards).53
The second wave of prison privatisation was the PPP model. The first country to
enthusiastically adopt PPPs was, perhaps predictably, the pioneer of neoliberal economic
governance in the region. Under centre-left President Lagos the Chilean government
374 Fiona Macaulay
contracted the private sector to build and operate 10 low and medium security prisons.54
Using the franchise model initiated in 2000, the first group of new prisons was built
at the expense of the licensee, with the state reimbursing the private partner over
20 years following the British public-private partnership model known as Design, Build,
Operate, Transfer (DBOT).55 The Gendarmerie of Chile (in charge of prisons) remains
responsible for maintaining custody services, legal benefits for prisoners and security and
posting a permanent inspector in each prison, along the French model. However, in the case of
two other prisons the state did the building and allowed the licensee (Sodexo) to run them.
Brazil’s first public-private-partnership prison opened in January 2013 in Belo
Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais state. Built by a consortium of five companies,
their bid of R$280 million won the contract to provide 608 additional prison places, at
an initial cost per place of R$460,526 (US$232,295). This will be offset by a monthly
payment per inmate of R$2,100 for the next 27 years to provide general services. The
state retains control of security personnel, supplying guards and external security. This is
yet another variant: the state leases the infrastructure from the private contractor
but has full control of security, not just a supervisory role as in the hybrid joint
administration model.
Is Latin America convinced by private sector involvement on the grounds either of
efficiency (cost and value for money) or effectiveness (providing better or innovative
regimes, guaranteeing the security of those inside the prison and outside)? The evidence is
mixed. Paraná state, the pioneer in the region in joint administration, decided in 2002 not
to renew the private contracts once they expired in 2006, alleging that privately run prisons
cost twice as much to administer as the public ones.56 Ceará’s contracts were cancelled by
the state’s appeal court as illegal.57 In 2005 Costa Rica’s Ombudsman and Supreme Court
forced the government to cancel a pre-contract to have a private company provide 1,200
extra prison places at a cost of U$73 million (U$60,833 per new bed): the state then
provided 2,600 more prison places at a cost of U$3,846 per inmate, six per cent of what the
private contractor had wanted to charge.58 Despite Chile’s global image as neoliberal
poster-boy, the Ministry of Justice under conservative President Piñera was also
unconvinced that such PPPs actually saved the state money and hesitated to build four new
ones under such terms. The construction of the second PPP prison in Brazil, in
Pernambuco state, stalled halfway in 2012 when the private contractor ran out of funds.
Conversely, a study conducted in Bahia state compared two prisons (one privately run,
the other publicly run) of similar size and prisoner profile, and found that the semi-
privatised prison achieved both economies in service provision and improved indicators
(such as fewer escapes and faster legal decisions for the inmates) due to a combination of
financial carrots and sticks, set by the state, and the freedom from constraints that beset the
public sector with regard to employment of staff and purchasing.59 Unsurprisingly, the
quality of state regulation is what determines effectiveness because privately run
prisons have not been immune from violence. A destructive riot at a jointly run prison
in Amazonas in 2007 was blamed on the private contractor’s resistance to oversight. In the
new PPP prison in Minas Gerais the consortium’s performance will be measured, by a
North American monitoring company, against 380 separate criteria, ranked in
importance. A riot would result in a 50 per cent cut in financial transfers.

The comparison between the two sectors can also be skewed by structural factors, as
private operators are often brought in to run brand-new facilities, rather than
the crumbling infrastructure of the public prison system. New contracts also tend to
ensure that the prison’s specific capacity will not be exceeded, avoiding the
overcrowding that constitutes the major security threat within Brazilian and Latin
American jails.60 In September 2012 the Chilean government was forced to pay a fine of
US$1.5 million to a private prison consortium after transferring too many prisoners to its
facilities.61 As Carranza notes, this creates a two-tier prison system, with those in the
PPP or privately co-run prisons guaranteed better conditions, but at a high cost to the
public purse.62
It is noticeable that the state with the highest prison population in Brazil, São Paulo, and
the two states with the most entrenched problem of criminal networks in their prisons, São
Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, have been slow to cede control to the commercial sector. Whilst
Dr Furukawa was head of the São Paulo state prison system (1999 –2006), he rebuffed the
many approaches of Brazilian security sector firms hoping to diversify into private prison
management, telling them he would only consider their proposals if the costs could equal
or better those of the community partnership-run prisons (see below). He was never
wooed by the US government or thinktanks promoting US prison technologies, although
the state housed many more prisoners in absolute numbers than all other Latin American
countries bar Mexico.63 However, in 2013 the state’s council on PPPs issued a call for
declarations of interest to build, operate and maintain prison units in the public-private
partnership model. The governors of both Minas Gerais and São Paulo states are leading
lights and potential presidential candidates for the centre-right party, the PSDB,
suggesting in this instance at least an ideological convergence.
376 Fiona Macaulay
Not-for-profit public-private partnerships
However, Brazil has been host to a completely home-grown innovation in prison

administration: the involvement of not-for-profit civil society organisations in running
prisons, either in parallel with the state, or in the kind of joint administration partnership
normally conducted with for-profit businesses. In 1972, in São José dos Campos, São Paulo
state, three Catholic laymen attempted to improve conditions in their local
decrepit, overcrowded and violent police lock-up where the state had effectively abandoned
prisoners. After failing to get the jail shut down, they formed an NGO, the Association for the
Protection and Assistance of Prisoners (APAC),64 which gradually developed its own ethos
and methodology, took over from the police the provision of services to the prisoners, and
built a new wing for 75 prisoners on day-release schemes. After a five-year closure due to police
brutality and hostility, the prison reopened in 1984, this time under the sole control of the
APAC group and with the blessing of the state authorities.
Their work began to attract attention, not least because the facility had no guards, inside
or out, with all the security provided by the inmates themselves. The model was then
replicated in another jail (Braganc a Paulista) in São Paulo state when Dr Nagashi
Furukawa, then the local judge, helped a group of local volunteers to sign a partnership
agreement with the state. When he became head of the state’s prison system in 1999, he
established 22 similar small prisons, known as Resocialisation Centres (Centros de
Ressocializac ão, CRs), each holding around 210 prisoners. The state provided the
infrastructure (either purpose-built or existing estate), discipline (guards) and external
security whilst the partner NGO handled the day-to-day running of the prison and
rehabilitation of prisoners, akin to the division of labour in the prisons administered
jointly with the commercial sector. Meanwhile the original, religiously based APAC group
migrated to Minas Gerais state.65
Like the private prison management companies, the NGOs are free from certain
constraints such as the tendering arrangements that tie the state authorities to ‘preferred
suppliers’, inflating costs and encouraging backhanders. They buy cheaper and better from
local businesses, thus contributing to the local economy, and can switch suppliers when
necessary.66 Their staff are also not state employees, whose protection under Brazilian
labour law makes them very hard to dismiss, even when they fail to fulfil their contracts.
In many state-run prisons, the hourly-contracted professionals, such as doctors, are often
paid for services that they never provide. These factors have enabled the NGOs to care for
prisoners at one third to half the normal cost to the state, and their greater value-for-money
is not debatable as it is with private sector partnership.67
Whilst the private sector is presumed to respond to economic signals and be more
efficient in pursuit of profit, then redistributed to investors, the NGOs are driven by many
non-economic, moral factors. They take pride in their careful guardianship of resources,
reinvesting any surplus in improved services to prisoners. Cost reductions are also possible
because as community-based organisations they have moral leverage in seeking free
donations of food or material. They are also subject to strict systems of accountability on
the part of the state authorities. In the heyday of the CRs, the head of prisons considered
having the NGOs take on the administration—not rehabilitative services—of nearby large
penitentiaries to reduce costs. In terms of effectiveness, there have been no major incidents
in APAC or CR prisons. Whilst they do not take career or hardened offenders, they do
operate maximum security wings or units with serious, non-serial offenders.68 As with
other private sector partnerships, they are also able to resist overcrowding as part of their
contractual arrangement with the state.
In terms of the diffusion of this model, early on the APAC model of volunteer
engagement with prisoners spread through Catholic and Christian networks, not just
within Brazil, but also overseas, influencing the work of US-based Prison Fellowship
International, to which the original APAC affiliated in 1986, and seeing similar Christian-
based units set up in the UK and USA in 1997,69 and in Latin America (for example,
Ecuador). However, the formal partnerships have expanded through the actions of state
agencies, both the executive branch and judiciary. Since 2001 the key advocate of the APAC
model has been the upper echelon of Minas Gerais state’s judiciary, its appeal court, which
has invited its counterparts from around Brazil to visit. The APAC NGO in Minas Gerais is
now operating essentially a franchise system, and recently signed contracts with the
authorities in Paraná state, following the latter’s rejection of partnership with the private
sector,70 and is poised to do the same in several other states.
By contrast, the CR partnership model in São Paulo state has been allowed to wither,
with only one third of the units now run in partnership with NGOs, after a new hard-line
administration took over in 2006 that saw community involvement as a distraction from
the core task of containment of the prison population. PPPs have now replaced civil
society-state partnerships as the preferred form of private sector involvement as a
recognisable, internationally touted off-the-peg solution.
378 Fiona Macaulay
Control models
A key issue for the region’s prison systems is how to contain their most violent inmates,
especially those linked to armed groups, criminal or political. One strategy has been to
concentrate gangs in particular prisons: in Rio de Janeiro incoming prisoners are allocated
to prisons depending on their stated affiliation to one of the rival Comandos. However, this
inadvertently gives them a consolidated operational base. The other option is dispersal
through the prison system and isolation of the main leaders in maximum security prisons.
São Paulo authorities transferred the PCC’s leaders first to prisons in neighbouring states
then into the state’s ‘supermax’ facilities and into the federal prisons after 2006. But,
although it made it seem that the state was taking decisive action, this simply facilitated the
gang’s rhizomic spread, and provided it with a narrative of persecution and suffering that
strengthened its legitimacy among inmates.71 A number of prisons in Mato Grosso do Sul
and Paraná joined in the 2006 disorder and in November 2012 it was reported that the
gang was present in the prisons of 21 of Brazil’s 27 states, and that 135 of São Paulo state’s
152 prisons were under its control.72
Supermax
The US super-maximum security model is the most visible and exportable model
internationally for control of detainees—typically gang leaders or terrorists/spies—who pose
a serious and ongoing threat either to society at large or to the security of the prison,
other prisoners and prison staff, having attempted escape or committed or planned
serious disorder. Supermax prisons—or wings—have a distinctive regime: prisoners are
locked up for 23 hours a day and have very little contact with fellow inmates or guards. Control
is ensured through the planned use of the infrastructure and technologies such as CCTV,
biometric scanning and remote, electronic door operation. Some of these security
technologies, such as the fire-retardant mattresses, low voltage lights and cells without
electrical sockets (to prevent mobile phones from being charged) are being built into new,
‘normal’ maximum security prisons. In Minas Gerais’ new PPP prison two control towers will
receive images from over 300 closed-circuit cameras, and remotely control doors, electricity
and water. The distinctiveness of supermax resides therefore primarily in the almost total
isolation of prisoners.
However, some ‘supermax’ regimes (as opposed to the modern technology used to operate
them) look rather similar to the kinds of isolation and disciplinary regimes developed by
national prison systems over the last two centuries to deal with ‘incorrigible’ prisoners.
Mexico’s island-based San Juan de Ulloa prison in Veracruz, used to incarcerate political
prisoners, may actually have inspired Alcatraz, developed as a military prison 20 years after
California was annexed by the USA from Mexico. Other island prisons included Islas Marias
(Mexico), Isla Maria (Chile), San Lucas (Costa Rica) and Anchieta and Ilha Grande (Brazil).
It was in the latter that the Comando Vermelho was born, and in an existing form of supermax
regime that the PCC emerged. Such isolation of prisoners has a much longer history than the
supermax jails of the last two decades, dating back to the development of the Pennsylvania
system of the early nineteenth century, designed to produce ‘penitents’. This system formed
the basis of penitentiary design throughout the Americas.73 The first identifiable supermax
regime was instituted in Marion prison Illinois, which had taken many of the Alcatraz
prisoners after the stabbing of two guards in 1983. But it was not until 1994 that the first
purpose-built supermax prisons were opened in the USA.
Brazil’s effort to contain violent inmates began in 1985 with the establishment of the
Penitentiary Rehabilitation Centre of Taubaté in São Paulo,74 whose regime entailed 23 hours
a day solitary confinement, and frequent beatings and torture. It was also an exceptional
facility by comparison to the other prisons in the state.75 It was deemed adequate to cope with
violent prisoners until the PCC riots of February 2001 sparked by the attempt of state Prison
Director, Dr Furukawa, to break the status quo in which senior prison system officials
tolerated the gang’s presence and power in the system, a situation that still persists in Rio de
Janeiro and in São Paulo. He introduced a new control tool, a regulation instituting the
differentiated disciplinary regime (RDD), which allowed for a prisoner to be held in an
individual cell for 22 hours a day for up to 360 days. A similar arrangement was sought in Rio
de Janeiro, following violence by the Comando Vermelho, including the murder of the
governor of maximum security jail Bangu I, and their imposed stoppage of the city of Rio de
Janeiro in September 2002. Both initiatives were legally consolidated in 2003.76
The new regime was incorporated into the internal guidelines of the new federal prisons
which the 1984 Law on Sentence Serving (LSS) allowed the national authorities to build in
order to house prisoners transferred from the state prison systems ‘for their own safety or
reasons of security’. However, none were built until the gangs crisis broke after 2001: the first
two of five were opened in 2006 and the next two in 2009, each intended to hold 208 of the
most threatening prisoners and those subject to the RDD. Since an amendment to the LSS in
2003, all federal prisons operate this as standard—22 hours lockdown in single-occupancy
cells, plus all the supermax control technologies—even for prisoners who have not yet
380 Fiona Macaulay
committed disciplinary offences, but are considered a ‘risk’. The 360 day (renewable once)
time limit has been removed by federal courts, making these now institutions of legal
abandonment. In Brazil, then, supermax began as a disciplinary regime in two state
facilities,77 and ended up as specific control prisons under both state and federal purview.
Most states are now installing the RDD in at least one state high security penitentiary, whilst
there is talk of expanding the federal supermax prisons from one per region to one per state.
How far has this ‘American invention in penal practice’ become globalised?78 In the case
of Brazil and the USA, these control models emerged in parallel over two centuries, most
recently in the former in response to the changing profile of criminal activity under
globalisation, and in the latter in response to the fear of crime that accompanied this social
restructuring.79 Of the nine countries that have acknowledged supermax facilities, most
are advanced industrialised countries, whilst the adoption of this prison regime has been
highly contextual.80 That said, prisons adopting this de facto regime appear to be now
proliferating in Latin America without necessarily bearing the name.
The promotion of prison reform by the USA in locations it deems ‘insecure’—
Colombia, Bolivia, Mexico and Central America—unsurprisingly emphasises the
installation of supermax technologies.81 Direct funding of criminal justice reforms with
strong conditionality has resulted in explicit transfer of USA supermax carceral models.
The aim, in the Colombian case, was to clean the slate, eradicating overcrowding,
corruption and ‘old’ bad practices, including prisoner movement around the facility,
association and sociability. Not only has overcrowding not been eradicated, but the
dehumanised supermax experience may well be more vigorously opposed by, and help
stimulate, prisoner organisations, as occurred in Brazil with the rise of the PCC, than the
‘chaotic’ conditions which prisoners are actually more able to shape and resist through the
creation of their own prison culture and norms.
Dynamic and relationship-centred security
The UK has developed a model of interactive, intelligence- and personnel-centred security,

known as dynamic security, that is viewed as an alternative to the US supermax control
paradigm. Developed within the British prison service,82 it sees security and order as best
maintained through relationships between individual prisoners and staff, rather than
isolation of inmates, and keeping prisoners active in education or work within the prison,
combined with high-tech surveillance on the prison perimeter. These relationships yield
not only day-to-day intelligence about planned disorder, but also ‘both a material and an
intuitive insight into the operation of the prison’. They unlock not just offender
rehabilitation but also the ‘harder’ outcomes of security and order. Dynamic security
requires high staff-to-prisoner ratios, careful training, continuous debriefing and
evaluation of staff, and allows for relatively free movement of prisoners within the prison
or control unit.
The Brazilian prison authorities are aware of this model, having visited maximum
security facilities in the UK that use this technology,83 but have so far not attempted to
emulate it, in large part because of the prevalent corruption within the public sector,
including prison guards. Indeed, the strategy of dispersal of PCC members to maximum
security prisons did not prevent gang leaders from bribing guards to let in mobile phones
and drugs. So far, the supermax facilities in Brazil appear to have fulfilled their mission of
containment, even if they are criticised on other grounds, such as human rights and
constitutional violations, and offer a form of legitimacy to gang leaders. However, the next
section analyses both imported and indigenously generated attempts to implement such
dynamic security principles and to govern prisoners in a more humane way.
Governance models
The governmentality of abandonment
The way in which the internal life of the prison is governed in both a sociological and a
bureaucratic sense goes beyond the issue of which actors or institutions are administering
the prison (the estate, security, finances and services) and the technologies of control, and
addresses the underlying ethos and the practices that reveal and reinforce it. If the
neoliberal approach to imprisonment warehouses the unemployed poor and removes
them from public circulation, as the Victorian workhouse did, conditions of detention
therefore can be chaotic and degrading, as there is no real intention to reintegrate these
surplus members of society back into the capitalist market. The result is the appalling
conditions of detention, life-threatening violence and systemic human rights violations
described earlier. This is prison as ‘bare life’ in Agamben’s terms.84 His radical
philosophical thesis explores and extends Foucault’s notion of biopolitics to understand
how the modern state creates normalised ‘states of exception’, or spaces—the
concentration camp being the ultimate example—in which those assigned to them are
simultaneously subject to the law and exempted from its protection.
382 Fiona Macaulay
This state of ‘abandonment’ applies well to many of Latin America’s prisons, where the
state uses penal law and judicial discretion to imprison, but has demonstrated little interest
in using local legal institutions to enforce adherence either to the guarantees in the
country’s law and constitution, or to the international human rights conventions to which
the state is party. Peru, El Salvador, Brazil and other countries have seen regular mass
deaths in custody that prove the point: 81 inmates died in December 2010 in San Miguel
prison in Chile; over 350 died in February 2012 in a fire in Comayagua penitentiary in
Honduras; in January 2013 a riot in Uribana prison in Venezuela left 56 prisoners and one
guard dead. Routine abandonment of pre-trial prisoners to a legal limbo and effective
extra-judicial punishment is a lesser form of ‘bare life’ common in the region.
Governance through human rights-based managerialism
One direct attempt at policy transfer, aimed at reorienting the management of Brazil’s
prisons from spaces of violent exceptionalism to spaces governed by humane and human-
rights compliant practices and norms was a British government-funded ‘prison
improvement project’, which contrasts in its intent, at least, with the US prison
improvement schemes mentioned above.85 Following an approach by the authors of the
1999 Amnesty International report, the Prison Service in England and Wales agreed to
offer technical assistance to Brazil in the area of prison reform and management.86 The
Human Rights Department of the British Embassy in Brası́lia contracted the International
Centre for Prison Studies (ICPS) at King’s College London (closely linked to the leading
NGO Penal Reform International-PRI), and the Centre for Comparative Criminology and
Criminal Justice at the University of Bangor.87
The project drew heavily on the ideas of New Managerialism, and a methodology
developed by the ICPS and PRI in their consultancy in prison reform around the world,
backed by the UK government and various inter-governmental bodies such as the Council
of Europe. In Latin America, since 2002, the ICPS has carried out projects in Chile,
Dominican Republic, Peru, Colombia, Uruguay, Argentina and three Central American
countries, with its project in Brazil from 2002 to 2006 being the most ambitious.
Rooted in the British control technology of relationship-based dynamic security, which
sees itself as a more humane alternative to the supermax, the ICPS methodology stresses
the mutually reinforcing character of security, order and governance in prisons, with the
aim of helping prison administrators, from individual prison guards to senior policy-
makers, to manage prisons in a safe, secure and just manner and apply the rule of both
international and local law within the prisons, to both staff and inmates.88 It uses ethical
measures of success, that is, the outcomes and impact of prisons on all stakeholders
(effectiveness), rather than technical measurements of inputs, outputs and processes
(efficiency). However, this requires considerable changes in institutional and
organisational cultures through the entire policy chain.89 Human rights compliance is
folded into other concepts—professionalism, performance, procedures—that speak more
readily to the bureaucratic cohorts with whom they work, in an attempt to sidestep
resistance to change: surveys of prison guards and police have revealed that the now
mandatory human rights component in their training was counter-productive when not
tied into professional practices and procedures.
This reform project, driven by ‘ethical institutional pragmatism’, was piloted in São
Paulo state, which not only offered the greatest challenge and potential impact in terms of
sheer numbers of prisoners but was also headed at the time by a liberal reformer,
Dr Furukawa. The project was then extended to two other states, Rondônia and Espı́rito
Santo. Key multipliers were trained to ‘identify deficits in prison service delivery when
measured against international standards on human rights and Brazilian law’, with the aim
of setting up offices in the three states and the federal penitentiary department to drive
change in prison governance in specific prisons, then across the state system, and beyond.
The project saw considerable time investment by senior Brazilian prison administrators
and UK consultants, and financial investment by the UK embassy.
However, its results were modest and not durable. Five years later all that remained were
some box files in the National Penitentiary Department. The PCC riots of 2006 had toppled Dr
Furukawa from leadership of the São Paulo prison system, replaced by a hardliner with a
military attitude to prison control. In 2010, prisoners were found incarcerated in metal
shipping containers in Espı́rito Santo and the situation in Rondônia since the multiple deaths
in the Urso Branco jail in 2002 is unchanged. These second phase states were both relatively
small but with very poor prison infrastructure, significant crime levels as transit states for
illegal narcotics, and high levels of judicial and political connivance with criminal groups.
However, the main reasons for the failure of the project to influence prison management
relate both to its conception and delivery, and the receptiveness of the Brazilian state
partners. The ICPS became the main deliverer of the project as disagreements within the
original team about the ambition of the methods and its appropriateness for Brazilian
prison system realities led to the departure of the Brazilian academic with expertise in
384 Fiona Macaulay
prison management and research, and a British academic with comparative prison
experience. This left the British former head of a maximum security prison, and his
brother-in-law, who had no experience in the prison field, but an MBA and a background
in management training. The content of the capacity-building package became heavy on
management jargon, and light on situational analysis. One component sought to have
prison managers writing the kinds of copious procedural norms (covering every aspect of
prison life) that are standard in the UK but completely absent in Brazil (both for the police
and prisons).
As Dolowitz and Marsh observe, there are different ways in which policy transfer,
whether eagerly imported by reformers or touted by policy exporters, can result in failure,
because it is uninformed, incomplete and inappropriate.90 In the end, the project did not
really understand ‘the conditions that make possible, or delimit the marketing and
spread of particular policies and practices’.91 It started out with the intention of creating
a locally appropriate form of hybrid governance, and ended up trying to impose a
culturally inappropriate model, which was simply met with resistance and rejection on the
partners’ side.
Governmentality through human relationships and values
The Brazilian prisons that are actually most clearly governed by genuine reintegration, as
opposed to abandonment, of the offender and adherence to domestic and international
legislation on human rights norms are the indigenously developed CRs and APACs. Their
distinctive ethos rehumanises the prison environment by stressing human relationships—
between prisoners, prisoners and staff, prisoners and family.92 They accept only prisoners
whose families live nearby and commit to engagement with the inmate. They offer a very
full rehabilitative regime (education, work training, support to family outside prison) and
claim a recidivism rate of 15 per cent compared to 70 per cent in the normal system,
making them effective, as well as efficient.93 This focus on welfare interventions for
prisoner and family is redolent of the conventional Western penology of the 1960s and
1970s, and the focus on training and education for the offender a reminder of the ideals of
the mid-twentieth century, when São Paulo’s state penitentiary was considered one of the
best of its kind. Whilst this regime could, in theory, be delivered in fully state-run prisons,
or (semi)-privatised prisons, community involvement has created a space for resistance to
a number of tropes in current incarceration.
The CRs in São Paulo state were based on a secular-humanistic model of job
training, whilst the APAC prisons in Minas Gerais are faith-based, and governed
by a strongly Christian model of redemption. Additionally, fully APAC-run prisons have
no prison guards, police or any other state employees: all staff are NGO volunteers, whereas
in São Paulo, state and NGO staff (and volunteers) work side by side. The volunteers, from a
variety of civil society organisations and backgrounds, are motivated by a set of ethical
values distinct from those required of privately contracted staff. This volunteerism, work
with the inmates’ families, including income generation, welfare and family therapy
support, and donations of food grown and produced in the prison, strengthens bonds with
the local community, which comes to view the prison as an asset, rather than a liability.94
These prisons are the very antithesis of the experience of many in Brazil’s prison system:
‘mass deportation to a far-flung string of suburban or rural prisons [that] derail the
life trajectories of their targets, hamper household stability, weaken the local social
structure [ . . . ] and fuel unlawful conduct and interpersonal violence by and against the
forces of order’.95
A number of things are striking here. The first is the role of the prisoners themselves in
prison governance, and disciplining themselves and their fellows. So far the discussion has
centred on the state’s preference for external agents—state, private sector, civil society—to
run prisons, yet any prison requires the active collaboration of the prisoners. Different
groups of prisoners are able to impose, or reproduce, a range of social orders in Brazil’s
understaffed and overcrowded prisons. In those dominated by the PCC, for example, their
social norms and behavioural codes prevail.96 ‘Ordinary’ prisoners, as well as organised
groups, end up as effective partners and managers of their own situation.97
The second is the variety of formations of social governance within Brazilian prisons.
These offer prisoners a number of different and competing moral universes (rival
‘factions’, segregation units, evangelic wings, pre-trial units, APAC/CR units), which they
try and negotiate as a matter of survival.98 They are also mutually interdependent: the
PCC, for example, is selective of its members and spaces of influence: it represents the
‘world of crime’ and is not interested in colonising alternative spaces. In the APAC units,
the moral basis of governmentality is a Christian one that offers an explicit challenge to
‘the system’, which in turn operates as a disciplinary backstop (prisoners who do not
conform will be returned to the mainstream prison system).
Finally, this illustrates an ongoing tussle over ownership and influence over the
incarcerated populations among different interest groups—judiciary, prison authorities,
386 Fiona Macaulay
police, religious bodies—whilst prisoners themselves find themselves in a multi-layered

experience of compliance, collaboration and resistance, depending on their situation.
Conclusions
This article analysed the degree to which Latin American, and specifically Brazilian, policy-
makers and other social actors have been obliged to import, willingly adopted or adapted,
or resisted policy models for prison administration, control and governmentality
developed and touted by the global North. In this area of security sector reform, supply
side activities by multilateral liberal peace agents have been weak, as the securitisation of
prison systems in the region is relatively recent. However, one bilateral agent, the USA, has
imposed its penal technologies as a solution to hemispheric security problems, even
though the evidence is that this response will actually generate its own additional forms of
insecurity. Outside of such conditions of coercive isomorphism, local policy-makers have
hybridised internationally available penal technologies in combinations that respond to
the local political environment. For example, Brazilian states have preferred to adopt a
model of semi-privatisation that sits between the European and US models, retaining
closer state oversight of their private sector partners: the view that security is a core
responsibility of the state (even when the region’s states do not deliver) is rooted in two
centuries of constitutionalist adherence to liberal notions of rule of law, defended by a
long-established legal profession.
In the three overlapping dimensions of prison administration, control and
governmentality analysed in this article, different approaches are present in distinctive
combinations in each model. For example, although the ‘supermax’ model of prison
control is now seen as distinctively North American, it is not inevitably associated with
private-sector administration. A range of apparently contradictory forms of prison
management also co-exist within the same jurisdiction or geographical areas. In the state
of Minas Gerais, the executive branch has just opened the country’s first PPP prison, with
its supermax technologies, even as the APAC model of not-for-profit/state collaboration
and human-centred security is being promoted by the judiciary. Similarly, São Paulo
state developed supermax prisons at the same time as it expanded the system of NGO-state
run units.
One might argue that such diversity simply responds to a necessary differentiation of
treatment of different categories of offenders, as required by international guidelines.
It might be also be claimed that dominant value systems—in this case a neoliberal
penality—are perfectly capable of tolerating experiments and opposition as long as they do
not threaten the overall hegemonic logic of the system. However, an alternative view is that
these variations, numerically minor as they are, indicate the existence of different
ideological/philosophical strands regarding crime and punishment among different
sectors within, and outside, the prison system, contesting both the status quo of violent
abandonment and the utility of the ‘new’ solutions on offer, as well as perhaps trying to
recuperate some of the penal idealism of previous decades before the prison system
exploded out of control. The APAC model, for example, fuses a religious ethos with the
legal provisions set out by the liberal drafters of the Law on Sentence Serving. Of course,
the religious basis of the modern penitentiary system is well known, in its merging of sin
and crime, penitence and rehabilitation. However, in the context of progressive state legal
abandonment of prisoners, it has for now acquired a new radical, moral, contestational
force, even if at heart its social, disciplinary aims remain conservative.
Certainly the indigenously developed and unconventional modes of administration and
security in the CR and APAC prisons—operating without state security personnel, and a
partnership between the public sector and civil society, rather than commercial economic
actors—subvert the state-centric nature of Western criminal justice systems and go against
the grain of neoliberal penality. The faith-based ethos (and to some degree the
administrative model) of the APAC model has diffused from Brazil. Its humanistic
approach is consistent with the Western interest in restorative justice as an attempt to place
the victim more at the centre of the criminal justice system, but these prisons had evolved
well beforehand, and have proceeded in parallel with growing interest in judicial circles in
Brazil in restorative practices.
Certain permissive conditions in Brazil’s political and administrative environment have
been conducive to creating such a mixed system. However, even the more centralised
countries of the region have been slow to embrace—voluntarily—Northern models of
prison administration, control and governance, and the friction generated in the process of
adoption—for example of privatisation and PPPs—has resulted in resistance and reversal.
Therefore, in this under-analysed field of prison reform, as in other aspects of security
sector reform, more attention is needed not only to how the transfer of Northern modes of
neoliberal governance has resulted in hybrid formations, but also to how developing states
generate their own indigenous forms of penal governance, that may be far better solutions
to their—and our—dilemmas of crime, violence and (in)security.
388 Fiona Macaulay
Endnotes
1. Evans, ‘Development as Institutional Change’. 21. World Bank, Crime and Violence in Central America,
2. DiMaggio and Powell, ‘Iron Cage Revisited’, 151. Vol II, 65.
3. Garland, Culture of Control. O’Malley, ‘Volatile and 22. Ariza Higuera and Iturralde, Los muros de la infamia.
Contradictory Punishment’. 23. Iturralde, Castigo, liberalismo autoritario y justicia penal
4. Newburn, ‘Diffusion, Differentiation and Resistance’. de excepción.
5. Ibid., 341. 24. Amnesty International, No one Sleeps Here Safely.
6. Aguirre, ‘Prisons and Prisoners’. 25. Lessing, ‘Dangers of Dungeons’, 158.
7. Tsing, Friction. 26. Nonetheless, it is alleged that in Honduras, ‘drug
8. Mac Ginty, ‘Hybrid Peace’. trafficking and other organized crime activities are
9. Koonings and Kruijt, Societies of Fear and Organised directed from the prisons and by current and former
Violence and State Failure; Frühling et al., Crime and government and military officials’, according to the 2008
Violence in Latin America; Bergman and Whitehead, International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (cited
Criminality, Public Security; Arias and Goldstein, Violent in World Bank, Crime and Violence in Central America,
Democracies in Latin America. Vol II, vi).
10. For a time series between 1992 and 2010 on these two 27. Lessing, ‘Dangers of Dungeons’, 164.
dimensions see Müller, ‘Rise of the Penal State’, 65 and 67. 28. There are several alternative ‘foundational’ myths
11. This is complicated by the paucity of victimisation according to Biondi, Junto e Misturado, 69.
studies in the region, often conducted sporadically, with 29. Dias, PCC.
no methodological consistency between countries (or, 30. Buzan et al., Security.
internally, between provinces or municipalities) or over 31. Manwaring, Contemporary Challenge to State Sover-
time. Even the best proxy (homicide data) is not entirely eignty, iii.
reliable, depending on its source. 32. Russell, ‘Political Ecology of Police Reform’, 567 – 568.
12. Available online at: http://www.prisonstudies.org/info/ 33. Bastick, Role of Penal Reform.
worldbrief/?search¼southam&x¼South%20America. 34. The Inter-American Development Bank was the
13. Ungar, Policing Democracy, 29– 36. first multilateral financial institution to invest sub-
14. For a discussion about the relationship of ideas of stantially in justice sector reform in Latin America.
security, rights and (post)neoliberalism in Bolivia, and Since 1998 it has lent U$371 million to 11 countries, and
Latin America more broadly, see Goldstein, ‘Toward a given out U$14 million in technical co-operation
Critical Anthropology of Security’. grants. Much of this was oriented first to judicial reform
15. Washington Office on Latin America, Systems Overload. (Domingo and Sieder, Rule of Law in Latin
16. Ungar, Policing Democracy, 194. America), then to municipal-level crime and violence
17. By way of comparison the rate for the USA is 716 prevention. One of its four thematic areas in citizen
prisoners per 100,000, Rwanda 527, Russia 487, South security is ‘judiciary and rehabilitation’, where
Africa 307, England and Wales 150. it emphasises financing alternatives to prison, rehabi-
18. Gangs come in many different shapes and sizes, with litation of prisoners and ‘modernisation of the
wildly varying degrees of cohesion, hierarchy, member- penitentiary system’, although what this means is not
ship and involvement in illicit activities, which in turn specified (http://www.iadb.org/en/topics/citizen-
has distinct consequences for the prison system (Lessing, security/judiciary-and-rehabilitation,2671.html).
‘Dangers of Dungeons’). 35. Marenin, ‘Implementing Police Reforms’; Peake and
19. Rodgers and Muggah, ‘Gangs as Non-State Armed Marenin, ‘Their Reports are not Read’.
Groups’, 306. Teenage children of the many Central 36. Call, ‘Competing Donor Approaches’.
American refugees who fled the civil wars of the 1980s 37. Wacquant, Prisons of Poverty, afterword 162.
got involved in Los Angeles street gangs. Changes in US 38. O’Malley, ‘Neoliberalism and Risk’.
immigration policy, domestic penal laws and anti- 39. Wacquant, ‘Towards a Dictatorship over the Poor?’ and
terrorism laws led the US government to deport to ‘The Militarization of Urban Marginality’.
Central America an estimated 46,000 convicts and 40. Müller, ‘Rise of the Penal State’, 72.
160,000 illegal immigrants between 1998 and 2005. They 41. Wacquant, Prisons of Poverty, afterword 174
then formed the two main gangs: the maras salvatrucha 42. One notable reason was the so-called Heinous Crimes
and the Calle 18. bill, passed in a moral panic in 1990, which made several
20. Ibid., 308– 309. types of serious crime, including ‘drug trafficking’
(including small time dealers and users), ineligible for run prisons. (‘Organizing Prisons Through Public-
bail or early release through amnesty or pardon. Private Partnerships’).
43. Salla, ‘De Montoro a Lembo’. 61. Public Policy 1026, page 7.
44. Macaulay, ‘Knowledge Production’. 62. Carranza, ‘Situación penitenciaria en América Latina y
45. Brazil’s national penitentiary fund is financed by court el Caribe’.
fines and the lottery, and accumulated R$1.8billion 63. Personal communication, July 2013.
(US$3.6 bn) between 1994 and 2007. It is used for prison 64. Over the years the acronym has stood for a number of
rehabilitation projects and training of guards, but very slightly different names, now most commonly
primarily for prison building and refurbishment: in this Associac ão de Protec ão e Assistência ao Condenado. Some
period the Ministry of Justice claims 78,184 new prison confusion is caused by some of the NGOs working in the
places were provided, 27,223 in São Paulo state alone. CRs in São Paulo state having adopted the APAC
46. Zomighani Júnior, ‘Grito dos lugares’, 105. Between acronym, whereas the Minas Gerais group see
1997 and 2006 São Paulo state built 101 new prisons at a themselves as the ‘true’, faith-based APAC.
cost of R$575 million. 65. The original APAC, São José dos Campos, was closed
47. Monthly data from the website of the Brazilian down in 1999, later reopening as a CR. Meanwhile, an
Penitentiary Department in the Ministry of Justice. APAC group in Itaúna in Minas Gerais set up in 1984
48. Kentner and Prior, ‘Globalization of Private Prisons’, 88. formalised its running of the local jail in 1991, and began
49. Ibid., 89. to attract attention in the 1990s when the Brazilian
50. Oliveira, A privatizac ão das prisões. Catholic Church launched a campaign on prison
51. Cordeiro, Privatizac ão do sistema prisional brasileiro. conditions, and the National Congress conducted
52. Brazilian states that have adopted prison joint investigations into the same.
administration are: Paraná, Ceará, Amazonas, Bahia, 66. Information based on my field research in four CRs in
Espı́rito Santo and Santa Catarina. The two states with 2004, analysed in ‘Resocialization Centres in São Paulo
planned PPP prisons are Pernambuco and Minas Gerais. State’.
53. Cabral et al., ‘Private Entrepreneurs in Public Services’. 67. Tribunal de Justic a de Minas Gerais. http://ftp.tjmg.jus.
54. Dammert and Dı́az,‘Carceles privadas’. Things went more br/presidencia/programanovosrumos/.
slowly than planned, and only eight were in operation by 68. Interviews with NGO representatives and state prison
2012. ‘Private Prisons: Revitalising the Model’ in Public authorities in four CR prisons in 2006.
Policy no. 1076, a bulletin published by the Chilean 69. Burnside et al., My Brother’s Keeper
conservative thinktank Instituto Libertad y Desarrollo. 70. The state court of appeal website asserts that some 33
55. The private partner for three such prisons is a APAC units are functioning, with another 69 planned.
consortium composed of Besalco, Astaldi and Sodexo However, only a handful of prisons are run entirely by
(BAS Ltd) and for another three the Sociedad the NGO: the rest are units within prisons.
Infraestructura Penitenciaria (Compass Group). 71. Lessing, ‘Dangers of Dungeons’; Dias, PCC, 404– 417.
56. Cabral et al., ‘Private Entrepreneurs in Public Services’, 72. O Globo newspaper, ‘A atuac ão do PCC no paı́s [The
dispute this, arguing that it was political rivalry by the operation of PCC throughout the country]’, which
new, incoming governor that led to this cancellation. presents 2011 Ministry of Justice data on the PCC’s
The current head of prisons in Paraná told me the costs national reach. http://oglobo.globo.com/infograficos/
were the same as in the public sector and that it was a pcc-mapa-atuacao/.
political/ideological decision to resume state control. 73. Salvatore and Aguirre, Birth of the Penitentiary in Latin
57. The contracts had not been put out to tender, published America.
in the government official record, or been regulated by 74. Jesus Filho, ‘Rise of the Supermax in Brazil’.
secondary legislation. Cordeiro, Privatizac ão do sistema 75. Neither Catholic Church activists nor international
prisional brasileiro. human rights organisations were ever granted access to it.
58. For data on attempts to expand prison privatisation around 76. Caldeira, ‘A polı́tica do cárcere duro’.
the world until around 2006 see Prison Privatisation Report 77. Taubaté was closed down and now operates as a psychiatric
International. On Costa Rica see reports no. 46, 51, 62, 68. facility, whilst the RDD is in operation in São Paulo state
59. Cabral and Azevedo, ‘Modes of Provision of Prison not just formally in the Centre for Temporary Read-
Services’. aptation in Presidente Bernardes, but also informally in
60. For example, Cabral and Saussier’s data on Paraná state Venceslau I and II and Avaré I and II prisons, which have
from 2002 to 2005 show that the public prisons held on become unregulated spaces. Dias, PCC, 414–415.
average 63 per cent more inmates than did the privately 78. Ross, Globalization of Supermax Prisons, 1.
390 Fiona Macaulay
79. Jesus Filho, ‘Rise of the Supermax in Brazil’. ment: A History of the Prison in Africa, Asia and Latin
80. Ross, Globalization of Supermax Prisons. America, eds. Frank Dikötter and Ian Brown. Cornell
81. See the criticism of the new-style Valledupar prison in University Press, Ithaca, NY, 14 – 54.
Colombia by Ariza Higuera and Iturralde, Los muros de Amnesty International, 1999. No one Sleeps Here Safely:
la infamia, 69– 70. Human Rights Violations Against Detainees. Amnesty
82. It was first articulated by Dunbar in A Sense of Direction. International, London.
83. I accompanied a delegation to HM Prison Whitemoor. Arias, Desmond Enrique and Daniel Goldstein, 2010.
84. Agamben, Homo Sacer. Violent Democracies in Latin America: The Cultures
85. I periodically discussed the progress of this project with and Practice of Violence. Duke University Press,
all involved. Durham, NC.
86. King, ‘Proposal for Collaborative Project’. Ariza Higuera, Libardo José and Manuel Iturralde, 2011. Los
87. ICPS and PRI were already interested in Brazil for a muros de la infamia: prisiones en Colombia y en América
variety of reasons. Julita Lemgruber, former secretary Latina [The walls of infamy: prisons in Colombia and
of prisons in Rio de Janeiro under Brizola (1991 – Latin America]. Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá.
1994) served on the board of PRI from 1996 to 2005, Bastick, Megan, 2009. The Role of Penal Reform in Security
and Baroness Vivien Stern, a PRI founder, had Sector Reform. Centre for the Democratic Control of
visited Brazil a number of times at the invitation of Armed Forces, Geneva.
reformers. Bergman, Marcelo and Laurence Whitehead (eds.), 2009.
88. ICPS, A Human Rights Approach to Prison Management. Criminality, Public Security, and the Challenge to
89. Field visit, Ministry of Justice, Brazil, May 2011. Democracy in Latin America. University of Notre
90. Dolowitz and Marsh, ‘Learning from Abroad’, 17. Dame Press, Notre Dame.
91. Newburn, ‘Diffusion, Differentiation and Resistance’. Biondi, Karina, 2010. Junto e misturado: Uma etnografia do
92. Ordóñez Vargas, ‘É possı́vel humanizar a vida atrás das PCC [Together and mixed up: an ethnography of the
grades?’, is a rare ethnography of the APAC system. Most PCC]. Editora Terceiro Nome, São Paulo.
literature on the APACs is short and descriptive, often Burnside, Jonathan with Nancy Loucks, Joanna R. Adler and
produced by sympathetic groups, such as Prison Gerry Rose, 2005. My Brother’s Keeper: Faith-based Units
Fellowship International. For a statement of the faith- in Prison. Willan Publishing, Devon.
based APAC ‘method’ by its founder see Ottoboni, Buzan, Barry, Ole Waever and Jaap de Wilde, 1998. Security:
Vamos matar o criminoso?. A New Framework for Analysis. Lynne Rienner, Boulder, CO.
93. Tribunal de Justic a de Minas Gerais. http://ftp.tjmg.jus.br/ Cabral, Sandro and Paulo Furquim de Azevedo, 2008.
presidencia/projetonovosrumos/. Methodological issues ‘The Modes of Provision of Prison Services in a
make recidivism rates hard to verify. Comparative Perspective’. Brazilian Administration
94. I interviewed one mayor (Jaú, October 2004), who had Review 5(1), 53–69.
vigorously opposed the building of a CR prison locally, Cabral, Sandro and Stéphane Saussier, 2013. ‘Organizing
but then featured it in his subsequent re-election Prisons Through Public-Private Partnerships: A Cross-
campaign, claiming credit for bringing it to the town. Country Investigation’. Brazilian Administration Review
95. Wacquant, ‘Militarization of Urban Marginality’, 69. 10(1), 100 –120.
96. Biondi, Junto e Misturado; Dias, PCC. Cabral, Sandro, Sergio G. Lazzarini and Paulo Furquim de
97. Darke, ‘Inmate Governance’ and ‘Entangled Staff- Azevedo, 2013. ‘Private Entrepreneurs in Public
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98. Garces, in ‘Cross Politics of Ecuador’s Penal State’, and Statization of Prisons’. Strategic Entrepreneurship
analyses how pre-trial prisoners in a state of legal Journal 7(1), 6– 25.
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Conflict Police Reform’. Conflict, Security and Develop-
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conditions and priorities.8

Latin America’s prison crisis

No. of prisoners Imprisonment rate

Source: ICPS World Prison Briefing.12

gang membership to 30 years imprisonment.20 By the mid-2000s gang members made up

Security impacts of failing prison systems

National governments and the transnational security community have begun to

Security sector reform, neoliberal penality and policy

Forms of privatisation and commercial public-private partnerships

Brazilian Penitentiary Department (DEPEN) within the Ministry of Justice, prompted a

importance. A riot would result in a 50 per cent cut in financial transfers.

Not-for-profit public-private partnerships

However, Brazil has been host to a completely home-grown innovation in prison

Dynamic and relationship-centred security

The UK has developed a model of interactive, intelligence- and personnel-centred security,

extra-judicial punishment is a lesser form of ‘bare life’ common in the region.

Governance through human rights-based managerialism

Governmentality through human relationships and values

police, religious bodies—whilst prisoners themselves find themselves in a multi-layered

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