Ricardo Urquizas Campello

Ricardo Urquizas Campello
Short
Circuit
Electronic Monitoring and the Crisis
of the Brazilian Prison System
Short Circuit
Short Circuit
Electronic Monitoring and the Crisis
of the Brazilian Prison System
Center for the Study of Violence, University of São Paulo (NEV/USP)
Graduate Program in Social Anthropology, State University of Campinas
(PPGAS/UNICAMP)
São Paulo, Brazil
ISBN 978-3-031-21858-3 ISBN 978-3-031-21859-0 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21859-0
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This book is dedicated to those people who,
incarcerated or subjected to remote
monitoring systems,
were willing to engage in the exchanges
along the path of the research.
They are in the middle of nowhere and do not even realize in which region the Colony is located.
Out there, beyond the vast expanses and empty spaces, there is silence pushing them into
nothingness.
(Ana Paula Maia, Assim na terra como debaixo da terra)
vii
Foreword: Perverse Effects of an Alternative
Sanction
Following many other countries around the world, Brazil finally succumbed to the
appeal of the electronic anklet, institutionalized by a federal law in 2010. And it is
this decade-long experience that this book by Ricardo Urquizas Campello recounts,
in what is, to my knowledge, the first in-depth investigation into the use of elec-
tronic monitoring (EM) in Latin America’s largest country.1
In recent times, the imposition of house arrest with electronic surveillance on a
number of politicians and businessmen accused of corruption and money launder-
ing as part of the Lava Jato (Car Wash) investigation has lent a high profile to this
measure. But it is, in a way, the tree that hides the forest. And Ricardo Campello’s
interest is focused upon this hidden dimension, that is, upon the vast majority of
people subjected to EM, who do not belong to the wealthy classes, but rather to the
usual “clientele” of the criminal justice system – Black and marginalized people,
formally convicted or otherwise subjected to pretrial measures. With this in mind,
he offers us a work organized into five chapters and an introduction, written in a
clear and fluid style, which skillfully combines theoretical and historical consider-
ations, ethnographic research, and analysis of the arguments developed by advo-
cates and opponents of this device. Well anchored in the scientific literature on EM
and particularly sensitive to the theses of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and
Langdon Winner, Ricardo Campello pays close attention to the specific features of
the Brazilian case.
Brazil’s particularities make it an especially interesting case study when it comes
to testing broad theories with an international scope. As a federative republic, where
criminal law is the responsibility of the central government, but prison matters are
the responsibility of the federal states, Brazil presents a great variety of configura-
tions that favor internal comparative research. In the present case, the ethnographic
investigation was carried out in the states of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro – the
1
This book is the result of a doctoral thesis in Sociology (USP), whose development I followed
while supervising the author during his research internship at the Centre de recherches
Sociologiques sur le Droit et les Institutions Pénales (CESDIP, France) in 2018, under a FAPESP
BEPE grant. This work won the CAPES and ANPOCS thesis awards in 2020.
ix
x Foreword: Perverse Effects of an Alternative Sanction
country’s central economic axis – and in the states of Ceará and Maranhão – located
in the poor Northeast region. As such, the book lays the groundwork for further
systematic research that would span the entire country.
The Brazilian context also offers another propitious element, at least in theory,
for the implementation of EM: the reality of an ever-increasing prison population,
sheltered in atrocious conditions of overcrowding, human rights abuses, and vio-
lence of all kinds, including when waged by massive criminal organizations that
reproduce within the prison walls the brutality of the conflicts that take place out-
side. In this context, largely because of the ineptitude of the authorities, EM could
be perceived as a solution to unclogging prisons.
In view of this, as is often the case in other countries, the scope of application of
EM was quickly extended to new legal hypotheses, and the number of people being
tracked grew at a rapid pace. Not faster, though, than the prison population, and so
Brazil provided further proof, if any were needed, of the utopian futility of replacing
incarceration with EM. Quite the contrary, the book shows to what extent prison and
EM, far from being antagonistic, coexist in symbiosis. This provides a new twist on
the expression “virtual prison,” often applied to EM: prison remains in fact an omi-
nous possibility that ensures the obedience of those monitored from a distance.
This is only one of the many incongruities of electronic surveillance pointed out
by the author. Analyzing the inner workings of the sociotechnical system that con-
stitutes EM, from the relations between the monitoring agents, responsible for
recording the alleged violations of judicial rules, and the criminal enforcement
judge, in charge of imposing penalties, the author points out the true “hierarchical
inversion” that derives from it: the monitoring agents are the only operators capable
of determining, with a fair amount of discretionary power, if such or such violation
is due to a flaw in the system or to a deliberate fault by its user, liable to more serious
penalties. The judge, as well as the monitored individuals themselves, can do no
more than take note of this assessment, which, according to the reports collected by
the author, quite often leads to unjustified sanctions.
For readers from outside Brazil, however, the most remarkable perverse effect of
implementing EM in this country is undoubtedly the evidence that the use of an
anklet constitutes a kind of criminal marker that, just like the ancient branding in hot
iron, identifies its wearer as a felon in the eyes of the general public. It is evident that
this trait can be more or less observed in all countries, driving many of its users to
hide their anklets from the public eye. However, to my knowledge, Brazil is the only
country where this situation poses a risk of death to those wearing the EM device,
either by making them potential targets for militia groups, as in the case of Rio de
Janeiro, or for criminal gangs that control certain territories in Ceará and São Paulo
(and which, in order to recognize their members or sympathizers, require that they
wear the anklet on their right or left leg, depending on which gang they belong to).
Hence, far from representing, as is often the case in other countries, a moderate
form of punishment aimed at keeping the individual in his or her social environ-
ment, EM in Brazil is, on the contrary, an intensification of control, pushing the
bearer into such a Kafkaesque situation that some may even prefer to be sent back
to prison.
Foreword: Perverse Effects of an Alternative Sanction xi
These are just some of the gems in this book – which will surely set a milestone –
and I leave it to the reader to realize the price of becoming, in accordance with
Ricardo Campello’s apt formulation, “one’s own jailer.”
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique René Lévy

Paris, France
Foreword: The Labyrinth Beyond the Bars
“ (...) What counts is that we are at the beginning of something. In the prison system: the
attempt to find penalties of “substitution,” at least for petty crimes, and the use of an elec-
tronic collar, that force the convicted person to stay at home during certain hours. (...) Gilles
Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control1
Electronic monitoring (EM) of people convicted or prosecuted by the justice

system has been discussed and implemented as part of contemporary criminal poli-
cies in several countries. It consists in the use of transmitter equipment, attached to
the bodies of those under control, which enables monitoring, in an open environ-
ment, the positioning of these individuals, by means of radiofrequency or satellite
tracking technologies. Doctrinal issues are often discussed regarding the use of EM
in the field of crime control, its effects in terms of the dissemination of a certain
culture of control nowadays, its articulation with concrete dynamics of contempo-
rary punishment practices, such as the increase in incarceration rates, among many
other aspects. In Brazil, electronic surveillance in the domain of criminal justice
was made possible by the approval, in 2010, of Federal Law 12,258.
In his investigation of EM in Brazil, now published as a book, Ricardo Campello
does not lose sight of these multiple issues, but rather develops an original socio-
logical look at the use of this device, at the same time sociotechnical and political,
a new metamorphosis in punitive methods in the contemporary world. Michel
Foucault provides a notion that helps to understand Campello’s peculiar approach to
EM: the dispositif. Especially in the so-called genealogical moment of his trajec-
tory, Foucault multiplies the characterizations based on this term: power dispositifs,
disciplinary dispositifs, knowledge dispositifs, sexuality dispositifs, etc. And a set
of descriptive elements are organized through it: it is about describing the network
of relations established among heterogeneous elements – discourses, institutions,
architectural proposals, laws, administrative regulations, philosophical, scientific,
moral statements, etc. – which are defined on the basis of a specific genesis and with
connections of various natures, as they seek to respond to certain historical
1
Deleuze, G. “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter, 1992), pp. 3–7, p. 7
(first published in l’Autre journal 1 May 1990).
xiii
xiv Foreword: The Labyrinth Beyond the Bars
challenges, but perpetually reconfigured in strategic terms.2 Approaching EM as a

dispositif thus implies pursuing this complex, contextualized description, but which,
at the same time, reveals patterns of connections and developments in a variety of
social power relations.
In view of this analytical intuition, the reader is invited to keep track of the mul-
tiple social dimensions affected by the EM policy, whether in terms of the discus-
sion and implementation of the legislation that lends legal and institutional support
to the new technology; or in terms of the growth of a market for surveillance and
security services, in which EM is included; or in terms of the way in which the
bureaucratic monitoring apparatuses work in different regions of the country, and
the effects they have on the individuals being monitored and their interactions with
other people in everyday life.
Thus, throughout the chapters of the book, different dimensions of the EM dis-
positif are dissected and the reader will be able to follow in detail, thanks to the
author’s creativity in employing several research methodologies – documentary
analysis, direct observation, interviews, quantitative data regarding monitored indi-
viduals across the country, among others – how the “layers” are arranged and pro-
jected in directions that alternately converge and diverge. The perverse effects and
damages caused by the use of this technology are also described, and they do not
seem to be negligible.
The path leading to Federal Law No. 12,258/10, authorizing the EM of convicts
in Brazil, is retraced, along with other aspects of the implementation of such a pol-
icy, which is gradually being applied to thousands of people in the country. The first
paradox is already evident in this discussion, as, while the new law was being
debated, an emphasis was placed on the “decarceration potential” of the policy,
which did not exactly come true, as the expansion of EM programs in subsequent
years did not result in a drop in incarceration rates. Thus, the suspicion raised by the
study is that EM is being applied in the country as a complementary element to
imprisonment, not to curb, but to expand and intensify penal control.
It is a given that, by putting into operation the machinery of remote surveillance,
EM mobilizes a network of justice bureaucrats, market agents, technical profession-
als, and prison system operators in the country. Campello keeps track of the arti-
facts, discourses, and actors in different Brazilian states: São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro,
Ceará, and Maranhão. His observation and analysis uncovers the inadequacies, the
flaws, and the course corrections that, in fact, make possible the reproduction of the
artifact as a whole. The curious observation made in Fortaleza, in the state of Ceará,
of a case in which a monitored person’s anklet signal was blocked, in which legal
operators, unfamiliar with the technologies employed, remain hostage to computer
2
Cf. Foucault, M. The History of Sexuality vol. 1: An Introduction. London: Allen Lane, 1979;
Castro, E. Vocabulário de Foucault. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2009.
Foreword: The Labyrinth Beyond the Bars xv
technicians’ explanations in order to decipher what had happened, is one of the

many examples found throughout the text of the complexity of the device, as well
as its opacities.
In turn, the size of the market for surveillance technologies, which is growing in
Brazil, is also explored. With the rising incarceration rate, punishment is becoming
an increasingly profitable business, and the advance of EM instruments and pro-
grams is likely to excite politicians and security entrepreneurs interested in the
profit opportunities that this new dimension of the dispositif will generate in the
country. As the author states, a new “window of opportunity” opens and the local
market will be able to supply sophisticated weapons for the declared war against
crime and for the maintenance of order, inside and outside prisons; a war that every-
one knows is causing an infinite number of deaths in Brazilian daily life.
On the other hand, the gigantic bureaucracy of criminal justice seeks to dominate
the technological shift stimulated by the use of electronic anklets, but not without
mishaps, as exemplified in the aforementioned scene of signal blocking observed in
the state of Ceará’s EM control room. the legislative regulation and the legal opera-
tors’ actions notwithstanding, the technological operation of the tracking systems
emerges as another “black box,” with its own semantics and technical intricacies
that are unfathomable to the layman. The inversion of hierarchies, whereby techni-
cians ultimately control aspects of the sentencing of those being monitored, is one
of the paradoxes unveiled by the research.
But how do the monitored react, those who are ultimately the clientele of the
device? Campello rightfully opens the study with the speech of those who are moni-
tored, but it is fair to say that the experience of being watched pervades the entire
investigation and is a kind of Ariadne’s thread that, if it falls short of providing a
meaning to this labyrinth of technologies, bureaucracies, and merchandise, perhaps
it reveals precisely the meaninglessness of this entire dynamic. Like being in the
center of the labyrinth, it is in the body of the monitored that the multiple layers of
the EM device overlap and produce what is invariably the result of any punishment:
suffering. It is the material effects of the electronic anklet that literally come to life:
the vibration, the change in color, the heat produced by the anklet tied to the body;
the perverse visibility that, in the very particular context of the so-called “world of
crime” in Brazil, places the monitored individual as a target for militias or gangs;
the resistance that is undeniable, but at times equally paradoxical, such as in the case
of the monitored man in Rio de Janeiro who decided to build a wall around his resi-
dence to prevent the neighbors from noticing that he was wearing the anklet.
In brief, the comprehensive research undertaken, and thoroughly described here,
reveals to the reader some of the multiple dimensions of this little known experi-
ence – and that in Brazil only attained visibility, with a clearly distorted perception,
with the ill-fated Operation Car Wash – involving EM in the criminal justice system.
Based on this, it is certainly justified to revisit the traditional questions, regarding
the role of EM in criminal policy, its effects on incarceration, and even as one of the
xvi Foreword: The Labyrinth Beyond the Bars
options available in the context of punitive practices and institutions in contempo-

rary times. But it is hardly possible to remain indifferent to the suffering of those
who undergo such policies as the subjects being monitored, as this suffering is not
merely a remnant, a residue, or a leftover of certain abstract measures but rather
what is deliberately pursued throughout the labyrinth.
University of São Paulo Marcos César Alvarez

São Paulo, SP, Brazil
This work won the 2020 Prize for Scientific Works, Theses, and Dissertations of the Associação
Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Ciências Sociais (ANPOCS), and received an
Honorable Mention in the 2020 Theses Prize of the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal
de Nível Superior (CAPES).
This study was financed by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior –
Brasil (CAPES) – Finance Code 001, and by the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de
São Paulo (FAPESP) – Process 2020/12374-6
xvii
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the Graduate Program in Sociology at the University of São
Paulo (PPGS-USP) and the Centre de recherches Sociologiques sur le Droit et les
Institutions Pénales (CESDIP – UVSQ/CY Cergy Paris Univ./U. Paris-Saclay/
CNRS/Min de la Justice), which hosted this research. I would like to express my
special thanks to Professor Marcos César Alvarez, Coordinator of the Center for the
Study of Violence at the University of São Paulo (NEV/USP), and Full Professor at
the Department of Sociology at the University of São Paulo (DS/USP). I also extend
my sincere thanks to René Lévy, Director Emeritus of Research at the Centre
national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), and member of CESDIP. Finally, I
express my gratitude to Professor Susana Durão, Associate Professor of
Anthropology at the Institute of Philosophy and Humanities at the State University
of Campinas (IFCH/UNICAMP), and Senior Fellow Researcher at the Center for
Public Policy Studies at the State University of Campinas (NEPP/UNICAMP).
xix
Contents
1 Introduction�� 1
1.1 Initial Outline�� 3
1.2 Methodological Approach�� 8
1.3 Chapters�� 12
References�� 15
2 Short Circuit�� 17
2.1 Human–Machine Interface�� 17
2.2 The Jailer of Oneself�� 24
2.3 Connecting Cog�� 32
2.4 The Marked Body �� 37
References�� 43
3 Lines of Emergence�� 47
3.1 Epistemological Progeny: Psychotechnology�� 47
3.2 Science Fiction and Neoliberal Penality �� 54
3.3 Martial Traces: Geopositioning as a Technology of War�� 63
References�� 68
4 Diagrammatic Compositions�� 71
4.1 It’s a Signal Blockage �� 71
4.2 Superimposed Diagrams �� 80
4.3 Silicon and Rubble�� 86
References�� 94
5 Converging Enunciations�� 97
5.1 Eclectic Discourses and the PCC Attacks�� 97
5.2 Unlikely Origins�� 106
5.3 The Trade Show�� 111
References�� 120
xxi
xxii Contents
6 Out of Control�� 123

6.1 Success in Failure �� 123
6.2 Out of Control �� 129
References�� 135
Afterword�� 137
Index�� 141
Chapter 1
Introduction
Federal Senate, 29 March 2007.

Session Chamber, Senator Magno Malta:
Prison is no longer the perfect means of control. It is outdated because it is still based on a
rigid space. The territorial limit imposed by prison is no longer a positive aspect of criminal
control, but an inconvenience, since it is unsustainable for the state to keep the countless
convicted persons incarcerated. Some countries, such as the United States of America,
France and Portugal, already use monitoring systems, requiring the use of electronic brace-
lets to control offenders under community penalties. Many arguments favorable to the use of
this type of criminal control are being discussed, such as the better social integration of
offenders, avoiding the breakdown of family ties and loss of employment, the fight against
prison overcrowding and, in addition to all else, cost savings, since the so-called “electronic
bracelet” would cost 22 euros per day, as opposed to 63 euros per day of detention (…).
Electronic control emerges to overcome the limitations of prisons, and can be universalized
(…) We must create systems that do not have the drawbacks of prison, such as the impossibil-
ity of rapid expansion and very high cost (…). The electronic monitoring of offenders,
already socially accepted in some countries, can efficiently replace prison (…). It would be
a kind of control established through satellite, without limits, present in the body of the indi-
vidual wherever it goes. Thus, we call on our illustrious peers to approve this project, which,
if adopted, will allow the reduction of financial costs for prisons, the reduction of prison
overcrowding, and a faster re-socialization of the convict. (Malta 2007, pp. 2–3)
The appeal launched by Senator Magno Malta was part of the text underlying sen-
ate draft bill no. 175/07, one of the main legal sources of federal law no. 12,258/10,
approving the electronic monitoring (EM) of convicts in Brazil. Adopted on 15 June
2010, the new law amended the penal execution law 7.210/84, specifying that, in
cases of temporary release from the semi-open regime and when home detention is
ordered, the judge may impose “supervision” through “electronic monitoring” (law
7.210/84, article 146-B). Less than a year after EM was authorized in the context of
criminal enforcement, its possibilities of application were extended to pre-trial
restraining orders, through federal law 12,403/11, sanctioned on 4 May 2011.
Today, the so-called telematic monitoring of individuals sentenced or processed
by the criminal justice system is applied to more than 80,300 convicts all over
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 1

R. U. Campello, Short Circuit, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21859-0_1
2 1 Introduction
Brazil, according to data presented by the national penitentiary department

(Departamento Penitenciário Nacional, DEPEN).1 Introduced against the backdrop
of the of the gradual collapse of the prison system, the measure raises questions
about current transformations in practices of control and punishment, prompting
concerns about both its effects on penal policy and its impacts on the daily lives of
individuals subjected to monitoring programs.
This book analyzes the social as well as the political consequences of EM poli-
cies in contemporary Brazil. It draws upon both ethnographic and non-ethnographic
sources, including participant observations, semi-structured interviews, legislative
and regulatory documents, and quantitative data. This multidimensional approach
has been chosen so as to do justice to the heterogeneous nature of the phenomenon
in question, comprising and conflating technical, political, epistemological, and
subjective layers.
Against this backdrop, research has been evolving along three main investigative
axes: (1) analyzing EM policies in Brazil and understanding their development and
application, notably against their declared purpose of de-incarceration; (2) scruti-
nizing the discourses and rationalities invoked to justify EM policies, in articulation
with the emergence and consolidation of a new economy of punishment; and (3)
comprehending the effects of EM policies on the everyday life of monitored indi-
viduals, bearing in mind the modes of subjectivation promoted by new technologies
of penal control. All three axes served as methodological guidelines orienting the
production of data in the field and the collection of pertinent documents. More than
organizing demarcations, they constituted research tools in themselves, and through-
out the present book a whole series of mutual intersections shall be elaborated.
The underlying issue of the first axis consists in the overcrowding of the Brazilian
prison system, whose absolute population is currently the third largest on the plan-
et.2 Precarious institutions and inhuman prison conditions transform the penal sys-
tem into an incubator of cruelty, thus announcing the urgency of reconsidering the
penal policies adopted so far. The second axis is devoted to analyzing the discursive
practices that have facilitated the articulation and diffusion of EM policies in Brazil,
not least in order to contextualize them within an international trend towards a
novel, deterritorialized politics of punishment. It is thus concerned with identifying
the technological, psychological, and penological knowledge that undergirds EM
policies. Finally, the specific interest that defines the third axis refers to the impact
of EM policies on the daily lives of monitored convicts in Brazil. Indeed, very little
research has been conducted so far concerning the perceptions and experiences of
those who are subject to this new type of penal regime.3 Therefore, the conversations
and encounters with monitored convicts have yielded vital insights apt to expand
and complement previous analyses of Brazilian EM policies.
1
Available at: https://www.gov.br/depen/pt-br/servicos/sisdepen. Accessed on 11 Aug 2022.
2
Ibid.
3
Among the few Brazilian publications that have examined the subjective experiences of moni-
tored convicts, the works of Lancellotti (2018), Souza (2019), and Maciel (2021) deserve special
mention.
1.1 Initial Outline 3
The research underlying the present book was conducted as part of the collective
project “The government of conflict in the production of the contemporary city: the
São Paulo experience” (A gestão do conflito na produção da cidade contemporânea:
a experiência paulista) coordinated by Vera da Silva Telles at the University of São
Paulo’s sociology department (DS-USP) and financed by the Fundação de Amparo
à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP). More specifically, the investigation
presented in what follows is part of a research effort aimed at analyzing the
“Rearticulation of dispositifs of security, punishment, and incarceration”
(Rearticulação dos dispositivos de segurança, punição e encarceramento). The
conversations and debates with my fellow researchers are of crucial importance to
the argument made in the present book.
Bibliographic research has been conducted at the Centre de recherches soci-
ologiques sur le Droit et les Institutions Pénales (CESDIP, France), supervised by
René Lévy (CESDIP/CNRS) and supported by a Bolsa Estágio de Pesquisa no
Exterior (BEPE) granted by FAPESP. Accessing the library at CESDIP has turned
out to be fundamental to elaborating the analytical tools underpinning the present
study, especially when considering the still incipient research on EM policies in the
Brazilian context.
This book would have been impossible without the steady support of Marcos
César Alvarez (DS-USP), whose patient guidance and tireless encouragement car-
ried me through the different stages of research, from delineating the abovemen-
tioned conceptual axes to morphologically refining the final text.
In what follows, I shall present a brief contextualization of the research topic,
with the purpose of providing a general outline concerning the implementation of
EM policies in Brazil and some of its major implications.
1.1 Initial Outline
To start with a working definition, EM consists in the use of telematic transmitting

equipment enabling the automated tracking of people convicted or otherwise being
processed by the criminal justice system. It may draw upon radiofrequency tech-
nologies, allowing the detection of the presence or absence of a monitored individ-
ual within a designated space (fixed monitoring), or on satellite tracking systems,
identifying the location of the individual continuously on a global scale (mobile or
continuous monitoring) (Lévy 2019).
In Brazil, legal authorities have opted for a combination of the two approaches,
integrating GPS (Global Positioning System) and GPRS (General Packet Radio
Services) technologies. A tether is attached to the monitored person’s ankle, calcu-
lating his or her position and sending the geolocation information to a monitoring
center in real time. A so-called inclusion area is determined by the court, defining
the perimeter within which the monitored person is obliged to remain. Likewise,
exclusion areas can be determined, which must not be trespassed by the monitored
individual. If any kind of violation is detected, an alarm goes off at the monitoring
4 1 Introduction
center and the judge in charge is informed immediately. The general purpose of the
device thus consists in the open-air control of people subject to the criminal jus-
tice system.
The first experiments with the remote tracking of ‘delinquent’ individuals date
back to a research program led by Ralph and Robert Schwitzgebel, members of the
Scientific Committee on Psychological Experimentation at Harvard University. In
1964, the Schwitzgebels started working on a system capable of remotely detecting
the physical position and the neurological state of individuals under psychothera-
peutic treatment (Schwitzgebel et al. 1964). They used a combination of data trans-
mission technologies involving telecommunications, computer science, and
electronic engineering; that is, a series of applied sciences that would later merge
into the field of telematics. The overarching goal consisted in developing a localiza-
tion and communication system geared toward criminals, psychiatric patients, or
people suffering from neurological disorders (Fox 1987).
In the early 1980s, US judge Jack Love of Albuquerque, New Mexico, first
implemented an EM device for the specific purposes of the criminal justice system.
Love was inspired by a Spiderman comic book, in which the villain attached a
tracking apparatus to the hero’s arm. He convinced entrepreneur Michael Goss, an
expert in electronic engineering, to manufacture a similar mechanism to monitor
prisoners in his jurisdiction (Whitfield 2001; Burrel and Gable 2008; Lilly and
Nellis 2013). Goss then came up with a transmitting device detecting the proximity
of the convict to the monitoring center and issuing alerts in case of noncompliance
with the rules defined. The first tests were considered a success and the system was
further improved throughout the following years (Lilly and Nellis 2013). Building
on Love’s pioneering experience, EM devices quickly spread across the USA. By
1985, over 20 states had adopted some kind of EM system. By 1998, a total of
95,000 devices had been sold or leased in the USA (Whitfield 2001). In 2006, about
100,000 people were being monitored throughout the country (Journal of Offender
Monitoring 2006). Ten years later, it was estimated that a total of 125,000 persons
were monitored each year in the USA (Pew 2016).
From the USA, the device was exported to Canada and the UK as early as the late
1980s (Wallace-Cappreta and Roberts 2013; Mair and Nellis 2013). Throughout the
1990s, countries such as Australia, Sweden, France, Belgium, Spain, Argentina, and
New Zealand started to test the device. By the beginning of the twenty-first century,
criminal tracking programs had been implemented on four continents of the planet.
Today, they are being deployed in a wide variety of penal contexts from Western and
Eastern Europe to South Africa, Senegal, Israel, South Korea, Japan, Colombia,
Chile, and Brazil (Leal 2011; Nellis et al. 2013; Lévy et al. 2019).
The Brazilian case is amongst the most recent. The introduction of EM into the
country’s legal system took place in June 2010, with the approval of federal law
12,258. It stated that electronic surveillance would become applicable in cases of
sentencing to the semi-open regime or home detention. Thus, temporary exits from
semi-open regime units – occasions when prisoners in progression have the right to
be with their families and friends on specific dates (law 7.210/84, art. 122) – could
now be monitored electronically. Similarly, the conditions for serving sentences in
home detention, relating to the convict’s hours of circulation and confinement,

would be subject to monitoring, at the discretion of the criminal judge. In May
2011, the approval of federal law 12,403/11 (law of pre-trial custody) included EM
among the pre-trial supervision orders other than imprisonment (article 319, IX).
From then on, prosecuted persons awaiting trial could be subjected to electronic
surveillance. The purpose was to create tools to reduce the high rate of provisional
detainees, which corresponded, at the time, to about 40% of the Brazilian prison
population.4 The inclusion of monitoring as a pre-trial supervision order also made
it possible to use it to control emergency protective measures in cases of domestic
violence against women under law 11.340/06 (the so-called Maria da Penha law).
In this case, the mechanism would be used to supervise the aggressor’s position in
relation to the victim.
It should be noted, from the outset, that the implementation of EM in Brazil was
backed by the need to develop new penal techniques in face of the country’s prison
system crisis at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The recurrence of riots and
the proliferation of “criminal factions” inside prisons alarmed authorities and soci-
ety in general. The high economic costs incurred by imprisonment and its ineffec-
tiveness as an instrument for resocializing criminals called for alternatives to
incarceration. In this sense, the arguments that informed the implementation of EM
in Brazil emphasized the possibilities of replacing imprisonment with telemetric
control. The political campaigns and bills that led to adoption of the policy high-
lighted the “decarceration potential” of EM, which would remove from prison cer-
tain individuals who did not represent a “real danger” to society (Malta 2007;
Mercadante 2007).
However, the official data on the evolution of the prison population and the prog-
ress of EM programs in Brazil reveal an increase in the number of prisoners coincid-
ing with the spread of electronic tethers. The development and expansion of the
policy have gone along with an absolute increase in incarceration rates. According
to DEPEN, an executive body linked to the ministry of justice and public safety
(Ministério da Justiça e Segurança Pública, MJSP), in 2009, about a year before the
implementation of monitoring programs, the total number of prisoners was 469,500.
By June 2021, this number had reached a staggering 679,100. Whereas in 2009
there were 247 prisoners for every 100,000 inhabitants in Brazil, by the year 2021
this rate had climbed to 321. At the same time, the proliferation of EM entailed that
there would be 80,332 people monitored by Brazil’s penal system.5
Therefore, one argument presented in this book emphasizes that EM is being
applied as a complementary measure to imprisonment, contributing to the expan-
sion and intensification of control while failing to fulfill its stated aim of decarcera-
tion. On the one hand, there has been an increase in the amount of people subjected
to criminal justice, both within and beyond prison walls. On the other, there has
been an intensification of surveillance mechanisms enabling an ‘open’ penal regime
4
Available at: https://www.gov.br/depen/pt-br/servicos/sisdepen. Accessed on 11 Apr 2022.
5
Ibid.
6 1 Introduction
supervised by electronic tracking systems. The constellation is characterized by a

double movement of centrifugal expansion and centripetal densification: although
the volume of people absorbed by the penal system increases, its control networks
become progressively stricter, resulting in a “net widening” effect, as defined by
South African criminologist Stanley Cohen (1985). Nevertheless, the policy contin-
ues to expand and there are growing investments aimed at institutionalizing it.
Representatives of the executive, legislative, and judiciary branches are committed
to promoting its use and universalization.
Electronic tethers gained unprecedented visibility in Brazil with the monitoring
of politicians and businessmen accused of corruption and money laundering, amid
the so-called operação lava-jato (“operation car wash”), conducted by the federal
police since 2014. The device has become an option for the oversight of penal sanc-
tions applied to “white-collar crimes.” In this context, its use has been publicly
associated with emblematic cases of embezzlement, bribery, misappropriation of
public funds, and currency evasion. However, the vast majority of monitored people
are individuals who are far from the major corruption and public money laundering
circuits. For this reason, it has to be emphasized that this book does not address
cases of white-collar crime. On the contrary, what shall be addressed is the more
systematic and quotidian use of the electronic tether as it affects prisoners in pro-
gression or under extra-jail pre-trial orders. Reproducing a century-old bias of
Brazil’s criminal justice system, these specific penal measures predominantly hit
the poor, the Black, and the peripheral.6
Although managing the surveillance of convicted or prosecuted persons is the
responsibility of the state governments, the field of EM has from the very beginning
been a hotbed of outsourcing and privatization. A whole ecology of private compa-
nies is now devoted to developing equipment, making infrastructure available, and
providing the necessary maintenance to keep the systems up and running. The larg-
est company in both Brazil and South America is Spacecom Monitoramento Ltda.,
based in the southern city of Curitiba. Its tracking system, called SAC24 (Sistema
de Acompanhamento de Custódia 24 horas, i.e., 24-hour custody monitoring sys-
tem), is based on a set of hard- and software that integrates telecommunication and
geoprocessing technologies.7 The company’s specific degree of involvement varies
according to the state and the contracts established with the respective secretariats
of justice and penitentiary administration.
Traversing the juridico-political discussions involving the issue of electronic sur-
veillance, the proliferation of technological devices aimed at controlling crime and
criminals is largely driven by the rise of the punishment market. Punishment is a
profitable business and the Brazilian market keeps growing, boosted by the demand
for ever more prison units, the outsourcing of prison services, and the elaboration of
6
In Brazil, there is no legal requirement for the application of monitoring to correspond to a spe-
cific crime or criminal typification. The device is used according to the nature and regime of the
judicial provision (criminal or pre-trial; open, semi-open, or home regime).
7
Spacecom. Sistema SAC24 – Apresentação. Available at: http://spacecom.com.br/?s=mon.
Accessed on 6 Jan 2017.
new techniques of out-of-prison control (Minhoto 2000). Between 2011 and 2015,
Spacecom’s turnover grew by 296%, notably through the company’s stakes in the
EM market.8 Feeding on the prison crisis as the driving force of its expansion, the
industry of electronic crime control systems has been consolidating its commitment
to turn society into some kind of open-air prison, as Nils Christie (1993) warned
almost three decades ago.
From a political point of view, the present book analyzes the introduction of
market dynamics into the field of punishment as a key vector of what Michel
Foucault called neoliberal governmentality (Foucault 2004, 2007). It refers to the
rational and strategic guideline that organizes the ways in which the governing of
individuals and populations is carried out, based on the politico-economic calcula-
tion that balances costs and benefits, establishing economic rationality as the com-
mon denominator of the legal, political, and the social sphere. Embedded in the
criminal justice system – and also derived from it – the neoliberal rationality of
contemporary government fosters the development of new penal technologies in
response to the various economic, political, and social obstacles generated by the
already outdated disciplinary techniques of intramural confinement. On the one
hand, prison is considered a budgetary problem, too costly for the State’s cash-
strapped coffers. On the other hand, high recidivism rates reveal the inefficiency of
prison in “resocializing” those cast into it, driving the demand for cost-effective
solutions through minimal penal interventions. To this end, neoliberal governmen-
tality demands new forms of control that extend beyond prison, guided by evalua-
tive projections of cost and efficiency (Foucault 2004; Garland 2002; Aviram 2016).
This particular form of political order-making, defined as neoliberal governmen-
tality, inevitably entails specific modes of subjectivation (Brown 2005; Lazzarato
2014; Dardot and Laval 2016). If the penal policy is formulated and instituted within
a utilitarian framework that weighs and balances advantages and disadvantages, the
penalized subject is also interpellated according to this model, governed as a ratio-
nal agent and responsible for the penalty imposed upon its body. The individual
emerges from the same epistemological grid through which a specific strategy of
government is produced. Punitive intervention appears as a gradient of risks and
benefits to be appraised and managed by the punished subject itself. Prison and
liberty turn into opposite ends of an individual and prospective scale whose rider is
the monitored subject. With this in mind, the observation of monitored individuals
in the course of this research gives rise to an exercise of understanding and analyz-
ing EM as a technology of power as well as a technology of the self. The monitoring
device conveys exercises of power to the extent that it triggers the corresponding
processes of subjectivation (Staples and Decker 2008; Razac 2013).
By breaking down and taking a deeper look at these general issues, the present
book organizes the research findings on the different technical, political, epistemo-
logical, and subjective elements that constitute EM systems in Brazil, so as to
8
O Globo. Uso de tornozeleiras eletrônicas dispara e mercado cresce quase 300%. Available at:
http://oglobo.globo.com/brasil/uso-de-tornozeleiras-eletronicas-dispara-mercado-cresce-
quase-300-19637514. Accessed on 5 Dec 2016.
8 1 Introduction
identify their current effects, characteristics, and functionalities, which now seem to
be shifting away from their purported strategic function of replacing imprisonment.
In this sense, one last consideration before turning to the methodological outline of
the research concerns the specific features EM has acquired in the Brazilian urban
and prison context. Here, the high technology of remote surveillance systems is
coupled with the perennial archaism of the country’s prison institutions and the
explicit brutality of historical urban violence. The contrast between the old and the
new – the filthy and the aseptic – is sharp when one takes a close look at the lines
and wires that interconnect the georeferenced tracking techniques and the precari-
ous facilities consisting of prison cells, beams, and yards. Likewise, the apparent
(and only apparent) discrepancy between the innovative practices of remote surveil-
lance and the perpetuation of torture and extralegal execution as entrenched tech-
niques of conflict management is one of the main aspects to be highlighted with
regard to the Brazilian case. By adjusting to local prison structures and to the
dynamics of urban armed conflict dominated by extermination groups, prison ‘fac-
tions’ and abusive State forces, electronic control is integrated into the Brazilian
carceral complex and its repertoire of violence.
1.2 Methodological Approach
At the dawn of the historical process of industrialization in Western Europe, in the

midst of the transformations triggered by the emergence of factory production,
workers in the spinning and weaving industries were confronted with the onset of
the phenomenon of labor automation, as machines came to occupy production
spaces with superhuman efficiency. Workers’ bodies were gradually and systemati-
cally replaced by machine production. The mechanized universe of the industry
now dictated the rules of work practice. In response to this, the resistance strategy
of an underground movement of British workers consisted in destroying the machin-
ery with which the industrial means of production had been equipped. Known as
Luddites,9 the workers who incited the riots would storm the factories at night and
destroy the weaving mills. Smashing the machines that filled the vast, newly
installed warehouses seemed to them a logical attitude in view of the wave of unem-
ployment during the early days of the Industrial Revolution.
Nearly two centuries later, in the mid-1980s, the American philosopher Langdon
Winner (1978, 1986) revisited the Luddite experience to propose an analytical pro-
cedure capable of detecting the political nature of new technologies. Also inspired
by Jacques Ellul’s (2008, 2017) “philosophy of techniques,” Winner suggests
engaging in an epistemological Luddism, whereby technological mechanisms are
dismantled through political–philosophical analysis. For him, technological
9
The term “Luddite” derives from the fictional character Ned Ludd, who was conceived by the
labor movement itself for the purpose of spreading its ideas and activities in workers’ circles
(Winner 1978).
1.2 Methodological Approach 9
artifacts are not politically neutral. Technology itself implies a form of politics. It is
up to the analyst to detect the imperatives installed in the projects, programs, and
protocols that constitute a given technology. Pursuing Winner’s suggestions, the
purpose of this book is to analytically disassemble EM devices used by the Brazilian
criminal justice system and decode the power relations inscribed in them. The aim
is to observe its different components and the connections deemed crucial to the
understanding of its social and political operation.
To this end, the basic methodological instrument mobilized during the research
consisted of the articulation between ethnographic research and genealogical analy-
sis. Direct observation and documentary reconstitution make up the basic method
employed throughout the investigative work. As proposed by Didier Fassin (2017),
the complementary association between ethnography and genealogy helps to iden-
tify the relationships established between the concrete functioning of a given policy
and the programmatic layers of its conception; its everyday process of materializa-
tion and its fundamental conditions of historical emergence. With regard to the
object of study examined here, this methodological proposal highlights the links
between the operationalization of EM programs, the purposes ascribed to it, and the
various effects generated by its use. Combining ethnography and genealogy in the
manner of Fassin, with Winner’s epistemological Luddism as a transversal proce-
dure, makes it possible to perform an analytical disassembling of the EM devices
and a detailed study of their different elements.
The ethnographic research was carried out between the years 2015 and 2019 in
EM centers and control rooms, semi-open regime prison units, provisional deten-
tion centers, criminal execution courts, penal alternatives centers, and urban spaces
through which my monitored interlocutors circulated. The main goals of the field-
work were to identify the operationalization of electronic surveillance and its
impacts on the lives of people subjected to its use. In order to identify the particular
aspects of the EM policy in different regions of the country and some of its general
effects, the research was conducted in the states of São Paulo, Maranhão, Rio de
Janeiro, and Ceará. I should clarify, thus, that prison policy in Brazil is a responsi-
bility of the federal states, and it has its own distinct administrative traits in each
unit of the federation. Despite complying with national regulations, the manage-
ment of the EM programs and the impacts of their use differ considerably according
to state contexts. In each state where the field research was carried out, I established
dialogues with people being monitored, their families, technical operators of moni-
toring systems, correctional officers, psychologists, and social workers who work in
centers of penal alternatives, as well as judges of penal execution.
I must emphasize that the development of this research was only possible, both
practically and ethically, because of the partnership and engagement I established
with the Prison Pastoral Care (Pastoral Carcerária) in the State of São Paulo. This
is an organization linked to the Catholic Church and the National Confederation of
Brazilian Bishops (Confederação Nacional dos Bispos do Brasil, CNBB), whose
purpose is to provide religious, juridical, and humanitarian assistance to
10 1 Introduction
incarcerated people in the country.10 As an atheist researcher, my activities in this

organization were limited to legal and humanitarian support to prisoners and moni-
tored people, associated with the research work. It was as an agent of the Prison
Pastoral Care that I had access to the people being monitored and to the prison units
where I did fieldwork. It was through this organization and its commitment to pris-
oners that I was able to do this work, given the difficulties and obstacles imposed by
the prison authorities to research activities in the context of Brazilian prisons. From
that point on, the words that were entrusted to me implied and still imply being side
by side, trying to respond as best I could to some urgent and basic needs of those
with whom I established these dialogues – either by making contact with the fami-
lies of prisoners or by seeking information about their files; either by acknowledg-
ing their anguish and frequent troubles or by referring to the competent authorities
the cases of torture and similar situations that were reported to me. Thus, my inves-
tigative work was permanently permeated by an ethical and political engagement
that is reflected in the final result presented in this book and in the emphasis I give
to the perspective of those imprisoned or monitored.11 The experiences of my moni-
tored or incarcerated interlocutors constitute the starting point and guiding force of
my analytical efforts.
Parallel to the field work, the genealogical research had as empirical basis: docu-
ments and legislative and normative debates regarding EM in Brazil; documental
records by the main political, legal, and scientific agents who designed the first
monitoring systems in the USA and those who played a leading role in its early
introduction into the Brazilian criminal justice system; statistical data regarding the
evolution of the EM policy in the federal units – from the moment of its implemen-
tation until today; and the review of national and international literature on EM. The
goals of the genealogical work developed here consisted, on the one hand, in iden-
tifying the discourses and rationalities that informed the conception, implementa-
tion, and application of EM devices and, on the other hand, in examining their
historical evolution and their relationship with the prison system. The interfaces
between prison and electronic control constitute a focus of special interest and rel-
evance in this study.For the analysis of the legislative discussions, I review the bills
that preceded the approval of EM at the federal level, as well as the transcripts of the
sessions held in the Chamber of Deputies and in the Federal Senate around the bill
that culminated in its enactment by the President of the Republic. This documenta-
tion is cross-referenced with the Diagnósticos e Modelos de Gestão da Política de
Monitoração Eletrônica de Pessoas (Diagnoses and Management Models of the
Policy of Electronic Monitoring of People), produced by the National Executive
Branch, constituting the basic material upon which I develop the analysis of the
official justifications that provide political guidance and regulatory support for EM
10
On the work developed by the Prison Pastoral Care (Pastoral Carcerária) in Brazil, see: https://
carceraria.org.br. Accessed on 12 Apr 2022.
11
We develop a collective reflection on the intersections between research and political action
inside prisons in Epistemopolíticas do dispositivo carcerário paulista: refletindo sobre experiên-
cias de pesquisa-intervenção junto à Pastoral Carcerária (Godoi et al. 2020).
1.2 Methodological Approach 11
in Brazil. To track the progress of the monitoring programs in the country, quantita-
tive information provided by the State Secretariats of Justice and Penitentiary
Administration was collected and systematized. These data were then compared
with the fluctuation of incarceration rates, published by the National Penitentiary
Department (Departamento Penitenciário Nacional, DEPEN), in an effort to
observe the relationships between the statistical growth of incarceration and moni-
toring in Brazil and thus detect some of the macrosociological connections between
these two forms of punitive practice.
In this way, the heterogeneity of the empirical material and the research tech-
niques mobilized in this research made it possible to conduct a study of the different
technical and political, objective and subjective, discursive and nondiscursive com-
ponents that define EM and its configuration in the Brazilian context. Established
upon the interaction between electronic systems, governmental institutions, legal
propositions, scientific foundations, operators, and users of the monitoring systems,
the object examined here required the use of different research procedures and an
analytical and expository work of articulation between them. It is in this sense that
this book has as its main analytical tool the notion of dispositif, as devised by Michel
Foucault (1979, 1980, 1994, 1995) and further expanded by Gilles Deleuze (1992)
and Thomas Lemke (2018). This is the central analytical node through which this
research unfolds. Understood as a dispositif, EM ceases to be taken as a mere tech-
nical or legal apparatus, and becomes instead scrutinized as a connecting bundle
that is established between machines, programs, laws, institutions, and enunciations
that are as heterogeneous as they are versatile. Accordingly, a dispositif is “the sys-
tem of relations that can be established between these elements” (Foucault 1980,
p. 194). This notion emerges, therefore, as an apt tool within the framework of an
analytical and methodological strategy that accounts for the multifaceted nature of
the research subject.
From a genealogical point of view, and considering the definition provided by
Foucault, according to which a dispositif is imbued with the dominant strategic
function of responding to a certain urgency (Ibid.), we investigate a specific disposi-
tif that was given the elementary strategic function of responding to the urgencies
arising from the crisis of the means of confinement. Open-air control emerges as a
projected solution to the social, economic, and political problems raised by the
demographic explosion of prison systems and by the pragmatic limits of its expan-
sion. As we will see, this original functionality is today reinterpreted and rearticu-
lated on the basis of the materialization and concrete use of EM, whose effects stray
from the function that was originally assigned to it, pointing to new functionalities,
in a process of functional overdetermination, typical of the development of a device
as such (Foucault 1979; Lemke 2018). Furthermore, I also draw attention to the
views of Deleuze (1992), when the philosopher defines the concept of dispositif as
a multilinear set within and based on which power relations, knowledge production,
and lines of subjectivation are established. It is a complex agency with political,
epistemological, and subjective dimensions. This specific description has informed
the three axes of investigation that guided this research, based on the following
initial questions: what are the power relations mobilized by the EM of offenders in
12 1 Introduction
Brazil? Which discourses and rationalities does it respond to and feed back? What
are the processes of subjectivation triggered by the dispositif under analysis?
Without any claims of exhausting these questions, the research developed based
on them.
Next, I present a brief description of the chapters in this book and their respective
goals, aligned with the set of questions that steered the research effort.
1.3 Chapters
This book is organized into five chapters, each of them displaying one predominant
methodological approach, alternating between ethnography (Chaps. 2, 4, and 6) and
genealogy (Chaps. 3 and 5). The internal sections enjoy a certain degree of auton-
omy and may be read separately. They are assembled according to the main argu-
ment developed in the respective chapters.
The second chapter elaborates some of the primary questions that informed the
research development. Ethnographic above all, it focuses on the impact of EM on
the daily lives of convicts both within and beyond prison walls. Its first section
describes the functioning of EM technology from the perspective of convicts serv-
ing their sentences in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, emphasizing the conflicted
synergy of the monitored body and the apparatus that organizes its circulation. The
common thread consists in the personal account of Anderson, subject to EM while
serving his sentence in metropolitan São Paulo. Following on, the second section of
the chapter analyzes the modes of subjectivation implied in EM and their articula-
tion with the physical violence endemic to São Paulo’s carceral complex. Departing
from the experience of Deivid, a convict who was tortured by prison guards owing
to a supposed infringement of his judicially imposed motion profile, I draw inspira-
tion from several authors dealing with the neoliberal paradigm of ‘individualized
responsibilization’ and show how, in the Brazilian penal system, this paradigm is
mediated through an excess of institutionalized violence. The third part draws upon
field research conducted in Maranhão, one of Brazil’s poorest states. The section
raises questions about the simultaneity between ‘modernization’ and precariousness
in Maranhão’s penal system and discusses the effects of power and de-subjectivation
implied by electronic surveillance programs. Finally, the fourth part of the chapter
is devoted to the less obvious effects of EM devices upon convicts’ lives, notably as
they unfold in urban settings governed by criminal gangs, armed militias, and abu-
sive police forces. Primarily based upon the account of Sergio, a monitored indi-
vidual in the state of Rio de Janeiro, I show how the subject marked and stigmatized
by the EM artifact becomes a steady target of persecutions and assaults, thus facing
a quasi-constant threat of death.
Chapter 3 is devoted to a genealogical critique of EM as a preeminent technology
of contemporary government. Taking into account the pertinent international litera-
ture, it offers a historical overview and a geographic shift as it analyzes the original
development of EM in the USA between the 1960s and the 2000s. The first part of
1.3 Chapters 13
the chapter is devoted to the development of early EM technologies, notably at

Harvard University’s Science Committee on Psychological Experimentation, under
the coordination of Ralph and Robert Schwitzgebel. Concentrating on the
Committee’s epistemological foundations and its penological preferences, it high-
lights how the group articulated behavioristic psychology with correctionalist ideals
through technological means. The following section discusses the role of popular
culture and science fiction when it comes to the emergence of new surveillance
technologies and the advent of EM against the backdrop of an emerging neoliberal
penality. It draws upon the case of Albuquerque judge Jack Love who, in the 1980s,
drew inspiration from a Spider-Man comic when developing the first EM system to
be officially used by the US criminal justice system. Subsequently, the closing sec-
tion of the chapter includes a brief history of the Global Positioning System (GPS)
of the US armed forces and argues that its development had a substantial impact
upon the development of EM technologies. First deployed during the 1991 Gulf
War, EM devices had been equipped with GPS receivers since 1999. With this
prominent amalgam of warfare and criminal justice in mind, the section then sets
out to analyze the tactical symbiosis of domestic and international security that
defines our globalized present.
Chapter 4 includes another block of ethnographic research as it analyzes the
configurations of interference and complementarity that unfold between EM and
incarceration. Although presented as a humane strategy to relieve Brazil’s congested
prison complex, in fact, EM has become a strategy of supplementary control and,
therefore, an effective expansion of the penal system itself. The first section draws
upon a participant observation conducted at Ceará State Electronic Monitoring Cell.
It describes the response of the shift to an incoming alert, provoked by a monitored
convict who supposedly had violated his decreed motion profile. The episode under-
scores some of the characteristics of the technology, especially concerning its politi-
cal as well as its sociotechnical opacity. The second part concentrates on the
deployment of EM in São Paulo state, notably among prisoners serving their sen-
tence under a semi-open regime. Based on data gathered during participant observa-
tions in semi-open prisons, with monitored convicts leaving in the morning for their
respective workplaces and returning in the evening to spend the night indoors, the
section provides ample material concerning the strategical synergies between EM
and physical incarceration. Statistical data are also discussed to corroborate the
simultaneous increase in both the quantity of convicts serving an EM regime and
São Paulo’s total prison population. The last section analyzes the evolution of the
EM program in Maranhão as a supposed panacea for the state prison crisis. Between
2010 and 2013, massacres and rebellions occurred in several local prisons, with
gory images of mutilated bodies and cut-off heads circulating in Brazilian news and
digital media. In 2014, local authorities presented EM as a silver bullet to resolve
the state’s prison crisis. Analyzing the evolution of EM programs in Maranhão, once
again statistical data are mobilized, proving the stable overpopulation of the state’s
prisons, in spite of various EM programs having been implemented over the past
few years.
14 1 Introduction
The fifth chapter revisits the book’s genealogical argument by examining how
EM became a desirable penal policy in the Brazilian context. In so doing, emphasis
is given to the juridico-political discourses and rationalities that accompanied
implementation of the technology. The first section of the chapter analyzes the argu-
ments invoked in the draft laws, which ultimately resulted in the authorization of
EM in Brazil, driven by a series of prison rebellions led by the country’s largest
criminal faction: the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC). As a strategy to restore
the capacity of State control over the penal system, three main rationales were
brought forward, namely (1) that community sanctions would facilitate social reha-
bilitation of the convicts; (2) that the implementation of EM would save costs; (3)
that the constant monitoring of prisoners would increase public security. The cross-
cutting argument presented by the lawmakers emphasized the opportunities for
reducing the prison population via EM. Following on, the second part is devoted to
the first experiments with EM and its subsequent institutionalization in the Brazilian
context. It identifies the main actors involved in the initial deployment of the tech-
nology in a remote provincial town in the poor northeastern region of the country.
The final section of the chapter highlights the prominent role of private actors in
promoting the legal as well as institutional implementation of the technology and
presents some more general observations concerning the creeping privatization of
the criminal justice system and its broader sociopolitical implications. Based upon
parliamentary proceedings documenting the negotiations between politicians and
business representatives, the section analyzes the considerable influence of the pri-
vate security sector on the federal law that regulates the deployment of EM in Brazil.
The final chapter of the book once again mobilizes ethnographic data as a means
of examining the paradoxical nature of Brazil’s EM policies. Although, on the one
hand, EM tends to function as a supplementary control mechanism that effectively
enlarges and amplifies the reach of the penal system, on the other, it is undeniable
that the diverging appropriations of the technology by local governments as well as
criminal gangs entail a considerable loss of control and, indeed, a significant degree
of contingency concerning its future materializations. The chapter’s first section
retrieves the ethnographic observation carried out in the Electronic Monitoring Cell
of Ceará and contextualizes the EM policy put in place amid the escalation of urban
violence wreaked across the state by prison factions. It reviews Ceará’s EM policies
by juxtaposing their technical and institutional failures. Challenging the recurrent
identification of a policy’s empirical materialization with its operational blueprint,
the argument to be made sustains that the supposed failure of a technology may
indeed provide a valuable starting point for examining its political performances in
a more encompassing way. The flaw is taken here as an analytical and methodologi-
cal crack that reveals the inner workings of a particular political technology. Finally,
the last section attempts to systematize the effects of EM policies in contemporary
Brazil by suggesting four main categories, namely: (1) a centrifugal expansion of
the penal system; (2) a centripetal densification of punitive control; (3) the securitar-
ian administration of the penal system; and (4) the virtualization and de-
territorialization of carceral violence. Presented in detail throughout the book, each
References 15
of these four effects was detected through my ethnographic observation sessions

and analysis of the collated documentation.
I invite the reader, hence, to take a closer look at the distinct components of a
technological device installed within the ruins of the Brazilian prison system.
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University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Chapter 2
Short Circuit
Strong restrained spasm of furious mechanisms!

In fury within and beyond myself,
Through all my nerves dissected outside,
My papillae swollen with everything I feel!
I have dry lips, oh great modern noises,
From listening to you much too closely,
And my head burns, wanting to chant for you
With an excessive expression of all my feelings,
An excess contemporaneous with you, oh machines! –(Álvaro
de Campos, Triumphal Ode)
2.1 Human–Machine Interface
“It vibrates, it just vibrates. And the light changes color. If it starts to vibrate, it will
light up a red or purple light. This is to indicate that I am beyond the area, or that I
need to charge the battery. Because the light is only green, it blinks green.”1 Sérgio
describes the different alerts emitted by the electronic tether that verifies compli-
ance with his house arrest (Prisão Albergue Domiciliar). A combination of light and
vibration alerts that signal the (in)adequate conduct of the device, detected by its
presence or absence within a perimeter delimited by judicial decision. Thaiane, who
was monitored while serving her sentence under a semi-open regime, explains:
“You have a radius. An invisible radius within which you’re free to circulate. Beyond
that… you’re fucked, pal, you’re fucked. Why is that? Because out there the light
turns red, so you’re fucked.”2
If the conditions of the regime are found to be violated, the potential
consequences are manifold and difficult to predict. Deivid reports that he was beaten
1
Interview conducted on 17 November 2016. All first names cited throughout this research are
fictitious, except those of public officials.
2
Interview conducted on 31 August 2015.

18 2 Short Circuit
up and put into the disciplinary cell3 when he returned from his Christmas release to
Penitenciária II in Sorocaba, in the hinterland of São Paulo state. His ankle monitor
had indicated an instance of trespassing beyond the permitted area. After 30 days of
isolation, his incarceration was finally reverted from a semi-open to a closed regime.
Meanwhile, Sérgio has gotten used to the alerts emitted by the device attached to his
leg. He lives in the western zone of Rio de Janeiro and studies downtown. According
to the guidelines of the Sistema de Inteligência Penitenciária (penitentiary intelli-
gence system), Sérgio is not allowed to leave the city, “but you end up breaching the
rules. I breach them. I go to Friburgo, I go anywhere. I was never punished for this.
Anyway, they say that if you get caught, things get ugly. But this is my life.”4
The monitoring software includes the programming and editing of control zones,
customized for each delinquent. The areas of in- or exclusion are defined by the
correctional officers and the contracted company’s technicians, based on the deter-
minations of the criminal justice system. Registered computers have access to the
software through the use of a personal login and a password, allowing the zoning to
be configured according to particular cases. “The system is very personalized, I can
set it up according to the legal decision made for that specific monitored person”
(Spacecom technical supervisor).5
The inclusion areas generally comprise the individual’s place of residence (in
cases of home detention or temporary release), the prison unit (for semi-open regime
prisoners), and his or her place of work or study. Based on these geographical points
of reference and the path that connects them, a specific zone is defined, outlining the
perimeter within which the person is allowed to move. The space between the points
on each path and the tolerated spatial limits represent the “invisible radius” men-
tioned by Thaiane. The exclusion areas may comprise bars, nightclubs, airports, bus
terminals, areas designated as risk zones, or places where “potential victims” live,
such as ex-partners of individuals under urgent protective measures, according to
the Maria da Penha law.6 In the latter case, the victim also carries a tracking device,
from which the aggressor’s tether must keep a certain distance.
The programmed spatial perimeters are combined with circulation schedules.
Each convict has his or her own itinerary, defined according to his or her routines of
work, study, and rest. A schedule is stipulated for entering the place of work or
study and another for leaving, with a time interval established for the necessary
3
In São Paulo’s prison system, the “disciplinary cell” – also known as the poço (“pit”) or pote
(“jar”) – is a punitive measure for inmates who supposedly infringed upon their penal regime or
who came into conflict with the unit’s administration. Disciplinary cells are usually small and
overcrowded spaces in which prisoners are deprived of sunbathing for days, weeks, or even
months on end.
4
Interview conducted on 17 November 2016.
5
Field record made on 30 October 2016 at the Central de Monitoramento Eletrônico (Electronic
Monitoring Center) in São Luiz, state of Maranhão.
6
The Maria da Penha Law (law 11,340) was passed in 2006 and establishes measures to curb
domestic and family violence against women. The law has the name of a victim of an emblematic
activist in defense of women’s rights, who was a victim of domestic abuse herself.
2.1 Human–Machine Interface 19
commutes. A certain amount of time is determined for remaining in the place of

detention, which may be the delinquent’s home or a prison unit. The inclusion areas
are thus linked to a specific time schedule, turning into exclusion areas according to
the time of day and week. The place of work becomes forbidden territory during
times of house arrest, for instance.
In this sense, the control zones are mobile, modulated, and entail a programma-
ble spatio-temporal pattern, enforcing an array of velocities that comprise both stop-
ping points and regimes of acceleration. It is this relational intersection of space and
time that enables the production and regulation of circulations, rather than the inde-
pendence of time and space as supposedly autonomous entities (Virilio 1977).7 The
peculiar interplay of punishment and control therefore comprises a whole micro-
physics of velocities, a penal testing ground where multiple technologies of power
coalesce in the perpetual alternation of movement and (ar)rest.
Criminal law enforcement thus institutes dynamics of progression and regres-
sion, acceleration, deceleration, and halt. Enacted by means of different composi-
tions of access and rejection, both the virtual and the actual come into play as
correlated modes of producing the real (Deleuze 1994; Lévy 1995).8 Criminal
enforcement laws are laws of speed, even when their effects do not keep up with the
envisaged rhythm: note the progressive evolution of correctional regimes, qualified
and quantified by the relationship between the time and place of compliance with
the sentence passed by the judge, interspersed with interminable time lapses during
which the sentenced person awaits release to a semi-open or open regime,9 or even
by penal regressions – mainly resulting from cases of disciplinary misconduct –
which make the regime harsher and let the cycle start over again.
Whether exceeding or falling short of established penal codes, contemporary
penality is conceived on the basis of strategies to control convicts’ itineraries, i.e.,
procedures of inserting bodies into a segmented spectrum of possible circuits
(Chantraine 2006; Cunha 2008; Godoi 2017; Mallart 2021). The daily and weekly
commutes of Anderson, arrested and monitored while serving a sentence under the
7
Paul Virilio analyzes the ways in which freedoms are equated within a political arrangement that
opposes vectors of speed. The strategies linked to the management of space as a function of time
are taken as an analytical key to the study of power relations in modern societies. The government
of locomotion requires the design of conductivity techniques that regulate the circulation of things
and bodies, by facilitating or hindering the “courses” and the “races.” Virilio uses the Greek word
dromos to imply speed, course, race, locomotion. The author analyzes capitalist societies as dro-
mocratic societies, guided by the logic of speed as a parameter of urbanization, a weapon of war,
and an instrument of power (Virilio 1977).
8
Gilles Deleuze (1994) deconstructs the opposition between the virtual and the real, defining the
virtual as a dimension that is immanent to any given real entity. Accordingly, the virtual is not
opposed to the real, but only to the actual, as reality is necessarily composed of a virtual and an
actual dimension. Inspired by Deleuze’s conceptual groundwork, Pierre Lévy (1995) sees reality
as a product of virtuality, even if the virtual is devoid of any “immediate physical presence” (p. 10).
Throughout the present book, both the virtualization and the actualization of punishment will be
critically examined, drawing on Deleuze and Lévy as crucial analytical references.
9
In the Brazilian penal execution law (law 7,210), the “benefit lapse” (lapso de benefício) is the
amount of time the convict awaits the progression of his or her correctional regime.
20 2 Short Circuit
semi-open regime in metropolitan São Paulo, are steered by a range of incitements

to mobility, interspersed by various induced stops. The following record describes
his itinerary:
Every day of the week, Anderson wakes up at 5:30 a.m. in cell 29 of the ground floor gallery
of Castelinho (“little castle”), as the correctional progression center (Centro de Progressão
Penitenciária, CPP) of Franco da Rocha is known. Before going to work, he checks that the
battery of his portable tracking unit (Unidade Portátil de Rastreamento, UPR) is sufficiently
charged. Together with the tether attached to his body 24 hours a day, the UPR composes
the electronic monitoring system that controls his presence within a defined area, during his
daily releases to study and work. The equipment transmits his location to the control termi-
nal installed in the prison unit. At 7:00 am, Anderson starts his day at the office of the
Fundação Dr. Manoel Pedro Pimentel, where he works as a cleaner until 4:00 pm. Around
4:30 pm, he takes the train to Luz station. He gets off at the neighborhood of Barra Funda
and takes the subway to Santa Cecília, where his college is located. His classes in the gas-
tronomy school last from 7:00 pm to 10:30 pm. By midnight at the latest, Anderson is
expected back in prison. On Sundays, he takes two Rivotril pills and sleeps in his cell.10
In August 2012, Anderson was charged after being caught with ecstasy and
cocaine in a nightclub in central São Paulo. Sentenced to 5 years and 10 months in
prison, initially on a closed regime, today he inhabits the liminal space between the
inside and the outside of prison walls, permanently monitored. His sentence no
longer has a fixed location, it is served in the circuit prison–work–college–prison
and managed by Castelinho’s administrative staff in collaboration with the “private
partner” that develops the system and provides the remote electronic control ser-
vices – in Anderson’s case, it goes by the name of Spacecom Monitoramento.
More than a space of enclosure and exclusion, but still operating by means of
physical confinement, Castelinho affects Anderson’s itinerary as a mechanism regu-
lating his circulation: a check- and stopping point as though it were a pit stop. It is
where he spends his nights and weekends. It is also where his monitoring equipment
is installed, inspected, and supervised, through a small computer located in one of
the rooms of the prison’s administrative sector. The archaic and imposing aspect of
the building, built in the early 1930s in a classical architectural layout, earned it the
ironic nickname that refers to the ambivalent combination of sumptuous home and
monument of agony.11 Through the narrow stairways and dim corridors of
Castelinho, prisoners walk from side to side, up and down, coping with the acrid
stench that impregnates the place, due to overcrowding and scarce water supply. In
a cell designed to hold 50 persons, more than 110 convicts vegetate in tents made of
sheets and share mattresses infested with bedbugs. “Life in there is unbearable,”
Anderson says.
10
Record extracted from interviews conducted between 23 September 2015 and 24 June 2016.
11
Initially, the building that now houses the CPP of Franco da Rocha was designed to serve as one
of the pavilions of the Hospital Psiquiátrico do Juquery (Juquery Psychiatric Hospital), located in
the prison’s immediate vicinity. It is no mere historical coincidence, however, that a good number
of the prisoners in that unit are today diagnosed with “mental health” problems, as the psychologist
in charge explained to me. On the current interfaces between punitive and psychiatric practices in
the state of São Paulo, see: Mallart 2021.
However, he spends most of his time outside the unit, circulating between the
prison city of Franco da Rocha12 and downtown São Paulo. Throughout this com-
mute, his movements are tracked by the device that connects his body to the techno-
logical network composed of the control terminal installed in the CPP, by Spacecom’s
Monitoring Center, and by the satellite network of the Global Positioning System
(GPS), a socio-technical nexus comprising hardware, software, artificial satellites,
prison agents, monitoring technicians, and monitored convicts. Anderson is inserted
into a correctional and communicational gear train in which he becomes a compo-
nent himself, a cogwheel of the “machinic assemblage” (Deleuze and Guattari
1975, 1980) that connects technical as well as political and economic elements and
crystallizes in government programs, legal codifications, and market demands.
As mentioned in the record, the circuit is further affected by the consumption of
anxiolytics and tranquilizers when Anderson is confined in the prison unit – a psy-
chotropic deactivation that, rather than a disconnecting shutdown, constitutes
another connector that traverses his body, turning it into a point of convergence
between punitive and psychiatric practices and knowledges and regulating his cen-
tral nervous system in times of enforced rest: molecular, neurochemical, and intra-
corporeal circulations as targets of intervention and objects of government.
In any case, Anderson’s correctional experience, characterized by the steady
alternation between physical imprisonment and monitored itineraries “out in the
open”, is driven and defined by the most contemporary techniques of punishment
and control and the specific modes of subjectivation they entail. From the original
police arrest to its eventual progression to an “open” regime, passing through the
slow and gradual evolution of penal execution, past the procedural labyrinth’s mul-
tiple dead ends, the interlocking of criminalization, incarceration, and monitoring
epitomizes a whole machinery in which the penal subject is perpetually produced
and annihilated. The construction of homo penalis thus becomes a mere part of a
wider capillary procedure of individuation and de-individuation, subjectivation and
de-subjectivation, operated by the composition and superposition of multiple dis-
positifs of power.
Being working-class and dark-skinned, Anderson squarely fits into a biosocial
category that promotes both his entry to and his permanence within the punitive
apparatus.13 His propensity to crime is assumed beforehand, by the lasting heritage
of an anthropological determinism that tethers his race and class identity to a cor-
responding moral qualification, the mere possession of narcotics being insufficient
12
The municipality of Franco da Rocha is located in the northern part of São Paulo’s metropolitan
region. With about 130,000 inhabitants, the city is home to three penitentiaries, two custody and
psychiatric hospitals, one provisional detention center, one penitentiary progression center, and six
youth detention units belonging to the Fundação Centro de Atendimento Socioeducativo para
Adolescentes.
13
The most recent prison census indicates that in Brazil 64% of all convicts identify as Black,
whereas the share of Black people among the country’s overall population is only 53%. The cate-
gorization carried out by the national penitentiary department (Departamento Penitenciário
Nacional, DEPEN) and the Brazilian institute of geography and statistics (Instituto Brasileiro de
Geografia e Estatística, IBGE) counts both “Black” and “Brown” people as “black.”
22 2 Short Circuit
for fabricating the image of the criminal. The application of criminal law, still sub-
stantially influenced in Brazil by the Italian-inspired criminological framework –
notably by the authors of the so-called positivist school, such as Lombroso, Ferri,
and Garofalo, oscillating between a political anatomy of delinquency and an incipi-
ent criminal sociology (Alvarez 2003) – operates as an instrument of validating a
pre-established truth, mobilizing the legal–illegal binarism as a means of ratifying
the identity markers that define the selection criteria of the criminal justice system.
The legal system is thus set in motion as an apparatus of social subjection, guided
by the normative categorization of races and classes (Foucault 1997; Deleuze and
Guattari 1980; Misse 2014).
Starting with the transgression as defined by the law and declared by the judge,
the conversion of Anderson into a delinquent subject materializes inside the prison
system. The prison’s multiple disciplinary regimes, established by the penitentiary
administration, by the informal code of conduct enforced by “gangs” or “factions,”
or by the spiritual mediation of churches and religious organizations, have the con-
tinuing effect of turning the criminal into a delinquent, with conviction or repen-
tance, even if this process of conversion is beyond the control of prison authorities
and might even turn against them. The mass prison, which has become an apparatus
for the allocation and management of ever larger populations (Wacquant 2009;
Chantraine 2006; Godoi 2017), remains, nonetheless, the space par excellence for
the individuation of delinquency.
After two and a half years under a closed regime, Anderson’s transfer to the
semi-open regime in Franco da Rocha entails new modes of subjectivation corre-
sponding to the EM of his movements. If, on the one hand, his body’s coupling with
a control device makes Anderson the individualized manager of his own sentence,
on the other his insertion into the intricate machinery of the electronic control sys-
tem promotes the individual’s dismantling, now turned into an intersection within
the socio-technical nexus that shapes the monitoring device and that enrolls his
body as a mere relay necessary to close the circuit. Anderson is subjectivated as his
very own prison guard at the same moment at which he becomes a part and compo-
nent of the correctional machine. It is also in the semi-open regime that Anderson’s
anxiety is being managed by taking the Rivotril pills that a cellmate provides
for him.
In this sense, Anderson’s journey through the criminal justice system mobilizes
a series of mechanisms that organize his locomotion, regulate its intensity, define its
frequency, demarcate its radius, and claim his body as their main vehicle and point
of intersection. Be it by means of an EM device attached to his leg, periodic medica-
tion via psychoactive drugs, or actual incarceration in the prison unit overnight and
on Sundays, the many techniques employed throughout Anderson’s penal pathway
inevitably depend on a whole series of somatic interventions. They literally require
his body.
Indeed, it is in the body and with the body that the penal machine wields its
power over individuals, turning their bodies into machines themselves. It is the body
as a biological substratum that conveys and enables the exercise of power (Foucault
1994, 1995). In spite of the significant transformations that technologies of
punishment have undergone throughout the centuries, their fundamental procedures

seem to retain a biological dimension whose current manifestations deserve further
investigation.
The Foucauldian notion of biopower represents a promising analytical starting
point here. According to Foucault, the historical emergence of a political strategy
operating in the body and through the body involved two correlated manifestations:
on the one hand, since the seventeenth century in Western Europe social control
would have entailed a series of disciplinary techniques aimed at training the indi-
vidual body. From schools to prisons, from factories to hospitals individual life
became permeated by a set of practices and knowledges focused on the attributes
and capabilities of the human body, on the systematic exploitation of its forces,
enabling the extraction of a politico-economic surplus value: a whole network of
disciplinary dispositifs whose operational diagram is shaped by the coupling of sur-
veillance and punishment (Foucault 1995). The body-machine is born together with
the disciplines.
On the other hand, Foucault examines the nineteenth-century construction of a
governmental apparatus geared toward managing the population as an organic body
and the concomitant techniques of regulation. The processes associated with the
proliferation of the human species, its reproduction, mortality and birth rates, the
levels of health and public hygiene, became part of the state’s urban, sanitary, medi-
cal, and security planning; a government strategy aimed at the population as a body-
species (Foucault 1994). Biopower would thus cover both an “anatomo-politics” of
the individual and a “biopolitics” of the population: two arenas from which emerges,
between the seventeenth and the nineteenth century, a general strategy of power that
encompasses life in its political essence.
The interpretations and re-interpretations of the notions of biopower and biopoli-
tics are countless and it would go beyond the purpose of the present book to discuss
them here.14 From analyses of state racism and genocide (Agamben 2002; Espósito
2010; Mbembe 2019) to investigations concerning the advance of genetic engineer-
ing (Rose 2007; Lemke 2011) and examinations of contemporary capitalism and the
corresponding production of subjectivities (Hardt and Negri 2000; Lazzarato 2014;
Dardot and Laval 2016; Pelbart 2009), the contributions of philosophers, sociolo-
gists, political scientists, geographers, and anthropologists are as valuable as they
are diverse. Some of the authors quoted above shall be referred to throughout this
book, as they provide tools for the study of the impacts of EM on the lives of the
people monitored; especially as they become manifest in the interactions between
the individual body and the penal apparatus, substantially altering the ways in which
punishment is applied and control dispersed.
14
To mention an elementary bibliography, suffice it to mention the works by Agamben (2002)
about Nazi-fascism, by Nikolas Rose (2007) about the development of and the transformations in
medical knowledge, and by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) about the current metamor-
phoses in social and labor relations driven by the advance of a mode of late capitalist production
they refer to as “empire.”
24 2 Short Circuit
Empirically departing from investigations into the reconfigurations in contempo-

rary biopolitical tactics and strategies, the aim is to explore how biopower persists
in the interstices: despite the significant effects of dislocation and rescaling to be
observed in the realm of penal technologies, the power to punish seems to retain the
body as its raw material. How does a contemporary government of the body take
place that goes beyond the individual political anatomy, yet is not restricted to
macro-managing the population? What kind of body is produced by the current
techniques of punishment and control, increasingly distant from the “docile” body
trained by disciplinary devices while approaching the maturity of a full-fledged
“body-machine” and its specific contradictions and aporias?
These questions shall guide the next steps of the present book, providing a heu-
ristic framework for the empirical analysis to follow. For the time being, it shall be
emphasized that certain procedures and principles of biopolitical subjectivation are
indispensable to the viability of EM as a form of penal control, backed by the gov-
ernmental regulation of circulating bodies, guided by a new political economy of
punishment, and deployed as a thoroughly contemporary technology for managing
a proliferating prison population. These are, then, the main investigative axes of the
book: the impacts of electronic control in the administration of Brazil’s prison
demographics; the transversal politico-economic rationality that drives the develop-
ment of new penal techniques; and the relationship between the penalized body that
circulates and the machine that coordinates this circulation.
The present chapter introduces some of the main questions raised during research,
as related to the abovementioned investigative axes. It presents the multiple layers
of reality and the various lines of force that constitute the apparatus under investiga-
tion, so as to delve into each of them in the subsequent chapters. The main starting
point resides, however, in the monitored body. It is from the interface established
between the body and the machine that the characteristic features of the mechanism
shall be identified and analyzed. Thus, the next sections raise some hypotheses
about the effects of EM devices related to the steering of circulating bodies, their
conversion into machine parts, and their public labeling. The fieldwork, literature
research, and document analysis conducted throughout this study indicate that the
monitored body is, at one and the same time, a steered body, a connected body, and
a labeled body.
2.2 The Jailer of Oneself
Article 146-C. The convict will be instructed on the precautions to be taken with the elec-
tronic equipment and on the following duties:
I – receive visits from the officers responsible for electronic monitoring, respond to their
contacts and comply with their instructions;
II – refrain from violating, modifying, or damaging in any way the electronic monitoring
device or allowing others to do so;
(...)
2.2 The Jailer of Oneself 25
Sole paragraph. Proven violation of the duties established in this article may result, at
the discretion of the responsible judge, after hearing the prosecution service and the
defense:
I – regression of the regime;
II – revocation of temporary release;
(...)
VI – revocation of home detention;
VII – written warning, for all cases in which the responsible judge decides not to apply
any of the measures provided for in items I to VI of this paragraph (Law no. 12,258/2010).
TZPR01 Equipment (1 piece)
If the purple light flashes, call 0800 643 5510;
You are the trusted custodian of this equipment;
Your freedom depends on your compliance with these rules;
Recharge for at least 3 hours a day;
Do not break this device or tamper with it. (User instructions for the monitored indi-
vidual, Spacecom).
The first document above is law no. 12,258 of June 2010, which amended the
penal execution law (law no. 7,210/1984) and authorized the application of remote
monitoring on convicts sentenced to serving a semi-open regime or home detention.
It is the first federal law to approve EM in Brazilian penal practice. The second
excerpt is taken from an instruction sheet delivered to convicts serving a regime of
home detention in Rio de Janeiro, explaining the use of the geolocation tether that
sustains Spacecom’s 24-h custody monitoring system. Both texts emphasize the
precautions and responsibilities to be taken by the monitored person, specifying the
precise occasions on which the system’s operators have to be contacted.
Electronic monitoring is also human monitoring inasmuch as it requires the
efforts of human agents, both public and private, to make the system work. Some
Brazilian states have teams of psychologists and social workers to assist monitored
convicts. This applies in Acre, Bahia, Ceará, Minas Gerais, Pará, Pernambuco, Rio
Grande do Sul, Roraima, and Santa Catarina (DEPEN 2017). In the rest of the coun-
try, monitoring work is carried out exclusively by prison guards and employees of
the contracted company, and it is restricted to verifying the convict’s adherence to
its stipulated penal regime and the enforcement of potential sanctions.
Article 146-C of law 12,258/10 specifies the following sanctions: regime regres-
sion; revocation of temporary leave for convicts under the semi-open regime; sus-
pension of home detention; or a warning. Each of the items has, however, underlying
implications that are irreducible to the legal framework, as they are applied at the
discretion of the respective operators in charge of the tracking services. Ultimately,
the quality of sanctions will be defined by the agents overseeing the penal regime,
the applicable law serving as a normative outline. The EM dispositif is thus com-
posed of the connections established between the law, the public and private
employees involved, the electronic tracking system, and the convicts themselves,
without whom the circuit cannot be closed. This sociotechnical nexus (Latour
2013), like any other, is not immune to unforeseen events, interferences, and com-
munication breakdowns, the consequences of which are determined by the judge
and mediated by the monitoring agents. Indeed, (socio)technical mishaps reported
26 2 Short Circuit
by monitored prisoners and their families are not uncommon. Malfunctions are
commonplace, resulting in regimental or extra-regimental penalties for the convicts.
Deivid’s fate is somewhat revealing in this regard.
In the early days of 2016, during his Christmas leave from Sorocaba penitentiary,
Deivid faced problems with his monitoring equipment. The device was composed
of two pieces: a tether and a portable tracking unit (Unidade Portátil de Rastreamento,
UPR), communicating with each other via radiofrequency. According to the guide-
lines of Sorocaba’s social reintegration officer, the tether must not exceed a distance
of 30 m from the UPR; otherwise, the device would flash a white LED and notify an
instance of “straying.” Deivid would thus make sure to keep the UPR in his hand, or
in a backpack, every time he left home.
One day, however, Deivid and his wife Irene noticed that the UPR’s white light
was flashing nonetheless. Shortly after, the device even started to beep. Worried,
Deivid and Irene called the penitentiary and described the situation. They were
instructed to keep the devices close to each other and carry on with their everyday
activities as the system’s interface had not indicated any irregularity. The couple
followed the instructions. However, on the day he returned from his saidinha,15
Deivid was surprised when he was welcomed with punches, handcuffs, and shoves.
He was immediately put into a detention cell where he remained for a month, justi-
fied by the accusation that he had moved away from his UPR. In the following letter,
he describes what happened to him:
I, convict Deivid Matias Nascimento, am currently detained in the penitentiary unit II of
Sorocaba. I want to report what happened on January 3, 2016 at about 1 pm, when I was
returning from the Christmas leave. When I arrived the staff came at me, handcuffing me,
beating me and saying that I was going to be put into the disciplinary cell. I asked them
what was going on. They said that there had been a problem with the UPR of the tether, that
I had strayed and left the stipulated area. Because of this, I stayed 30 days locked up in the
pit, and then I went back to closed regime. Before, when I was at my place during the said-
inha, there was a problem with the tether. It started beeping and the white light turned on.
It indicated straying, but I was home. Then my wife called the unit. They said it was normal.
I asked if it was going to be a problem. They said “no, you may come back, as usual.” When
I got back to the unit, they sent me to the disciplinary cell. Here we only get three hours of
sunlight, we stay locked up all day. There is a lot of people in the same situation locked up
in wing 1. The food is scarce, some prisoners are starving and there is almost no medical
attention for us. The disciplinary cell is full. No matter what happens, they send us there. I
am very grateful for your attention. God bless you (Deivid, P-II of Sorocaba).16
Deivid spent 2 years in the closed regime until the “benefit” of semi-open regime
was granted again. During the month he spent in isolation, Irene knew little about
his condition, let alone the reasons for his confinement. As usual in cases of disci-
plinary sanctions, her visits were forbidden while he was kept in the detention cell.
Evandro, a prisoner in the provincial city of Presidente Prudente, also had his regime
15
Saidinha (“little stroll”) is what prisoners call the temporary leaves in the semi-open regime.
They do not exceed 7 days each and are authorized five times a year, on the occasion of Christmas/
New Year, Easter, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and Day of the Dead.
16
Letter from Deivid, delivered through his wife, Irene, interviewed on 27 August 2016.
exacerbated when, according to him, his monitoring equipment started vibrating

and beeping for no clear reason. He remained in the closed regime for over
15 months.
Concerning the regular glitches of the EM systems, Maurício, a prison guard at
São Paulo’s Butantã center for correctional progression, states: “There were times
when the central office called the unit at 3 a.m. claiming that a cracked tether had
been reported. When I would go to check, the prisoner was sleeping in her cell. The
device was in its right place and she had just made some movement or whatever.”17
Both the device and its semantic interpretation are thus susceptible to error, just like
any other communications system. Having been subjected to São Paulo’s monitor-
ing scheme in 2011, Maria confirms: “It’s a tricky thing. You can get along fine,
having no problems at all, or the equipment fails and you get in trouble. It happens
a lot. It is a device that malfunctions, like any other”.18 However, the implications
resulting from “technical problems” are, in this case, quite unique to an artifact con-
nected to the penal and penitentiary apparatus. In the episode reported by Deivid, an
alleged defect in the equipment, combined with the judge’s intransigence and the
violent prison guards, resulted in an episode of physical abuse and immediate rele-
gation to the closed regime. Maria adds: “The equipment’s truth is our lie. It will
never be the device’s fault, it will always be the prisoner’s.”19
Adding up to the ingrained distrust of convicts’ explanations and statements, the
wager on the efficiency and objectivity of digital technology endows the devices’
accounts with the quality of indisputable truth. Artifacts do not lie. The presumed
technological neutrality warrants the system’s overall veracity. In this sense, Maria’s
perception is quite accurate. The interactions between human and non-human enti-
ties that make the monitoring system run also amount to a sociotechnical regime of
truth; a truth encoded by LEDs, beeps, and vibrating alerts, transmitted to the moni-
toring team, retransmitted to the criminal judge and translated into the penological
framework of criminal law. A truth produced inside the intricate machinery of EM
systems and that will ultimately be used to challenge the prisoner’s truth. In Deivid’s
case, the truth of the device prevailed, converting flashing alarms into a brutal
spanking inside the disciplinary cell.
In any case, the links between the EM system and Brazil’s prison archipelago are
also established through false alarms, misreadings, and “technical failures” that
may relegate behind bars those who had the bad luck to carry defective equipment.
If electronic control entails a relativization of the prison’s rigid physical limits, this
flexibility is therefore characterized by a certain degree of elasticity (Augusto 2013)
whose susceptibility for steady repositionings ironically reconfirms the centrality of
the prison and its violent regime of torture, beatings, and abuse. A thorough critique
of the phenomenon at stake is thus not a matter of equating technical bugs and
17
Informal conversation as registered during field research at CPP Butantã, conducted on 14
April 2016.
18
Interview conducted on 30 September 2016.
19
Idem.
28 2 Short Circuit
glitches with the system’s failure, but of understanding its performance within and
through its supposed malfunctions; that is, to avoid the quick conclusion that the
dispositif founders because it is technologically flawed and, instead, inquire how its
fallibility is, in fact, an integral part of its very functionality.
Besides malfunction and failure as an ever-present potential inherent to technical
devices, it is crucial to consider the political scripts defining the projects, programs,
and protocols that make up a specific technology. Technical devices are not neutral
and their specific design is decisive with regard to how they mediate and organize
social relations (Ellul 2008, 2017; Winner 1986). Designed as a core element of a
certain approach to penal control and integrated into the routine procedures of
prison management, the political character of the EM system is apparent in both its
conception and its implementation, impregnating every minor interaction with the
numerous human agents on which its daily operation depends (Latour 1994):
Throughout the device’s deployment, power relations are inscribed in technical
apparatuses and technical apparatuses are (re)inscribed into power relations (Winner
1986; Latour 1994).
It is therefore vital to investigate which types of power relations permeate the
mille-feuilles of discourses, practices, laws, and technologies in which penal EM
programs materialize: what types of rationality do these devices correspond to and
feed back into? What are the effects of this rationality as it penetrates the lives and
bodies of monitored convicts? Rather than searching for a single answer or a defi-
nite explanatory model, in what follows the aim is to explore a series of analytical
pathways resulting from close ethnographic contact with monitored individuals and
their respective perceptions.
For a substantial proportion of the convicts surveyed, being under perpetual elec-
tronic supervision causes a sense of alienation as well as a quasi-permanent state of
anxiety: “For me, the tether messes with my head as much as jail. I go out on the
street, but I’m still in jail. It seems that I have a guard by my side all the time, watch-
ing me no matter where I go.”20 The internalization of surveillance within the pris-
oner’s mind represents a core aspect of Jeremy Bentham’s concept for a “panoptic”
prison, as famously analyzed by Foucault (1995). Conceived in the late eighteenth
century as a means of producing well-disciplined “docile” bodies, the physical
architecture of the panopticon would transfer the centralized inspection to each
inspected convict, thus subjectivating them as jailers of themselves. “A new mode of
obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example,”
Bentham said of his invention (1995, p. 29). Meanwhile, the possibilities of examin-
ing and transforming any given individual’s behavior have been rescaled and recon-
figured by current developments in the field of remote sensing and geolocation, thus
extending the questionable promise of comprehensive observation and control to
open-air environments. The gradual obsolescence of disciplinary mechanics is
induced by the advance of mobile, modular, and uninterrupted monitoring
20
Interview with Anderson, conducted 14 October 2015.
techniques and the concomitant deterritorialization of surveillance (Froment 1996;

Bogard 2006; De Nicola 2006).
Rather than an utter deprivation of liberties, what is at stake here is the produc-
tion, promotion, and management of specific types of conduct. Power requires free-
dom as an indispensable substrate as it deploys mechanisms to regulate convicts’
patterns of movement, ensuring a margin of security through measures that serve as
counterweights to certain freedoms granted by criminal justice. Accordingly, the
operational principles of EM programs correspond to a governmental practice
whose rationale surpasses the brute logic of domination and confinement: “To gov-
ern, in this sense, is to structure the eventual field of action of others” (Foucault
1982, p. 790). Granting a spatiotemporally conditional “freedom” of movement to
the monitored convict, the judge in charge defines the range of acceptable conducts,
desisting from a prison sentence and its more immediate techniques of submission.
It is not so much a matter of correcting and molding the subject, but of creating a low-risk
pattern of life, with habits, routines, and a lifestyle that are safe for society. (...) An illicit
position sets off alarm bells not because it necessarily implies that the person has already
engaged in a new offense: it implies the risk that the person might engage in it (Vitores and
Domènech 2007, pp. 13–15)
The analysis of future risks must guide penal policies, characterized by a calcu-
lus of control that equates freedom and security in terms of efficiency and utility.
The current biopolitical technologies work “by anticipating actions, predicting the
next movements, operating and acting within the limits of the variation of uncer-
tainty” (Kanashiro 2011, p. 66).
Accordingly, the object of intervention is less the subject’s individuality than his
or her conduct, understood in its Foucauldian definition, as “the way of behaving
within a more or less open field of possibilities” (1982, p. 789). It is the user’s con-
duct in his or her “natural environment” that is to be controlled, governed, and
steered by means of electronic supervision (Schwitzgebel 1969). To do so, the terms
of the sanction are inverted: rather than inserting the individual’s body into a penal
institution, a penal device is installed upon the individual’s body. The imprisoned
body is replaced by the embodied prison.
This inversion has major implications for the ways in which convicts are subjec-
tivated. The imperative of self-control, anchored in the neoliberal paradigm of indi-
vidual accountability, reaches levels unthinkable in the Benthamian panopticon.
Monitored convicts have to perpetually assess the risks involved in violating the
conditions imposed by court. No physical impediment is imposed other than the
virtuality of imprisonment. Wherever they are, convicts have to adopt a conscious
attitude towards their sentence, steadily evaluating their margin of relative freedom
as defined and determined by the criminal judge.
Regarding the rules of his semi-open regime under monitoring, Anderson
explains:
I can’t visit places that could be risky for me: a drug den, a nightclub, a bar... But in reality,
there are some barriers that I create myself. Sometimes I think I’m too correct. Sometimes
30 2 Short Circuit
I could even extrapolate [the system’s fallibility], but I do think a thousand times before
taking any risk.21
Rather than imposing physical limits defined by architectural structures, elec-

tronic surveillance obliges convicts to determine their own limits, mediated by a
control device tethered to their bodies. Re-imprisonment remains the looming threat
that convicts have to avoid at all cost, notably by adopting “safe” types of conduct
and standing clear of any “risky” environment and/or behavior. Borrowing from
Gilles Deleuze, it may be argued that the individual’s disciplinary “molding” has
been partly replaced by a whole series of individualizing “modulations.”22
Concerning the conditions of his electronically monitored house arrest, Sérgio
explains:
They said I couldn’t go to places that sell liquor, for example. But if I need to go into a bar,
I will go into a bar. I wouldn’t deprive myself of going. Now what is the issue? If there is a
fight in a bar and I am there, I am screwed. If I am caught as a witness, even if I am a victim,
they take me to the police station. I might be a victim, but I shouldn’t even have been there
in the first place. I’ll go to jail. So, you have to weigh it, you have to think about it.23
The underlying utilitarian rationality that constantly appraises chances and risks,
advantages and disadvantages defines the ways in which the convicts conduct them-
selves, linking the EM devices to the set of power techniques that characterize neo-
liberal governmentality; i.e., a historically specific mode of governing individuals
and populations based upon the comprehensive economization of the legal, politi-
cal, and (inter)subjective spheres (Foucault 2004). The rational grid through which
economic relations are governed enables the conception and intelligibility of con-
temporary penal policies, associating freedom with profits and punitive intervention
with losses.
In this sense, not only does neoliberal governmentality assume that all aspects of
social and political life can be reduced to calculations of utility, but it also involves
technologies of power that enforce this idiosyncratic account of reality, promoting
forms of subjectivation that pivot on the steady assessment of risks and benefits
(Brown 2005).24 The quasi-entrepreneurial management of “personalized
21
Interview conducted on October 14, 2015.
22
Deleuze mobilizes the notion of dividual to describe the modes of subjectivation triggered by
new technologies of control, based on the division and reduction of the individual to fragmented
units of data. Furthermore, In differentiating between disciplinary dispositifs and control disposi-
tifs, he states that “Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a
self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve
whose mesh will transmute from point to point” (1992, p. 4).
23
Interview conducted on November 17, 2016.
24
It is possible to observe the production of a whole new criminological knowledge depicting the
offender as a sober-minded calculating agent who acts in accordance with rational choices guided
by cost–benefit evaluations and prognostics. “Based on theories like rational choice, such a con-
ception insists on the idea that offenders calculate their actions and that crime is a trivial aspect of
everyday existence, a risk that must be calculated or an accident to be avoided” (Alvarez 2014,
p. 57): homo criminalis is replaced by homo economicus (Foucault 2004; Becker 1974).
micro-risks” (Aubrey 2000, p. 101) entails that “individuals must govern themselves
from within by a technical rationalization of their relationship to themselves”
(Dardot and Laval 2016, p. 350): the penalty is seen, first and foremost, as a social
debt to be paid and handled by the convicts themselves.
Meanwhile, the convict’s conversion into a jailer of him- or herself may trigger
all kinds of idiosyncratic conducts, such as the tendency toward isolation and reclu-
sion induced by the visible stigma of wearing a monitoring device. Deivid spent
most of his temporary releases locked up in his house, fearful that the neighbors
would notice the presence of a convicted criminal offender. “Even inside the house,
when a visitor arrived, a person he didn’t know, he would always stay in his room,
he wouldn’t leave his room,”25 according to his partner, Irene. Anderson, in turn,
describes the temporary release under monitoring as yet another moment of with-
drawal: “I feel like isolating myself and staying home alone. I think it’s fear, because
of this tether.”26
As for Elton’s reaction, it was even more peculiar. Monitored in Rio de Janeiro
under a regime of house arrest, he built a wall around his house so that passers-by
would never spot him wearing a tether, according to his wife Angela: “Elton, when
he got here, the first thing he did was to do some work in the house. He built a wall
around the house and sealed all the cracks in the gate. All the cracks, he clogged
them up. He sealed the house.”27
Adding up to the moral stigma of being visibly marked as a criminal offender, we
can add the threats raised by the persecutory sensation. The deterritorialized prison,
virtualized by means of telematic systems of location and communication that
transpose its limits beyond the institutional walls, reterritorializes itself and updates
itself in the spaces in which the tracked individuals live, their work, their neighbor-
hood, their house, becoming a house-prison in which the walls are finally replaced,
now by the prisoners themselves. It is not a matter of a voluntary confinement, but
of an induced isolation, conducted by the relationship that is established between
the monitored subject and the monitoring device.
In any case, the imposition of physical limits that demarcate spaces of enclosure
is no longer necessary for the condition of prisoner to be established (Devresse
2012; Kilgore 2016; Gacek 2022). The inside and the outside reach such a point of
indifference that the walls no longer circumscribe the penal space and its controls,
now tied to the very body of the convict. The prisoner becomes his or her own jailer,
guided by the utilitarian arithmetic that reiterates penal regression as a permanent
risk and virtuality. A new criminal individuality is constructed, immanent to its line
of suppression that eradicates the divide between the body and the imprisonment of
the body.
25
Interview conducted on 27 August 2016.
26
Interview conducted on 14 October 2015.
27
32 2 Short Circuit
2.3 Connecting Cog
Social subjection equips us with a subjectivity, assigning us an identity, a sex, a body, a

profession, a nationality, and so on. In response to the needs of the social division of labor,
it in this way manufactures individuated subjects, their consciousness, representations, and
behavior. But the production of the individuated subject is coupled with a completely differ-
ent process and a completely different hold on subjectivity that proceeds through desubjec-
tivation. Machinic enslavement dismantles the individuated subject, consciousness, and
representations, acting on both the pre-individual and supra-individual levels (Maurizio
Lazzarato, Signs, machines, subjectivities, p. 12).
Located in the Outeiro da Cruz neighborhood, in the far northeastern city of São
Luís, capital of the state of Maranhão, the building of the State Secretariat of
Penitentiary Administration of Maranhão (Secretaria de Estado de Administração
Penitenciária do Maranhão, SEAP-MA) looks more like an abandoned construc-
tion, with its unfinished works and poorly installed facilities. In front of the land
used as a parking lot for vehicles and motorcycles of the employees, is one of the
premises of the State Academy of Penitentiary Management, where training courses
for prison guards are held. Next to it, a covered patio stores leftover construction
material, pieces of wood, and piles of sand and stone. Further ahead, a dimly lit shed
gives access to two flights of stairs leading to the upper floor. One can hardly notice
any movement.
Upstairs, a small area is used for the installation, inspection and replacement of
the EM equipment purchased by SEAP. The employees test the stocked devices and
examine the equipment with technical problems, whereas users stay in the five
chairs reserved for the waiting area. Some remain with the tether attached to their
bodies and plugged into the outlet until the battery is fully charged. Others queue
up, waiting for an outlet to be released. The scene of people kept for a few hours
with their ankle monitors fixed into their bodies and plugged in is commonplace. In
Brazil, the monitored subject is still the plugged-in individual, dependent on the
electrical power points without which his tracking devices will indicate misuse vio-
lations. Up ahead, a narrow corridor leads to the room that houses Maranhão’s cen-
tral monitoring station. A tight windowless room, about 25 m2, in which seven
computers are arranged in a row on two workbenches, together with a telephone set.
It is in this small space that SEAP agents monitor the displacements of offenders,
checking on their permanence in the control zones and making telephone contact
with those who are in violation. A Spacecom employee is in charge of system super-
vision, software installation and maintenance, as well as technical assistance for
faulty equipment. On the front wall, a 120-inch monitor displays a cartographic plan
composed of satellite photos, on which are signaled the moving dots that indicate
the positions of offenders under EM throughout the state.
There is a striking contrast between the overall precariousness of the place and
the modern resources it contains. The technological instruments that equip the con-
trol room are installed and arranged in a space with little or no ventilation in the
midst of the Maranhão tropical climate. The base station of the state’s EM system,
fixed as the main control and remote sensing terminal and connected to the Global
2.3 Connecting Cog 33
Positioning System, is housed inside a visibly deteriorated building surrounded by

poorly paved streets, raising questions about the uneven coexistence between high
technology instituted under modernization discourses and the reiterated abandon-
ment of public structures in Northeastern Brazil. The disparity is even more impres-
sive when the region’s penitentiary facilities are taken into consideration. How can
one think of the high investments directed at the technological progress geared
toward the modernization of Maranhão’s penal system, concomitant with the persis-
tence of an archaic and notably abusive prison archipelago, such as the one that is in
place on the island of São Luís? How to conceive the emergence and organization
of a society of control, founded and orchestrated under the aegis of silicon (Deleuze
1986), installed in the rubble of the land of the Pedrinhas Penitentiary Complex,
where more than 80 inmates were brutally executed in prison riots between 2010
and 201328?
Perhaps this is the real face of the modernizing project triggered by the control
society, erected in the perpetual shadow of old prison structures, the scenario of the
most radical mistreatment and stage for the infuriating mutilation of bodies, paraded
as public executions revisited and spectacularized in the avid communication chan-
nels and omnipresent digital media that expose to the astonished public the inevi-
table results of its penal policy: exposed fracture of neoliberal penality that makes
advanced remote geolocation systems coexist with the prolonged agony of its insti-
tutions of abduction and its torture houses, ironically equated to “medieval dun-
geons” by the very ministers in charge of them.29 Far from the asepsis presumed and
sold in the projects of improvement of punishment techniques, the new electronic
control mechanisms are implanted amidst the persistent and anachronistic dust of
the Brazilian penitentiary system, whose intrinsic violence is in full and expansive
operation.
It is also worth noting the introduction of high-tech facilities of remote monitor-
ing over bodies and flows, in the style of smart cities, amidst the tropical landscape
of Maranhão. At the state’s monitoring center, SEAP employees observe the move-
ments of monitored offenders in the small villages spread across scrublands and
along riverbanks that make up Maranhão’s rural zone. The forests and coastal plains
become digitalized cartographic scenery, cut out in areas of control over the move-
ment of suspects and convicts.
A total of 987 people were being monitored in October 2016 in Maranhão, where
EM programs have been in operation since 2014, a year in which there has been a
considerable expansion of the EM policy all over Brazil, driven by agreements
signed between state administrations and the National Penitentiary Department in
late 2013 (DEPEN 2015). Maranhão is one of the few states that began the
28
The Pedrinhas Penitentiary Complex (Complexo Penitenciário de Pedrinhas), located in metro-
politan São Luís, gained visibility between 2010 and 2013, when at least 86 prisoners were killed
in riots that broke out because of overcrowding, poor quality of food, and scarce water supply.
29
In November 2015, Eduardo Cardozo, Justice Minister at the time, defined the Brazilian prison
system as “medieval dungeons” in a conference to the national press. The statement uttered by the
head of the justice system caused a considerable stir in the media and on academic forums.
34 2 Short Circuit
implementation of EM mostly directed at the supervision of pre-trial restraining

orders, under Federal Law 12.403/2011. About 810 individuals were in this situa-
tion in the state in 2016. It was a government’s attempt to reduce the high rates of
pre-trial detention, which in 2014 represented 66% of the Maranhão’s prison popu-
lation (DEPEN 2014).
As in most of the bids signed in the country, the EM system employed in
Maranhão is the SAC24. It consists of a set of hardware and software composed of
different models of equipment to be carried by users and monitoring software avail-
able via the web for the control terminals. “With this, the institution has access in
real time to monitoring data from any computer connected to the Internet.”30
The device carried by the wearer may consist of one or two pieces. In the one-
piece version, information on the position of the monitored person and violation
alarms are transmitted by the ankle bracelet to the monitoring software through GPS
and General Packet Radio Services (GPRS) signals. The equipment is fitted with
warning LEDs that indicate the lack of GPRS communication, absence of GPS
signal, low battery levels, and contact calls occasionally placed by the monitors. In
addition, the anklet generates sound and vibration alerts when it detects any loss of
GPS signal, low battery levels, occasional monitor contacts, or when noncompli-
ance with the rules concerning inclusion and exclusion areas is detected. The ankle
strap is coated with fiber optics to detect tampering attempts. The apparatus attached
to the body weighs around 200 g.31
The two-piece device consists of an anklet that sends radiofrequency signals to a
Portable Tracking Unit (UPR) that stores the system’s battery, as well as GPS trans-
mitters. Both pieces of equipment must be kept at a programmable minimum dis-
tance, which, if exceeded, triggers a tampering alarm. In the two-piece version,
LEDs and audible alarms are emitted by the UPR, which transmits the location
information and tampering alerts to the software installed in the control terminal.32
The SAC24 software allows real-time visualization of user movement. “The
location points can be plotted on a map, satellite photos, or even a hybrid map (sat-
ellite photos combined with the streets).”33 The control zones can be edited for each
user via the software interface, defining the areas in which the person must be
located according to the time schedule set by the judge in charge. If any violation is
detected, the software triggers an alert, specifying the corresponding occurrence.
The possible violations are: absence from the inclusion area, penetration into an
exclusion area, battery exhaustion or battery levels low, loss of GPS or GPRS sig-
nals, breaking the seal, or damage to the equipment. “The system also stores the
convict’s whole history, allowing reports to be generated to provide information to
30
Spacecom. Sistema SAC24 – Dispositivo de Peça Única. Available at: http://spacecom.com.
br/?s=mon&ss=1p (Accessed on 18 February 2017).
31
Idem. 18
32
Spacecom. Sistema SAC24 – Dispositivo de duas peças. Available at: http://spacecom.com.
br/?s=mon&ss=2p (Accessed on 18 February 2017).
33
Spacecom. Sistema SAC24 – Software de Monitoramento SAC 24. Available at: http://spacecom.
com.br/?s=mon&ss=sac24 (Accessed on 18 February 2017)
2.3 Connecting Cog 35
the responsible authorities. System users’ accesses and activities are also stored for
auditing purposes.”34
As reported by the Spacecom employee who works at the Maranhão monitoring
center, the incidence of violations does not necessarily imply judicial consequences,
but indicates patterns of user behavior that will be automatically reported to the
judge for future evaluations and decision-making regarding sentence enforcement.
An isolated occurrence of loss of GPS signal, for example, may not have major
consequences. However, if the software registers the frequent loss of contact with a
specific tether, the pattern of misuse should be taken into consideration by the judge.
Also, according to the operators of the center, phone calls are made by the monitor-
ing agents to the offenders when any disobedience to the regime conditions is
detected in the system. “If they don’t answer, we issue an alert on the anklet that will
vibrate and switch on the purple light. Since the vibration alert is disturbing, they
usually call back here to the station” (SEAP employee, São Luís Central Monitoring
Station).35
The state monitoring centers, as well as the terminals located in the prison units,
are interconnected to Spacecom’s central, located in the city of Curitiba, in the
southern region of Brazil. In some of the Brazilian states, the monitoring work is
executed directly by the company’s central office, which notifies the authorities
responsible for penal enforcement when a violation alarm is triggered. This is the
case of Rio de Janeiro, for example, where the EM devices are installed and
inspected at the base of the Intelligence Superintendence of the Penitentiary System
(Superintendência de Inteligência do Sistema Penitenciário, SISPEN), an agency
linked to the State Secretariat of Penitentiary Administration, but the supervision
activities are performed at Spacecom’s central office. In the state of São Paulo, in
which EM is used exclusively to control temporary exits and external work in the
semi-open regime, the monitoring is carried out by prison agents on computers
installed in the prison units and supervised by the Spacecom’s central office. In
Maranhão, the surveillance activities are done at the base station managed by the
State, which has the technical support provided by a Spacecom employee in loco
and by the company’s monitoring center in Curitiba.
The option for public–private partnerships, in its most varied models, is based on
the shared management of monitoring work with private agents who supply equip-
ment, services, and technical expertise related to operating EM programs. In this
regard, the private sector’s participation in the management of punishment raises
discussions about the weakening of the rule of law and the safeguarding of its
monopoly on the legitimate use of force, already in an advanced process of deterio-
ration (Minhoto 2000; Garland 2002; Wacquant 2009; Aviram 2016; O’Malley
2016). Scholars and activists question the legal, political, and moral legitimacy
implied by the activity of extracting economic profit through the privatized exercise
of the power to punish. An age-old function of the modern state and a cornerstone
of its foundation, punishment is increasingly executed and managed by hybrid
34
Idem.
35
Record extracted from field research carried out on 20 October 2016.
36 2 Short Circuit
agents created through public–private partnerships. Aside from the debate around
values, the process of commodification of punishment has led to the infallible
expansion of the consumer market for sentences, fostered by the contractual
demands of a minimal population (a number that nevertheless tends to always hit
the upper limits) submitted to the penal apparatus to ensure a productivity coeffi-
cient and economic growth of the crime-control industry (Christie 1993; Minhoto
2000, 2002; Davis 2003; ACLU 2011).
This does not mean, however, that the State is excusing itself from the task of
punishing. The growth of private companies in crime control indicates more of a
readjustment than a retraction of the State in the penal area (Garland 2002; Wacquant
2009; Aviram 2016). State agencies assume the role of contractor and co-manager,
setting the guidelines to be pursued through partnerships, cooperation agreements,
and shared management of the punitive apparatus with the private sector. In addi-
tion, the State remains the entity in charge of selecting and capturing the public to
be sent to penal institutions. On the other hand, besides providing structure and
equipment, private companies offer services and expertise for the management of
correctional programs (Minhoto 2000, 2002; Aviram 2016).
In the case of Brazilian EM policy, the guidelines for its application have been
pursued, not without difficulties, by the central government together with the state
secretariats of justice and penitentiary administration. Between 2013 and 2017, the
national executive branch sought to establish standards for the management of the
monitoring centers and use of the equipment, in an attempt to institute operating
protocols. The launch, in 2017, of the Manual de Gestão para a Política de
Monitoração Eletrônica de Pessoas (“Management Manual for the Policy of
Electronic Monitoring of Persons”), indicates the government’s efforts in develop-
ing nationally standardized models for implementing the EM policy. However, the
fact that prison policies in Brazil are the responsibility of the federative states, asso-
ciated with the sharing of supervision activities between public and private agents
in charge of monitoring services, results in a decentralization of the EM policy and
a notable absence of operational standards in the administrative procedures, as each
state has its own methods of management and each company develops its own mon-
itoring systems.
This decentralized way in which EM is operationalized also applies to the frag-
mented ways of conceiving the monitored individual. In the SAC24 system,
Spacecom monitors not exactly the offender, but the identification number of the
device he or she carries. The identity of users is restricted to state prison administra-
tions. Each piece of equipment is identified by a cipher generated by the system that
encodes the individual’s data, available only on control terminals accessed by the
state secretaries’ staff or by prison agents. According to the company, “the data
transmission and storage system is encrypted, which guarantees information
security.”36 From the identification number provided by Spacecom, the prison
36
Spacecom. Sistema SAC24 – Apresentação. Available at: http://spacecom.com.br/?s=mon
(Accessed on 18 February 2017).
2.4 The Marked Body 37
administration can access the registered data of its user: full name, age, photo,
address, telephone number, crime under which he was convicted, legal basis for the
monitoring (pre-trial, penal, or protective measure), criminal court where the case is
lodged, enrollment number in the correctional institution, and the number of the
monitoring device.
From the system’s perspective, therefore, the monitored individual is constituted
by his or her personal and legal data, handled by the state, and by the number of his
or her monitoring equipment, supervised by the contracted company. The tracking
activities performed by the company are carried out on the device, whose connec-
tion to its bearer is re-established in the databases of the state prison agencies. When
one speaks, therefore, of a “monitored person,” one necessarily speaks of the set of
data relative to the individual and the device attached to him or her. There is no
monitoring without this set. If the connection is broken, the surveillance is inter-
rupted. It is in this relationship that the subjectivation processes implied by the EM
programs concur with a correlated movement of de-subjectivation, insofar as the
controlled element is constituted by a fragmented composition of identifying infor-
mation concerning the individual and the device to which he or she corresponds.
What makes the “monitored person” is not their unity as a subject, but the composi-
tion of personal, legal, and digital data concerning them and their equipment.
Likewise, what constitutes their conduct is no longer just their individual behav-
ior, but the command-and-control circuits established between the technological
supervisory system and the physical location to be supervised. It is the exchange of
information and signaling messages between technical emitters and organic receiv-
ers – luminous, audible, and vibratory alarms; tactile, visual, and auditory percep-
tions – that should define the “monitored person’s” ways of conducting themselves.
This is the current that promotes its de-subjectivation, establishing the hybrid com-
position between the control system and the controlled subject (Haraway, 2016).
The EM user is no longer a mere manufactured subject, disjunct from the machine
that manufactures him or her, but becomes a component part, an interface of inputs
and outputs that enables the connections of a specific assemblage. The individual
responsibility produced by the neoliberal penality requires the paradoxical move-
ment of the subject’s dismemberment, turned into a connecting cog, an amalgam of
the coupling between surveilled subject and surveilling object.
2.4 The Marked Body
In Marcados (Marked), photographer Claudia Andujar exhibits portraits of indige-

nous Yanomâmi people with license plates hanging around their necks. The images
were taken between 1981 and 1983, when the Yanomâmi’s Amazonian territories
had already been invaded by the Brazilian armed forces for the construction of the
Perimetral Norte highway, a megaproject conceived by the country’s military
regime. The highway’s opening encouraged the large-scale exploitation of natural
resources and involved the Yanomâmi’s violent displacement from their ancestral
38 2 Short Circuit
lands. Besides, the contact with the majority population entailed the – often deadly –
contagion with influenza, malaria, and other diseases.
Andujar accompanied two doctors in charge of vaccinating the Yanomâmi, pho-
tographing each vaccinated individual and clamping their portraits onto registration
forms. For identification purposes, the men, women, and children had to be por-
trayed with numbers on their chests, as the Yanomâmi do not have given names. The
forms were then kept at the national health registry, complete with detailed informa-
tion concerning each individual’s anatomy. The peculiar impression of numerically
marked indigenous bodies raised questions for the photographer herself, whose
Jewish relatives had also been tattooed with identification numbers upon their
arrival at the Nazi extermination camps (Andujar 2016).
Meanwhile, Sérgio’s account of inhabiting a body marked by an electronic
supervision tether reveals experiences that go beyond social stigma and the neigh-
borhood’s discriminatory gaze:
The militia here in Rio de Janeiro, if they see a guy wearing a tether, they punish him. You
better don’t even go to certain places with a tether, because it might turn out badly for you.
I once even had a conversation with a militia acquaintance and he said, ‘Sérgio, we punish
them, we have to punish them’. It’s not only that they want to punish, but in the neighbor-
hood itself, when they see that the guy is being monitored, the state has already identified
him as a criminal. And then, if he is a thief, he will suffer reprisals. If he is a murderer,
depending on the case, he might just get away with it. If he is a rapist: game over, he will
die. So, depending on the crime and its context, he might be forced to leave the neighbor-
hood, or he might even be killed. I’ve witnessed a situation like this, when the guy wearing
a tether was found to be a rapist, and the guys killed him. I live well because a militia
member from my hood has served time in prison with me, he is a close friend of mine. But
elsewhere things would be way more complicated. And always depending on someone: ‘I
am friends with so-and-so, with so-and-so’. You don’t go face to face. Don’t even think that
you might pass unnoticed because you won’t. The militia will make you pay. So, if the guy
is wearing a tether in a neighborhood governed by the militia, he may become subject to a
series of punishments. He can be killed, he can be beaten, he can suffer whatever, just
because of the tether.37
Wearing a tether may have different implications, depending on both location

and circumstances. In certain areas of Rio de Janeiro, it may result in a consultation
of the convict’s criminal record, owing to the close links between the militia groups
and the military police. If the record indicates a crime that is not tolerated, notably
rape or the murder of a police officer, it may entail immediate execution.
It is worth contextualizing that Rio de Janeiro’s militias are armed groups usually
headed by police officers or former police officers combining the fight against drug
trafficking groups with the more prosaic endeavor of making easy money.
Throughout the past decade, the militias have seized control over key territories in
both the city and the state, imposing mandatory fees on local residents and mer-
chants and enforcing coercive monopolies over certain products, services, and infra-
structures (Cano and Duarte 2014; Manso 2020). According to Cano and Duarte
(2014, p. 331), “the militiaman is simultaneously a public and private agent,
37
playing with this ambiguity.”38 More recently, militia activities have extended into
the realm of institutional politics, noticeably through links to high-ranking govern-
ment officials, threats against human rights activists, and the notorious assassination
of Rio de Janeiro’s councilwoman Marielle Franco in February 2018.
In this scenario, the risk of death imposed by the militias’ martial law has to be
taken into account by anyone carrying an EM device. Sérgio continues:
There is a neighborhood in Jacarepaguá where I don’t know anyone. It’s militia territory.
Sometimes I take a bus that passes through. Then it may happen that I’m wearing shorts and
the bus goes there. Someone gets on the bus and sees me with the tether and thinks I’m a
threat: ‘Get off!’ He warns the militia in the neighborhood: ‘Folks, there’s a guy with a
tether I think he is going to rob the bus!’ They’d come and go after me, no kidding. Either
they’d shoot me, because things always may get violent like that, or they’d beat me up,
they’d screw my whole life. Because they have this capacity and legitimacy in their neigh-
borhoods. And society would applaud. The next day I’d be in the news: ‘ex-convict is killed
in a militia area.’ And the general consensus will be: ‘he was stealing.’ I’d die for nothing.
And nobody would question it, because the tether itself legitimizes death. It may seem
strange. If I die wearing a tether, the tether itself legitimizes death.39
Within certain urban settings, the tether thus singles out the individual who may
be executed by literally stamping the crime upon the convict’s body. Like the
machine inscribing the sentence into the prisoner’s flesh in Kafka’s famous short
story, the tether visibly reiterates the convict’s guilt: “It would be useless to announce
it. He will experience it in his own flesh” (Kafka 1998, p. 36). The device oscillates
between its manifest biopolitical purpose, intended to enable and steer ‘safe’ circu-
lations, and a more implicit necropolitical function, directed toward the identifica-
tion of killable life (Mbembe 2019). As a constitutive element of government
practices in post-colonial contexts, necropolitics is established when a state marks,
brands, or circumscribes a human group under its jurisdiction in order to kill it. It
refers to the production of “life unworthy of being lived,” an indispensable aspect of
the sovereign power to decide on life and death (Ibid.).
This affirmation does not imply that the state monitors in order to kill. Electronic
programs of penal control are firmly based on a biopolitical rather than a thanatopo-
litical rationale. Their common purpose consists in managing and steering living
bodies, not in exposing and subjecting convicts to death. However, in particular
contexts, governed by public–private assemblages that bear considerable marks of
38
In Sérgio’s words, “the relationship between the militia and the military police here in Rio de
Janeiro is very close, they operate as one. Policemen work in the militia, sometimes they are the
ones who command or provide security and make it work. It’s a very safe way to guarantee money,
because with the drug gangs there are steady gunfights, and you have to keep bribing them. Not
with the militia. With the militia, the money comes right into your hand. And then you have the
money from the vans, you have the money from the clandestine cable TV network, there’s internet
now too, there’s gas, there’s all that shit. It is usually police officers or ex-police officers working
for the militia, but there are common people too. There are military policemen who are militiamen,
there are civil policemen who are militiamen, there are military defense personnel who may be
militiamen. But in general, the military police is the one that has the most people involved.”
(Interview conducted on 17 November 2016)
39
40 2 Short Circuit
sovereign power, the tether may embody a token distinguishing those who should
live from those who have to die. The state marks the body whose death is then
enacted by parastatal militia groups, sustained by practices of routine confiscation
and assassination. Between the telematic control of the everyday circulations of the
convicts and the sovereign extraction of life itself, the visible marking of the crimi-
nal body gives rise to unpredictable consequences, eerily in tune with the more
general dynamics of violence that pervade Brazilian society as a whole.
Meanwhile, in the northeastern city of Fortaleza the violent clashes between
drug gangs vying for control of urban territories have brought about a range of prob-
lems for the operators of the monitoring system: as monitored individuals living in
the city’s peripheral areas are often linked to rival criminal factions, the rules of
home confinement are at odds with the convicts’ needs for perpetual circulation, as
staying at a fixed address may turn out to be life threatening. According to a psy-
chologist working at Fortaleza’s center of penal alternatives (Central de Alternativas
Penais), there may be situations in which the monitored convict is persecuted by a
rival gang and his house arrest represents a lethal threat: “He can’t stay still. If there
is an enemy trying to kill him, he can’t stay at home. He cannot comply with the
regime imposed by electronic monitoring. Otherwise he dies.”40
In a similar vein, the judge in charge of Fortaleza’s third criminal court recalls a
young man who gladly returned to prison after a period of house arrest served under
electronic surveillance:
I remember this case very well, but I don’t remember exactly which hearing it was. He
cried, pleading for reimprisonment since he was scared that over there, locked up in his
residence, monitored and unable to leave, he would be easy prey for his enemies. So he
asked for reimprisonment and the solution I found for him at that moment was to authorize
his return to prison and to remove the tether. Many times, I imagine, it is really more about
the psychological aspect. He thinks he is being watched. Because our prisoners, like pretty
much anywhere else, are mostly ordinary people. But they do move around a lot, it’s impres-
sive. They tend to change their residence pretty often, because of the fear, I guess, fear of
the enemy.41
Meanwhile in São Paulo, according to some accounts, the tethers have been used
to express allegiance to the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), Brazil’s most
powerful criminal faction. According to Vladimir, monitored in 2014 while serving
time in the state’s interior, prisoners from units belonging to the PCC wore the
bracelet on their right leg, whereas those belonging to the “opposition”42 wore it on
their left. “Each faction uses it on one side,”43 he said. Because he had had a dis-
agreement with a higher-ranking PCC member, Vladimir would wear the tether on
his left leg, until he was physically threatened and eventually resolved to tear off
his device:
40
Interview conducted on 4 July 2017.
41
Interview conducted on 3 July 2017.
42
“Opposition” (oposição) is how the PCC refers to its rival groups, also called “things” (coisa) or
“vermin” (vermes).
43
Informal conversation extracted from fieldwork carried out on 10 May 2016.
About two years ago, I was on a saidinha [temporary release], coming from the semi-open
regime in Sorocaba. The bus would take me to the capital. I was on my way to Osasco, to
my father’s house. When I got off the bus, on Azevedo Antunes square, Lapa district, three
brothers from the PCC were already coming after me. They saw the bracelet on my left leg
and took me to task. They cornered me against a wall, telling me they would have to take me
to a different place for a talk. I clenched my fists and said ‘Look, whatever you are going to
do to me, you do it right here. I’m not going anywhere with you, we’ll sort it out right here
and now’. There was a police base nearby, one of those mobile police units. The cops came
over to see what was happening and the guys ran away. I explained to the police that I was
on a saidinha, I showed them the bracelet and the document proving that I was on a leave
and they let me go. Next, I went to the Church of Our Lady of Lapa. I got there, said my
prayers, took a knife and cut off the tether. I left it there in the church in gratitude to our
Lord (Vladimir, CDP Belém I).44
Vladimir remained a fugitive for about a year and a half before being recaptured
and sent to the Belém I provisional detention center; although intended for pretrial
confinement, owing to overcrowding of the state penitentiaries the unit houses mul-
tiple convicts serving time under a closed regime. Regarding the application of the
device as a means of signalizing (non-)affiliation with the PCC, Natasha, impris-
oned at the CPP in Butantã and monitored during her temporary leaves, affirms:
“Since we have the tether, it is like this. The party attaches it to one leg and the
opposition to the other. Someone started this as a joke and it stuck.”45
In Augusto’s view, it was anything but a joke:
I didn’t know about this, until one day we left the colony to work in the Mirandópolis gar-
bage dump. Nearby, monitored prisoners from another unit in Mirandópolis, belonging to
the PCC, were also working there. Suddenly they started pointing at us shouting: ‘Look!
The vermin! Look there! The vermin!’ I wondered how the guys knew that we were the
opposition and I asked the prison guard who was there with us. He said: ‘Look at your leg.
Now look at their legs over there.’ That’s when I realized that the guys had the tether on their
right leg, and we had it on our left. The prison guards, alongside the PCC, mark us to know
that we are the opposition. There was one inmate who asked the guard to attach the tether
to the other leg, and the guard said no. He refused, because he wants us to be marked as
vermin.46
According to Augusto, the mode of attachment of the tether would be mutually

determined by the PCC and the prison guards, with the purpose of identifying those
who belonged to the organization and differentiate them from their enemies. For
members of the PCC, the device installed on the right leg would reinforce factional
identity by symbolizing membership in Brazil’s largest criminal group. For the
“opposition,” the mark attached to the left leg would denote their inferior position,
44
45
Informal conversation extracted from fieldwork carried out on 13 May 2016. However, Natasha’s
version was contested by other convicts. Maria, who was monitored when serving time under a
semi-open regime in Butantã, affirmed: “Bullshit. There’s nothing like that.” Other prisoners also
stated that they did not know anything about it, yet others confirmed the information. In any case,
most accounts coincide that this peculiar instance of sociotechnical (mis)appropriation occurred
mostly in the early years of the system’s implementation.
46
Informal conversation extracted from fieldwork carried out on 15 November 2016.
42 2 Short Circuit
equating them to “vermin.” Despite its original purpose of remote supervision, the
device was converted into a sign of identification and differentiation, enabled
through the informal ties between the PCC and the prison guards in charge of oper-
ating the system.
Beyond stigma, a staple of sociological research involving discredit and margin-
alization (Goffman 1988), the tether may thus entail a sense of self-affirmation by
indicating membership of a privileged group, sanctioned and authenticated by the
institutions of the penal state. Rather than a top–down effect of unilateral moral
disqualification, the phenomenon at stake thus qualifies as a paragon of collective
agency comprising the penal state, the “criminal faction” and the monitored convict,
resulting in a complex mode of subjectivation in which stigma is but one partial
effect. Kasper (2004) suggests the notion of “functional deviation” to describe alter-
native uses of a specific artifact, regardless of its original purpose. Accordingly, a
functional deviation entails the transgressive utilization of a particular device,
enabled by its incorporation into a new context and the concomitant actualization of
certain virtualities. The tether’s (mis)appropriation as a sign of factional identity is
facilitated through the power relationships peculiar to the so-called “world of
crime,” thus transcending the device’s original purpose of telematic penal control.
In any case, the susceptibility of the device to all kinds of “functional deviations”
notwithstanding, the tether inevitably turns the monitored convict into a privileged
target of police patrols, whose periodic stop-and-frisks add up to the inconveniences
of remote tracking. Several accounts emphasize the device’s tendency to trigger the
persecutory gaze of both the police forces and private security agents:
Everybody stares at you. In the market, the security guard was right next to me. And it
draws the attention of the police. In my neighborhood there weren’t even that many cops
and they started patrolling when they saw me with the tether. One day I went to pick up my
daughter from school. It was horrible. The school patrol came up to me and then a bunch of
police cars arrived and they frisked me. Everyone was watching, my daughter didn’t under-
stand a thing, she was very nervous (Natasha, CPP Butantã, São Paulo).47
The monitored convict embodies its penalty and is therefore likely to appear as a
“dangerous” subject justifying police measures through its sheer presence. The
anatomo-politics of the delinquent is thus intertwined with an effect of penal over-
exposure: the tether as a machinic element laying bare the subject’s individuality
and its condition of being a convicted criminal.
In this way, whether by the production of killable life, the self-affirmation of
factional identity, or the overexposure of the convict to the policing gaze, the moni-
toring device marks the subject’s body with the emblem of penal policy, thus induc-
ing a fundamentally open-ended process of constructing a criminal identity. The
seal of crime upon the convict’s machinic body thus participates in a symbolic
economy whose productive dimension characterizes contemporary technologies of
penal power and enables the constitution of a criminal self – even if the ensuing type
of subjectivity is exposed to death or constant police harassment.
47
References 43
The monitoring device reaffirms the convict’s identity as delineated by criminal

law and criminological discourse, now inscribed upon the body as an identity tag or
a contemporary yellow badge. Like the nameless indigenes numbered and regis-
tered by the biopolitical vaccination campaign succeeding their deliberate massa-
cre, the identity of the monitored subject is politically construed through the mark
affixed by the state, designating a target of indiscriminate police measures or even a
naked life (Agamben 2002; Mbembe 2019) exposed to imminent death. Oscillating
between bios and necros, the marked body thus represents the indispensable politi-
cal substrate of EM as a penal measure.
What has been broached up to this point are but some of the singularities that
characterize the specific effects of EM policies in contemporary Brazil. Indeed, it is
only by means of ethnographic research and participant observation that the spatio-
temporal particularities of any given dispositif of power can be fathomed. Hence the
necessity to consider the circumstantial aspects, often unexpected or unpredictable,
that may cause any specific technology to deviate from its initial design. Notably
exceeding its original purpose of penal supervision, the electronic surveillance of
convicts is reconfigured and repurposed by the agency of those at which it is
directed, proving the inevitably reciprocal nature of the body–machine interface.
Meanwhile, understanding the multiple potentialities contained in any given
technology requires a detailed study of the different layers that constitute it, notably
its programmatic and epistemological implications. An analysis of the theoretical
principles and scientific enunciations that underlie the design and implementation
of EM devices is inevitable in order to understand their specific operating condi-
tions within any empirical context. Investigating the interplay between the “dry”
and “wet” components of EM systems therefore requires an examination of the
knowledge and rationalities that structure such interactions in the first place, thus
providing the epistemic dimension articulating body and machine. Keeping these
methodological considerations in mind, the following chapter shall provide a his-
torical digression toward the politico-scientific genesis of the dispositif in question.
In order to identify its various penological purposes and its peculiar conditions of
emergence, the next chapter revisits the development of EM devices in the penal
superpower of the contemporary world, the USA.
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Chapter 3
Lines of Emergence
The mechanical explanation of vital functions presupposes,

historically, the construction of automata… –(Georges
Canguilhem, Machine et organisme)
3.1 Epistemological Progeny: Psychotechnology
Massachusetts, 1964. Led by brothers Ralph and Robert Schwitzgebel, the Scientific
Committee for Psychological Experimentation at Harvard University devises the
first electronic mechanism for remote monitoring of individuals deemed ‘socially
maladjusted.’ Using radiofrequency technologies, the researchers design a remote
location system that enables the exchange of messages between the tracked person
and a laboratory base station (Schwitzgebel et al. 1964). The prototype detects the
position of its wearer, transmitting information about his or her activities, allowing
him or her to exchange communication signals with the group of scientists and,
perhaps, modifying his or her behavior (Harvard Law Review 1966). Later referred
to as “Dr. Schwitzgebel’s machine”, the equipment condensed the initial experi-
ments on the development of new technologies of deviance control. The project
brought together technical and scientific instruments with the purpose of changing
behavioral patterns through human–machine interactions. Its conception brought to
bear psychological and criminological knowledge, connected to recent advances in
the field of telematics.
Starting from the analysis of this first set of experiences, this chapter undertakes
a genealogical investigation of the EM dispositifs and the different rationalities
associated with their inception. The main goal of the chapter is to identify the func-
tionalities originally attributed to the EM, revealing its connection with the transfor-
mations in the field of crime control that have taken place since the 1960s in the
USA. Based on the analysis of the records produced by the first scientists dedicated
to the conception of remote monitoring systems and on a review of the literature on
the subject, this chapter deals with some of the social and scientific conditions that

48 3 Lines of Emergence
enabled the emergence and development of EM in the USA, the world’s largest
power in penal matters. Its starting point is located in the intersection established
between scientific research and behavioral intervention, which would make the aca-
demic and laboratory universe the breeding ground for a new technopenal dispositif.
The artifact developed by Harvard psychologists consisted of portable transceiv-
ers weighing about 1 kg that sent radiofrequency signals at a distance of approxi-
mately 400 meters. The monitored individual wore a transmitter bracelet and a
battery attached to his or her waist. The location signals were amplified by an
adapted missile tracking system that provided the position of the equipment on a
screen located at the laboratory base station. Users reported their activities and emo-
tional states to the researchers, who sent back reinforcement messages by means of
sound codes. Developed as a psychotherapeutic communication tool, the prototype
was named Behavior Transmitter-Reinforcer and tested on a number of volunteers
that included students, convicts, and psychiatric patients (Fox 1987; Gable and
Gable 2005; Vitores 2009).
Soon after, research was started on the possibility of modifying the system to
capture the physical and neurological signs of the person being monitored, such as
heart and respiratory rates, blood alcohol levels, and brain waves. Robert
Schwitzgebel improved the initial model, making it easier to handle and including a
pulse sensor that captured heart frequencies and other physiological information. In
addition to displacement, the idea was to supervise the individual’s clinical and
psychological conditions, registering their oscillations and intervening in them.
According to the researchers,
the monitored person may carry a variety of transducers such as meters, recorders, cam-
eras, and measuring instruments; transducers that can be triggered and/or interrogated
from the central station for control purposes or behavioral investigation. (Schwitzgebel and
Hurd 1969, p. 7)1
The transmitter device carried by the user would have as its main function the
immediate interception of situations experienced by the subject, influencing their
actions through a behavioral feedback mechanism. The physical and geographical
data were sent to the control center every 30 s, allowing the production of analytical
graphs that were used as the basis for the reinforcement messages. For its part, the
base station issued a set of stimuli to the individual, checking their responses and
devising, through its records, a correlational chart of behavioural probabilities
(Schwitzgebel et al. 1964, p. 234).
According to Ralph Schwitzgebel (1973), the experiments were inspired by the
concept of “operant conditioning,” laid out around the 1930s by psychologist
Burrhus Skinner. An exponent of behaviorism, Skinner had investigated the vari-
ables of human conduct, based on the dynamics of stimulus and response, whereby
reinforcement or punishment of individual actions would produce measurable
effects. The notion of operant conditioning explained the ways in which the
1
All instances where the original references could be retrieved were quoted verbatim. In cases
where this was not possible, our translation has sought to restore it as faithfully as possible.
3.1 Epistemological Progeny: Psychotechnology 49
behavioral repertoire of a given organism is shaped by changes in its environment.

An external intervention would produce responses whose probability could be pre-
dicted. Individual conduct would adjust to the emission of positive or negative feed-
backs, according to verifiable tendencies (Skinner 2014).
However, contrary to the recurrent readings and interpretations of the classic
Science and Human Behavior, which emphasize the punishment–reward mechanics
as a hallmark of Skinner’s thought, the psychologist believed that the set of human
actions may be “more effectively controlled by modifying the circumstances” (Ibid.,
p. 191). Physical constrictions often produce emotional dispositions to counteract
them. “The controller need not have the power to coerce or constrain behavior
directly but may affect it indirectly by altering the environment” (Ibid., p. 316).
Aversive stimuli contingent on punishment tend to generate disorganizing predispo-
sitions, subsequently requiring other control methods to remedy them.
Inspired by Skinnerian theory, the group of Harvard researchers coordinated by
the Schwitzgebel brothers developed their control system by articulating behavioral
psychology with what they called psychotechnology, i.e., “the study of the interac-
tion between electrical, mechanical, and chemical technology and conscious human
experience” (Schwitzgebel 1973, p. 11). Their investigations were designed around
a research program defined as “behavioral electronics,” whose main scope was the
application of electronic engineering to the “understanding, maintenance, and mod-
ification of human behavior” (Schwitzgebel et al. 1964, p. 233).
Conceived as an applied science, the psychotechnology of the Harvard group
pursued the improvement of psychological observation and intervention techniques
through the use of electronic devices that allowed the patient to be maintained in his
or her usual spaces. With the help of remote localization and communication sys-
tems, it would be possible to overcome the experimental limitations represented by
the confinement methods and develop therapeutic control mechanisms in the open
environment. The recording of the individual’s activities and the exchange of sig-
nals with the base station would provide adequate conditions for the supervision and
modification of deviant behavior. More than mere observation, the idea was to
change individual conduct based on the relationship between human beings and
electronic systems, established as an integrated unit (Ibid.).
Among the multiple functionalities of their experiments – such as the treatment
of epileptic, geriatric, or mental health patients (Schwitzgebel 1973, p. 15) – the
researchers envisioned the perspectives they would offer to criminal rehabilitation
techniques:
Research on human conduct, as it has been performed up to the present day, either places
the individual under constant surveillance or relies on subjective information provided by
the individual about his or her own conduct. Both techniques have obvious limitations, and
the results of such research are often inadequate. For example, in modern penology, one of
the main goals is the rehabilitation of convicted offenders. Still, the commonly used peno-
logical tools and techniques involve either a high degree of situational restraint (prison) or
limited supervision through periodic contact with the individual (probation). The difference
between the two techniques is so great that, in many cases, the transition from one tech-
nique to the other can lead to counter-rehabilitative forms of stress. (Schwitzgebel and
Hurd 1969, p. 6)
Psychologists evoked the corrective function of punishment as one of its goals,

since the confinement techniques produced unwanted emotional effects. Prison and
its excessive constraints “stand more as a landmark in the technology of revenge
rather than the technology of rehabilitation” (Schwitzgebel 1968, p. 34). Their inef-
fectiveness as a reformative procedure for delinquent behavior should be addressed
by technological systems of control and prediction. According to them, the moment
one can “predict or control delinquent behavior, incarceration will no longer be
necessary as a means of behavioral control and social protection” (Schwitzgebel
1969, p. 236).
A parolee thus released would probably be less likely than usual to commit offenses if a
record of his location were kept at the base station. If two-way tone communication with the
parolee were included in this system, a therapeutic relationship might be established in
which the parolee could be rewarded, warned, or otherwise signaled in accordance with the
plan for therapy. (Schwitzgebel 1969, p. 598)
The objectives attributed to the system matched the premises that were typical of
penological thought at the time of its development. The therapeutic and rehabilita-
tive purposes attributed to EM were linked to the correctionalist precepts prevailing
in the 1960s. The discredit of prison as a corrective method had spread in American
legal, political, and criminological circles throughout the first half of the twentieth
century, fostering debates about the need to devise and develop the so-called alter-
native sentences (Cohen 1985; Wacquant 1999; Garland 2002). The growth of crim-
inal recidivism rates showed the inefficiency of prison as a reformative technique.
Penal measures applied in the community were preferred by experts and operators
of a criminal justice system essentially oriented by the rehabilitative ideal (Garland
1985, 2002).
In this context, psy knowledge was of special relevance within the scientific
framework that theoretically grounded the North American and Western European
criminal justice systems of the 1950s and 1960s. The central problems that brought
to bear the hegemonic criminological research were the understanding of the delin-
quent personality and the pathogenic aspects of the offender. From Freudian-
oriented criminal psychoanalysis, interested in the causal motivations that led
individuals to become delinquent – childhood traumas, unconscious conflicts, deep
underlying causalities – to forensic psychiatry, dedicated to identifying the neuro-
logical origins of social maladjustment – psychopathy, antisocial personality disor-
ders, inability of self-determination and understanding – the rehabilitative
criminological reasoning was largely sustained by the psy sciences, whose attention
turned to the characteristics of the individual, deciphered and treated according to
the binary differentiation between the normal and the pathological (Garland 1985).
Penal treatment focused primarily on the predispositions of the offender and the
rehabilitation of their socially, psychologically, or neurologically deviant behavior
(Garland 1985, 2002).
Within the scope of correctional concerns, the study and evaluation of the impacts
represented by different types of penal intervention was one of the guiding axes of
criminological research. Internal evaluations of crime control institutions attracted
government investments in countries such as the USA and England, aiming to ana-
lyze the effects of penal measures on criminals and the reduction of their propensity
to crime (Garland 2002). In this sense, community sanctions such as probation and
parole presented apparently favorable results for offender recovery compared with
incarceration (Dodge 1975).
However, the lack of continuous oversight of open prison regimes made their
ability to control and prevent recidivism questionable, calling for stricter methods
of penal supervision. It was necessary to develop effective forms of substitution for
prison that would guarantee strict, individualized, and moderating control exercised
over the offender (Cusson 1997). The Harvard group’s research pursued this goal by
developing the first mechanisms for remote monitoring of individuals perceived as
delinquent.
Systems such as these can monitor geographic location and psychosociological variables,
and enable two-way coded communication with people in their natural social environment.
(…) It would be desirable, for example, to offer criminals the option of choosing between
incarceration or parole with electronic monitoring. (Schwitzgebel 1973, p. 15)
The experimentation program developed in Massachusetts offered justice an

intermediate modality of penal control that would eliminate the drawbacks of prison
by dealing with offenders in their “natural environments.” The structuring and mon-
itoring of the daily activities of the convict in his or her own community, mediated
by the exchange of communicational and situational messages, would provide a
more efficient method of penal supervision.
The proposal gathered the discursive elements centered on the traditional reha-
bilitative purposes, incorporating, however, the new theoretical–programmatic con-
tents formulated by the emerging criminological currents of thought at the time. If,
on the one hand, the scientific goals of the group of psychologists focused on the
reform and modification of delinquent behavior, on the other hand, its proponents
bet on the predictive and situational performance in the social environment of the
criminal as an effective technique of crime control.
The Schwitzgebel brothers’ psychotechnology was connected to the epistemo-
logical genesis of the so-called environmental criminology, conceived between the
1960s and 1970s and sustained by the main hypothesis that crime is a natural mani-
festation of human conduct and that its propensity to occur must be restrained by
situational interventions. More than the individual transformation of the delinquent
subject, the theorists behind the new criminological lines of thought were concerned
with the spatial–temporal prevention of the criminal phenomenon. The efficiency in
fighting criminality would depend on environmental actions that would make crimi-
nal action a risky undertaking (Jeffery 1971; Brantihgham and Brantingham 1981).
The main target of scientific interest would move from the delinquent individual to
the criminal event.
Skinner’s behaviorism had itself already produced some of the basic elements
that would now be embraced by the environmental criminological school. The idea
that human activities would be conditioned by the external environment was the
central element of the behaviorist thesis, aimed at understanding and improving
control techniques. For Skinner, environmental changes and situational interven-

tions were the most adequate procedures for manipulating behavior.
The new criminological rationale would absorb these premises, channeling them
into the formulation of new strategies of crime control, based on a set of theoretical
assumptions and guidelines. Combining aspects of behavioral psychology, urban
social thought and microeconomics, environmental criminology – also referred to
as “situational criminology” or “everyday life criminology” – was based on three
main theoretical pillars: (a) routine activity theory; (b) geometric theory of crime,
and (c) rational choice theory (Brantihgham and Brantingham 1981).
The first pillar stressed the need to systematize the daily actions of both offenders
and victims in order to avoid the risks represented by “criminogenic situations.” The
focus of the experts was on the analysis, coordination, and prediction of individual
and collective activities, generating conditions for the management of population
flows within the urban space by crossing demographic information with data on
criminal incidence. The analysis concentrated on identifying the spaces and times of
circulation: where they go; how long they stay at their places of work, leisure, and
rest; what are the patterns of displacement, entry, and exit at the various places they
attend, and what is their relationship with the frequency of criminal events in the
observed areas. Pattern, time, and frequency were the core concepts upon which the
criminological research was based, and whose theoretical framework reclaimed the
foundations of human ecology2 (Cohen and Felson 1979).
The second theoretical pillar, referred to as the geometric theory of crime or
crime geometry, described the patterns of criminal occurrence by studying the geo-
graphic aspects of human activity, with special attention to the opportunities for
crime offered by spatial structure. Anchored in a given behavioral geography, its
theorists emphasized the influence of urban space on the individual choices of
potential victims and offenders. The central problem to be analyzed was that the
nodal points and paths frequented by criminals could intersect or overlap with those
crossed by potential victims and ordinary citizens. A safe path would therefore be
the one that avoids intersections with nodes or districts identified as risk areas,
where high crime rates are concentrated (Brantihgham and Brantingham 1981).
Finally, as the third pillar, rational choice theory applied to criminal phenomena
admits that criminal action is the result of a series of individual judgments made by
the offender, grounded on their own calculations of risks and benefits. If the crimi-
nal considers that the risks of the crime are lower than the benefits offered by it, the
infraction is perceived as a profitable action. In this sense, the potential offender acts
as an agent who calculates his or her actions, aiming to extract a personal advantage
2
Developed since the 1940s, human ecology considers the centrality of space and time for the
actions of human beings. Its theorists were interested in the modes of sociability established within
a community, based on relations of competitiveness and cooperation. Such relations would be
conditioned by the temporal transformation of the community space. The survival of individuals
and populations within a changing community would depend on their ability to adapt to the envi-
ronment, largely sustained by cooperative practices among the inhabitants (Brantingham and
Brantingham 1981).
from the crime. In this case, it is not only a matter of financial prognostics, but of
internal calculations and judgments that view penal intervention as a damage or a
risk to be avoided. The utilitarian projection of advantages and disadvantages would
guide the offender in their individual choices. Once treated as a pathological ele-
ment to be corrected and treated through rehabilitative techniques, the criminal is
now regarded as a rational agent, a planner of their actions, and an entrepreneur of
their own conduct (Becker 1974; Clarke and Cornish 1985).
The theoretical repertoire that made up the new criminological lines permeated
and still permeates EM programs in the various countries where it was implemented
(Kaluszynski and Froment 2003; Cotter 2004; Gable and Gable 2005; Vitores 2009;
Cotter and Lint 2009; Gacek 2022). The structuring of the daily activities of offend-
ers, based on schedules of circulation and withdrawal; the geometric planning of
their displacements within zones of inclusion and exclusion; and the notion that
penal intervention should be established as a risk to be inserted into the individual
calculation that drives the criminal are some of the guiding principles of EM prac-
tices, geared toward the management of the flows of convicts in the social
environment.
The Schwitzgebel brothers’ research was situated in the time span between the
hegemonic belief in the corrective functionality of punishment and the emergence
of a new criminological rationale that would set the tone for penal and public secu-
rity policies at the turn of the twentieth to the twenty-first century. The 1980s and
1990s would see significant changes in penal practices and knowledge both in the
USA and in Europe, toward a managerialist institutional epistemology, neutralizing
individuals and populations considered undesirable, to the detriment of the old cor-
rectionalist principles (Feeley and Simon 1992; Wacquant 1999, 2009; Garland
2002). The guiding scope of penal programs would swing between situational crime
management and the annihilation of the offender’s capacity to act. And offender
tracking systems would then be aligned to this new paradigm, particularly linked to
situational currents.
However, as we shall see later, the rehabilitative attributes conferred to EM pro-
grams will not be abandoned by the operators and legislators involved in its imple-
mentation. Instead, they will be placed into a heterogeneous and multifaceted tangle
of discursive formulations giving shape to a polyvalent apparatus, capable of adapt-
ing to varied political contexts and multiform penological epistemes (Cotter and
Lint 2009).
In any case, the analysis of the political features and epistemological dimensions
of EM require the study of the different rationalities shaping its conditions of emer-
gence, its nonlinear development, and its diffuse attributions. The inquiry of the
various lines of enunciation that weave together the practices of offender monitor-
ing allows us to identify, on the one hand, the tactical and cognitive schemes of
crime control mobilized as a result of its implementation and, on the other, the
composition of social, political, and economic forces that enabled its initial diffu-
sion. Beyond scientific knowledge, the development of the EM devices would be
leveraged by multiple discursive practices that permeated the process through which
not only neoliberal penal rationality, but even popular science fiction, was shaped.
3.2 Science Fiction and Neoliberal Penality
How silly I was when I was just a puppet!

And how happy I am now, having become a real boy! (Carlo Collodi, Le Avventure di
Pinnocchio)
Some unknowns persist with regard to the power of fiction to inform reality; to
its ability to yield the truth. It might be impossible to know with certainty the levels
of inspiration that public and private, political and business agents draw from the
fictional imaginary in devising their plans for giving shape to concrete reality. What
we do know is the potential of cultural production in making us think what would
otherwise be unthinkable and thus in outlining the virtualities of the future.
David Kirby (2000) alludes to the importance of the film industry and its interac-
tion with social reality in the construction of images and discourses about the
advance of research in genetic science and its impacts on society today. The rapid
expansion of biotechnological sciences is often projected by the cinema with fanci-
ful refinements and aesthetic overestimations regarding the manipulation of heredi-
tary organic material. The reverse, however, is also true, to the extent that a number
of productions in the field of science fiction have anticipated realities that, at the
time, seemed far removed from concrete reality. This is the case of the futuristic
cinema produced in the early twentieth century, whose plots are developed around
genetic experiments that would only come to fruition in the 1970s. Eugenics tech-
niques based on the manipulation of the human genome are portrayed in the output
of an incipient film production of the 1910s,3 which leads Kirby to probe the effects
of science fiction on social configuration.
His Sociology of Fiction, embraced by authors linked to the phenomenology of
cinema and futurist literature, raises questions concerning the influence of the cin-
ematographic universe on the development of genetic determinisms: the reframing
of racism carried out by the laboratory combination of human genes. Kirby offers
an analytical reflection on the eradication of the dichotomy between science and
fiction and their complementary mechanisms of reproduction of human relations.
But he also highlights the capacity of cultural production to shed light on society’s
worst fears about science as a social force. As the Portuguese sociologist Flávio
Ferreira (2016) notes, discussing Kirby’s work, the uncertain nature of the direc-
tions to be taken by biotechnological research makes it difficult to draw any valua-
tional conclusion regarding its ethical and moral content. At any rate, some measure
of caution is necessary “when fiction bothers us so realistically and reality seems to
border on the fictional” (Ferreira 2016, p. 115).
***
In 1983, US Judge Jack Love, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, got inspiration
from a Spider-Man comic book to carry out the first legal application of an EM
3
Among the movies mentioned by Kirby (2012) are: Eugenics at the Bar “U” Ranch (1914),
Snakeville’s Eugenic Marriage (1915), Heredity (1915), The Regeneration of Margaret (1916),
Their Mutual Child (1920).
3.2 Science Fiction and Neoliberal Penality 55
penal device. The magistrate was particularly intrigued by an episode of the popular
Marvel Comics series, in which the villain clamped a radar device on the hero’s
wrist in order to track his movements wherever he went. Tracking the character
would allow his rival to put himself at an advantage, as he would always stay one
step ahead of the superhero (Lilly and Nellis 2013, pp. 24–25). Enthused by the
cartoonist’s idea, Jack Love took the initiative to replicate it for supervising crimi-
nals in the arid landscape of Albuquerque. Since the late 1970s, the judge had been
interested in possible ways of monitoring young inmates from the local jail, collect-
ing information on electronic surveillance systems such as anti-theft cards used in
supermarkets and cargo and animal tracking technologies. The Spider-Man comics,
published in 1977 in an issue of the city’s newspaper, spurred Love to look for
manufacturers interested in designing a similar mechanism. It was then that he met
Michael Goss, a computer salesman, who agreed to undertake the initiative. Goss
surveyed the patents of the equipment developed by the Schwitzgebel brothers and
their research group, concluding that, with the use of reduced technological compo-
nents, commercially available on the electronics market, it would be possible to
develop something close to the judge’s order. The entrepreneur produced a device
that he named Gosslink, in reference to his own name (Burrel and Gable 2008; Lilly
and Nellis 2013).
Early versions of the artifact consisted of a transmitter that emitted radio signals
every 60 seconds and a receiver connected to a computer and a telephone line. The
system no longer included the possibility of direct intervention and two-way inter-
communication between the equipment carrier and the control center, as was the
case with the models developed by the Harvard psychologists. Basically, the appa-
ratus developed by Michael Goss consisted of a mechanism to detect the user’s
proximity to the central station and to sound alarms in case of violation of the delim-
ited areas. In April 1983, after testing the equipment on himself for 3 weeks, Jack
Love determined its application in five individuals under probation in Albuquerque
(Rodríguez-Magariños 2007; Burrel and Gable 2008; Lilly and Nellis 2013). Years
later, the judge himself would express his concern about the invasive aspects of the
device, when Japanese companies offered him the possibility of attaching a televi-
sion control to the equipment. At the time, the magistrate would state that the “new
technology was facilitating the violation of people’s basic rights” (Love apud
Rodríguez-Magariños 2007, p. 61).
It was too late. Following his experiment, EM systems began to spread across the
USA. A few months after Love’s initiative, a convict-tracking program was inaugu-
rated in Palm Beach, Florida, including 415 people in the period between 1984 and
1989 (Burrel and Gable 2008). Also in 1984, a similar project began in Kenton
County, Kentucky, aimed at surveilling probationers.4 By the following year, 21
states across the country were adopting EM programs (Lilly and Ball 1992). By
1998, the total number of people monitored in the USA was over 95,000, according
4
Individuals submitted to the probation regime, equivalent to the conditional suspension of sen-
tence in Brazilian law.
to data presented by the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology

Center (1999). Just over a decade was needed for the development of EM to reach
this mark.
The 1980s are considered the initial milestone in the spread of EM programs in
the USA. The equipment developed in Albuquerque is pointed out by analysts as the
inaugural version of the current mechanisms (Vitores and Domènech 2007; Burrel
and Gable 2008; Lilly and Nellis 2013). Jack Love and Michael Goss are credited
with having stimulated the elaboration of an operational model of the system and
enabled its first practical use. The inspiration from the fictional universe was con-
verted into concrete reality by the legal and commercial enterprise of its developers.
From then on, electronic penal control was disseminated throughout the North
American criminal justice system and exported to Europe as early as 1988, when
England conducted its first pilot projects (Mair and Nellis 2013). The genealogy of
the dispositif is nevertheless fraught with a number of discontinuities. Its develop-
ment does not follow a univocal historical mechanics, nor does it abide by a prede-
termined penological purpose. The EM features and the elements driving their
progress are linked to the different historical–political shifts that have affected the
field of crime control over the last decades of the twentieth century. Their conditions
of emergence were defined by acute transformations that swept through the penal
universe in many regions of the world.
Twenty years had passed between the beginning of the research project by Ralph
and Robert Schwitzgebel’s group and Jack Love’s initiative. The experimentation
program that took place in Massachusetts had not been supported by the state or
federal authorities. The few mentions of the project were critical of the potential
abuses that its use would entail (Vitores 2009). Its own protagonists had also pon-
dered the threats that EM systems could pose to collective and individual liberties.
“The misuse of behavioral telemetric equipment in crime prevention presents a most
serious threat to the essential civil liberties of the general public,” Dr. Ralph
Schwitzgebel (1969, p. 611) warned. Throughout the 1970s, relative oblivion had
been accorded to the idea of supervising offenders with electronic trackers (Burrel
and Gable 2008).
What, then, might be the reasons for the successful development of the EM pro-
grams from the 1980s onward? What might explain why a set of scientifically based
and psychologically grounded experiments could not succeed as a policy program,
whereas an idea spurred by a juvenile cartoon became the triggering point of the
boom period for a new dispositif of penal supervision?
Four basic and interrelated processes can be pointed out here as explanatory fac-
tors, all of them converging toward the so-called punitive turn (Wacquant 1999,
2009) that reconfigured the crime control strategies in the USA during the last three
decades of the twentieth century: (a) the massive – and racially selective – absorp-
tion of vast population contingents by the penal and penitentiary systems from the
mid-1970s onward; (b) the intensification of private capital participation in the US
criminal justice system; (c) the perception that fighting crime required the techno-
logical modernization of resources earmarked for penal and public security
agencies; and (d) the consolidation of a penological rationality essentially guided by

economic–political parameters of cost efficiency.
The interlocking of these four elementary processes represents, on the one hand,
a kind of socio-historical seedbed for a new technology of penal control and, on the
other, the partial and situated constitution of what some authors have called neolib-
eral penality (Wacquant 1999, 2009; Harcourt 2008, 2009; Lloyd and Whitehead
2018).5 The huge increase in the number of people subjected to criminal justice,
particularly among the Black population; the genesis and development of a promi-
nent crime control industry; the technicization of the tools deployed by penal and
security agencies; and the turn of hegemonic criminological thought toward an eco-
nomic and efficientist rationality are some of the core elements that characterize the
penal face of neoliberal government. Hence, a brief examination of these four spe-
cific points allows us to detect the main connections that may be established between
the emergence of EM dispositifs and the formulation of a political and epistemo-
logical framework in the field of penality, situated within the analyses of
neoliberalism.
(a) Demographic and racially selective expansion of the penal system
The last quarter of the twentieth century saw an unprecedented growth in the US
prison population, fueled by campaigns to reassert the ethnoracial hierarchy in the
country, as highlighted by Angela Davis (2003) and Michelle Alexander (2010),
among others. During the 1960s, the stratification between Blacks and whites had
been shaken by the political struggle of the Black pro-civil rights movements. The
collapse of ghettos in the North, concentrating the descendants of slaves in the
impoverished zones of large metropolitan areas, and the eradication of the “Jim
Crow system,” which had established legal racial segregation in Southern states,
would be followed by an aggressive State response toward the systematic criminal-
ization and massive prosecution of the Black population over the following decades
(Davis 2003; Wacquant 2009). The legislative cascade that declared a “war on
crime,”6 coupled with the performative hyperactivity of police forces and the relent-
less condemnation of street crime, was underpinned by the racially focused action
of penal and security institutions (Davis 2003; Alexander 2010). Crystallized in the
doctrine of law and order and in zero tolerance programs, the punitive and repres-
sive onslaught set in motion in the USA between the 1970s and 1990s led to an
abrupt increase in incarceration levels (Wacquant 1999, 2009; Davis 2003;
Alexander 2010).
5
In this section, I focus on some of the works that are more directly of interest to the research,
without pretending to provide an extensive review of the literature dedicated to the analysis of
neoliberal penality. Nor will I attempt to systematize and analyze neoliberalism as a global con-
cept, but instead concentrate on its penal face and on the authors who offer analytical tools for
understanding the emergence of EM.
6
The main examples of this were the anti-drug law, signed in 1986 by Ronald Reagan, raising the
minimum sentences for crimes related to drug trafficking and consumption, and the three-strikes
law, which in 1994 stipulated life imprisonment for habitual offenders.
From 1975 to 1985, the country’s prison population nearly doubled, jumping
from 380,000 to over 750,000 inmates. Of these, 45% were Black, whereas the
Black population made up 12% of the total American demography. In 1995, the
amount of people incarcerated in federal, state, and local prisons would exceed 1.5
million. By the year 2000, this number was approaching two million, with 1 out of
every 10 Black men between the ages of 20 and 29 in prison, whereas the rate of
white men in prison in this same age group was 1 in 100. In 25 years, the rate of
individuals locked up in carceral institutions in the “land of the free” grew by more
than 400%, whereas the total population of the country increased at a rate of 30%.7
The physical and pragmatic impossibility of expanding the prison system at the
speed required by the accelerated output of convicts also drove the expansion of the
population under community sanctions, already numerically superior to the aggre-
gate of incarcerated individuals. Simultaneously with the dramatic increase in the
prison population, the number of people in probation or parole was accumulating
even more significant contingents. In 1981, more than 1.5 million people were serv-
ing time in one of these two regimes. In 1990, there were more than 3.1 million. By
2000, this total had surpassed 4.5 million, a rate of 1 in every 54 adults living in the
USA, and 1 in every 14 Black adults.8 Far from being secondary, the mass of the
population subject to community supervision measures represented the thickest
layer of an expansive demographic block under the State’s punitive guardianship,
whose priority target was racially defined.
Nevertheless, doubt regarding the effectiveness of alternative sanctions as tech-
niques to control and prevent criminal recidivism would provoke changes in the
functional character of community sentences, traditionally associated with the reha-
bilitative ideal (Garland 1985, 2002). The mantric and relatively consensual conclu-
sion that “nothing works” when it comes to correcting the criminal, widespread
among criminologists and public administrators from the 1970s onward (Martinson
1974), would push probation services toward pure control purposes, intensifying
their methods of supervision and conditions of penal compliance (Wacquant 2009;
Garland 2002). Behavior assessments, toxicological examinations, periodic tele-
phone contacts, and reports concerning offenders’ compliance with judicial rules
would be emphasized among the tasks and procedures of probation agencies (Ibid.;
Ibid.). Within the framework of a new paradigm of community sentencing, EM was
inserted as an ideal technique, allowing the State to keep a close eye on the itinerary
of its probationers and parolees (Kilgore 2012).
However, the public authorities would no longer be the only agents in charge of
their elementary punitive duties. The large-scale production of convicts would now
require – and would in turn be required by – the structuring of a vast corrections-
commercial complex (Lilly and Knepper 1993), both within and outside prison
walls. So here we reach the second point, crucial to the success of EM programs in
7
Data gathered by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Available at: https://www.bjs.gov/index.
cfm?ty=tp&tid=1. Accessed on 18 Mar 2019.
8
Ibid.
the USA during the 1980s and 1990s: the flourishing of the punishment market and
the maximization of the lucrative function of the penal system.
(b) Increasing participation of the private sector in the criminal justice system
The role of the punishment industry in the inception of EM was initiated by a
two-way feedback process in the US penal system. On the one hand, the punitive
drive promoted by public authorities demanded the proliferation of agents capable
of dealing with the rapid influx of convicts. The corporate speed and low costs with
which private companies were able to build correctional facilities and provide sup-
ply and security services would be enough for them to earn the trust of the State
(Christie 1993; Garland 2002; Mason 2012). On the other hand, the emergence of a
wide punishment market structured by private companies would require its own
means of maintenance and growth, depending economically on the large-scale pro-
duction of prisoners. The accumulation of convicts became a necessary factor for
the productive development of penal enterprises that would turn their criminal
offenders into “human surplus value”9 (Davis 2003).
In 1980, there were still no adult prisons run by private agents in the USA. Ten
years later, there were already 67 facilities, housing a total of 7000 inmates. By
2009, that number would reach 129,000, representing a 1600% growth in less than
two decades. Companies such as Corrections Corporations of America (CCA) and
the GEO Group were responsible for the development of what became one of the
most profitable branches of the US economy, having mass incarceration policies as
the engine of its growth. In all, each of these companies had revenues close to $3
billion in 2010, as documented in a report published by the American Civil Liberties
Union (ACLU 2011).
Combined with the private prison construction program, the development of new
techniques for electronically supervising criminals offered promising prospects for
the (re)emerging punishment market.10 Still in the first half of the 1980s, a number
of companies and commercial organizations started to develop their own versions of
the ankle bracelets. The entrepreneur Michael Goss, who, along with Jack Love,
had designed the equipment tested in Albuquerque, opened his own specialized
company, National Incarceration Monitor and Control Services. It was the first com-
pany dedicated to the development and marketing of EM devices. In 1987, ten com-
mercial groups were already supplying tracking equipment in the USA (Renzema
1992). In 1996, there were already 20 American companies operating in the field
9
The idea of human surplus value is called upon here, based on its use by Angela Davis (2003,
p. 91), as surplus labor, reabsorbed by the market of punishment that transforms, not necessarily
labor, but the very manpower that is discarded by the market, into economic profit extracted from
the contracts established with the State.
10
Public–private arrangements in penal practices were not new in American history. Until the end
of the eighteenth century, jails run by private agents were commissioned by the State to hold indi-
viduals awaiting trial. The first publicly run prison was only built in 1790. From then on, private-
sector involvement in the penal sector would be limited to providing services such as food, medical
care, and transportation for prisoners. During the 1980s, however, private companies returned to
the correctional landscape and became an important player in the US penal system (Mason 2012).
(Gable and Gable 2005, p. 1). In the following decades, the production and com-
mercialization of EM systems would become an internationally widespread busi-
ness (Paterson 2013).
Beyond criminal justice, criminologist Craig Paterson (2013) stresses the impor-
tance of the private security industry for the burgeoning market for remote monitor-
ing systems and services. Big security companies, such as G4S and Serco, have
attained a relevant role in the implementation of EM policies in both the USA and
Europe, benefiting from their formal or informal ties with government institutions
(Ibid.). By instigating technological imaginaries, entrepreneurs in the industry
encouraged politicians and government agencies to modernize their supervision
practices and structures. Rather than the capabilities to correct or prevent criminal
recidivism, the emphasis was on the technical specifications and chimerical possi-
bilities their products offered to the State (Lilly and Nellis 2013).
(c) Technological modernization of penal and public security agencies
The modernizing efforts of the criminal justice and security systems that took
place in the 1980s and 1990s in the USA were based on the interface established
between the public and private sectors, fostered by the idea that the “war on crime”
would be won through the use of technological tools. This would be the main
weapon through which enthusiasts of programs such as zero tolerance would eradi-
cate urban incivilities – from the most insignificant to the most threatening, accord-
ing to the tenets disseminated by the broken windows theory.11 The focus on the
admirable capabilities of technical punishment and security systems was a powerful
lobbying tactic used by representatives of electronics companies (Lilly and
Nellis 2013).
The development of criminal monitoring programs was therefore part of a set of
techno-managerial arrangements to be adopted by police and justice institutions
(Froment 2011; Paterson 2013). Video-monitoring systems of urban space; biomet-
ric identification technologies; genetic data banks; analytical systems of crime
hotspots; and predictive policing programs would all become part of the strategic
arsenal aimed at fighting crime in large metropolitan areas. During the 1980s,
CCTV systems installed in public spaces spread throughout American cities. In
1993, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Products Agency) started its facial rec-
ognition program, later made available to security companies. In 1998, the FBI
inaugurated a forensic database that stored the DNA profiles of hundreds of
11
Formulated in the early 1980s by James Wilson and George Kelling (1982), the broken windows
theory provided some of the key foundations for the zero tolerance program inaugurated by
New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and spread across the USA over the following decade.
Roughly speaking, Wilson and Kelling argued that if a broken window in a certain building is not
quickly fixed, the tendency of people who “usually break windows” is to assume it is abandoned
and to continue the depredation. The metaphor was translated to the criminal area, in which the
authors advocated the need to curb and repress any and all infractions, no matter how minor, in
order to give neighborhoods and communities a safe aspect that would constrain criminals and
prevent further infringements from occurring.
thousands of convicts and blood and saliva samples collected by prison administra-
tions across the country (Lazer 2004; Lynch et al. 2008).
More than mere instruments, the new crime control systems enabled a series of
theoretical–discursive formulations based on the securitization of the urban envi-
ronment as a benchmark to increase the “quality of life” (Wilson and Kelling 1982).
Public order and good circulation in neighborhoods and communities would be con-
tingent on the ability of the authorities to gather geographically identifiable infor-
mation about the rates and frequencies of criminal events, as predicted by the
environmental criminological currents of thought, described in the first item of this
chapter. The iconic CompStat, an information processing system commissioned by
the New York Police Department and inaugurated in 1994, synthesized some of the
fundamental precepts of environmental criminology, as it allowed, through the use
of statistical data on criminal occurrences in urban space, the georeferenced distri-
bution of patrol activities, based on the tactical principles of situational intervention.
(d) Economic rationalization of the penal system
The fourth and last element, here understood as a driving agent of EM, refers to
the lexical and political conception of a new penal rationale guided by managerial
purposes, as described by a series of authors inspired by readings on what Michel
Foucault called neoliberal governmentality. The criminological approaches emerg-
ing in the 1970s and the exchange of practices and expertise between the public and
private sectors would lead police and justice agencies to adopt an administrative
model mirrored in the enterprise form and guided by cost-efficiency parameters
(Foucault 2004; Feeley and Simon 1992; Garland 2002; Harcourt 2008; Aviram
2016). Updating the premises of liberal utilitarianism devised by Jeremy Bentham
and Cesare Beccaria, which translated the foundations of the free market to crimi-
nal–legal thought, neoliberal governmentality pursued the optimization of control
techniques, conceiving punitive and preventive practices on the basis of economic
criteria geared toward risk analysis, cost containment, and the maximization of effi-
ciency in fighting crime (Foucault 2004; Feeley and Simon 1992; Harcourt 2008).
Beyond or short of the privatization of criminal justice in the strict sense, public–
private exchanges in the activities of management and elaboration of punishment
were part of a specific process of governmentalization of the penal system
(Foucault 1979).
As systematized by the economist Gary Becker (1974) and the exponents of the
Chicago School in criminal matters, the new economic approach to penal thought
employed as its analytical method a series of calculations contrasting the costs of
crime with the investments necessary for punitive intervention, so that the expendi-
tures of criminal policies did not exceed those represented by criminality itself. The
instruments used by crime control agencies would then be based on an arithmetic
reason that converted punishment into a market mechanism, aimed at reducing the
supply of crime to a certain level that would make its demand turn into a negative
one. Unlike the utilitarianism of Bentham and Beccaria, the core objective of neo-
liberal criminologists no longer resided in the moral conversion of the criminal
individual, construed as political profit extracted from reformative punishment, but
in an intervention on the crime market that would turn the offending act into a risky
venture (Foucault 2004). A losing agent in the game of the formal market, regulated
by the laws of free enterprise, the offender would enter the market of crime as an
individual entrepreneur who would pay the price of the penal response as a natural
consequence of his own choices (Hamann 2021).
The legal and disciplinary readings on crime and the criminal were overlapped
by a penal epistemology focused on the economic–political management of crimi-
nality. The offender would thus be regarded as a market agent, subjectivized as
human capital, an entrepreneur of oneself, and an individual responsible for the
risks incurred. If neoliberal governmentality were constituted on the basis of a cer-
tain configuration of technologies of power, its effectiveness would be contingent
upon the activation of a series of technologies of the self, perceiving the criminal
according to the same analytical grid through which criminal policy was conceived
(Foucault 2004; Staples and Decker 2008). And the contact surface between one
scale of action and the other would be determined by economic rationality. The
market reasoning would provide the global and fluid knowledge that established the
connection between strategies for governing the self and the others; between the
techniques of power and their corresponding modules of subjectivation.
It is to this extent, therefore, that the electronic surveillance of individuals either
convicted or prosecuted by the justice system would correspond to the demands
posed by neoliberal penality. The increase in public spending on the penal system
would gradually make the prison question be perceived as a budgetary problem.
Financial impact studies were being released, emphasizing the high cost of incar-
ceration. Supervision techniques had to be developed that would be less costly than
prison and more efficient than traditional community sentencing. The technological
virtues of remote monitoring mechanisms would be compounded by their advan-
tages from an economic point of view (Paterson 2013). In the same sense, the trans-
fer of the tasks of criminal control to the punished subject made it possible for the
State to be relieved of the costs represented by the provision of services and struc-
ture to prison facilities. The penalized subject became one more agent assigned the
shared function of the penal activity.
The range of transformations resulting from the four processes mentioned above
comprise some of the social and political elements of what is described here as
neoliberal penality, providing the basic conditions for the consolidation and devel-
opment of EM programs in the USA. Other historical processes could be assumed
to be a guiding thread for the genesis of the monitoring dispositif, as geolocation
technological systems date back to the beginning of the twentieth century, still
within the scope of military navigation. However, the sociological scope proposed
in this study is rooted in a particular interest in the technical, political, and episte-
mological metamorphosis of punishment strategies, crystallized in the EM pro-
grams. It is in the recent shifts operated by the power to punish that this research is
primarily interested.
Nonetheless, it must be noticed that what is defined here as neoliberal penality is
not organized as a static political and analytical grid, unalterably established in time
and space. Nor is neoliberal penality grasped as an airtight or comprehensive
3.3 Martial Traces: Geopositioning as a Technology of War 63
theoretical and political system but rather as a mobile composition of flexible vec-
tors, capable of adapting and modifying itself according to different social and
political scenarios, just like the power dispositifs it engenders (Lemke 2018). Other
vectors connect to it, adding to, juxtaposing, or bypassing its tactical formations.
Other lines of force run through neoliberal penal rationality, diverting, redirecting,
or retro-feeding its practices.
3.3 Martial Traces: Geopositioning as a Technology of War
Military satellites designed to guide nuclear missiles are being used to monitor prison
parolees and probationers in a technological advance designed to reduce the nation’s sky-
rocketing prison population. (Fields 1999, p. 1)
This was the lead of the article published on 8 April 1999 by USA Today. It was
a brief and concise report about the latest innovation in the American criminal jus-
tice system. The article described the technology, specified the costs, and presented
some of the debates around the use of a new remote sensing technology that would
expand the capabilities of the offender monitoring mechanisms: the Global
Positioning System (GPS). The constellation of satellites managed by the US mili-
tary power was now available to the penal system. It was no longer necessary to
stick to the limited resources of radiofrequency communications, whose signal cov-
erage was restricted to the perimeters near the offender’s residence. It was no longer
needed, therefore, to force probationers and parolees to remain in the immediate
vicinity of their home owing to technical restrictions. Now, anywhere on the planet,
the 24-satellite network that made up GPS would be able to detect their location.12
The so-called second generation of EM technologies was being introduced to
the market.
It was during the Persian Gulf War that the US Department of Defense inaugu-
rated its navigation system, made up of 16 satellites at the time. GPS debuted in
1991 to improve the accuracy of the AGM-86C missiles launched against Iraqi
troops in Kuwait. The project was part of the “smart weaponry” development pro-
grams carried out by the US military, which consisted in the perfectibility of the
military offensive, envisioned by the idea of “surgical strike” (De Maack 2011).
Orbiting more than 20,000 km from the Earth’s surface, the satellites calculated, in
real time, the latitude, longitude, and speed of the military artifact, and plotted the
route that directed it to the coordinates of its target. In addition, they made it possi-
ble to locate troops, tanks, and aircraft of the allied forces and landmines planted by
the enemy (Ibid.).
Considered the largest military operation since the Vietnam War, the invasion of
the Gulf region was considered a laboratory for perfecting cutting-edge
12
The GPS system is, nevertheless, subject to interference and range gaps, usually caused by topo-
graphical blocks, buildings, and mountains.
technologies that would be widely employed in future international conflicts. The

use of smart weapons was part of a broad strategical process of reconfiguration of
contemporary warfare that involved efforts to eliminate face-to-face combat between
military troops. Instead of the exchange of casualties in battle territories, the new
“states of violence” (Gros 2006) would be marked by their focus on techno-scientific
competencies aimed at the calculated distribution of death. And GPS would be one
of the main means of its implementation. After the intervention in the Gulf, the final
evaluation report of the US campaign issued by the Department of Defense high-
lighted the importance of the new sensing technology, concluding that the geoposi-
tioning system was used more extensively than planned and met the needs of
navigation and localization: “GPS should be considered for incorporation into all
weapon systems and platforms” (DOD 1992, p. 877).
By the late 1990s, the satellite network would begin to be used to monitor indi-
viduals in law enforcement. Its civilian use was already available for car tracking,
travel planning, and cell phone location (Lilly and Nellis 2013). It was only a matter
of time before the technology was incorporated into criminal monitoring systems.
By the 1999, nine US states were using GPS for surveilling a population ranging
from sex offenders in Chicago to juvenile delinquents in New Jersey (Fields 1999).
In 2001, Florida began deploying the technology, integrated with georeferenced
software for identifying criminal occurrences, in order to gather statistical informa-
tion about crime and compare it with data related to the circulation of convicts (Lilly
and Nellis 2013). Over the following years, the system would be used in EM crimi-
nal programs throughout the country.
The use of GPS has transformed EM practices by allowing criminal authorities
to permanently track the movements of the monitored individual. Its technical
advantages over the old mechanisms reside in its capacity to detect displacements in
detail. Unlike the equipment based on radiofrequency, which was only able to signal
the presence or absence of the individual in a determined space (usually his or her
home), the device equipped with GPS transmitters could capture his movements in
any environment. Whereas before the location of monitored people was only ascer-
tained when they were picked up at home, now their complete itinerary could be
known all along the way. With GPS, not only did judicial criminal enforcement no
longer require a fixed space, but the supervision capabilities themselves became
deterritorialized.
During the first years of its implementation by justice systems, the adoption of an
unrestricted tracking mechanism in EM programs divided opinions and positions in
the legal field. On the one hand, part of the legal scholars rejoiced at the prospect of
removing from prison certain criminals who did not represent a ‘real danger’ to
society, avoiding the “criminogenic effects” of incarceration and the high costs
involved. “The system gives judges an option for keeping people out of jail and
away from all the negative influences there. It is also cost-saving to the taxpayer,”
announced University of Nevada National Judicial College President Percy Luney.
“The problem with the old system is once offenders leave home, you have no idea
where they are or what they are doing,” he added (Luney apud Fields 1999, p. 2).
On the other hand, another group of scholars warned about the possibilities of
excessively expanding penal controls through the widespread use of GPS. Georgetown
University Law Professor Paul Rothstein underlined the changes in crime control
techniques related to the use of new tracking mechanisms, noting: “You could end
up with the majority of the population under some kind of surveillance by the gov-
ernment” (Rothstein apud Fields 1999, p. 2). The threats related to the scaling down
of state control capabilities loomed over the critical discussions and analyses that
surrounded EM and its innovations. Attention was paid, in particular, to the poten-
tial of the surveillance technologies to boost the processes of net widening: a phe-
nomenon defined by Stanley Cohen (1985) as the expansion and intensification of
penal controls, effected by the increase of the prison population, simultaneously
with the growth of the number of people subjected to community sanctions – there
is a multiplication of the demographic volumes submitted to the criminal justice
system, whose control techniques become progressively more comprehensive,
whereas new agencies and services, supposedly developed to replace the old institu-
tions, come to establish with prison a relationship of complementarity and supple-
mentary control.
In fact, the development of the first generation of EM devices had already sig-
naled the expansion of the penal network that their advancement entailed. The ini-
tial diffusion of EM programs in the USA during the last decades of the twentieth
century had occurred in parallel with the enlargement of the country’s prison sys-
tem. There was no apparent trend toward a decline or containment of incarceration
rates with the use of the device. On the contrary, its development reinforced the size
and density of the State’s punitive network, which, alongside its private partners,
absorbed increasing numbers of people and made the conditions of penal compli-
ance ever stricter, now mediated by remote tracking mechanisms (Kilgore 2012). In
view of the strengthening of the power of control enabled by the use of GPS, Paul
Rothstein noted the potential of the new systems for “creating a monster” (Rothstein
apud Fields 1999, p. 2).
Alarmist or not, his caveat had a point. The second generation of EM systems
contributed significantly to the further spread of the device. Spurred on by compa-
nies such as Advanced Business Sciences and ProTech Monitoring, pioneers in the
use of GPS for EM (Paterson 2013), the dissemination of the system caused the total
number of people monitored in the USA to more than double by the turn of the
century, rising from 42,000 in 1997 to 100,000 in 2006, according to data compiled
by the Journal of Offender Monitoring. In the same year of 2006, the number of
people locked up in the country’s prisons reached a total of 2.2 million, with its
growth rate reaching a historical high of almost 3% per year. Concomitantly, the
rates of probation and parole remained on the rise, jointly exceeding five million
people in 2007.13 The coupling between prison and EM kept the incarceration trends
unchanged, producing a vast legion of captives, both within and outside of the walls.
Bureau of Justice Statistics. Available at: https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cpus10.pdf.

13
Accessed on 20 Mar 2019.

Taking advantage, therefore, of satellite communication systems, the monitoring

technologies would acquire new development vectors. To the lines of force that
configured the neoliberal punitive drive were now added the advances in military
research. And the directions taken by the technical novelties presented by the justice
system would respond to the intersection between the political orientations of the
country’s penal authorities, the economic interests of the punishment industry, and
the will to maximize technological efficiency: an invidious formula that led EM to
becoming a virtual extension of the prison institution, distancing itself from its
stated purposes of replacing confinement, making the controls established beyond
the walls more rigid and omnipresent, and scaling the capabilities of penal supervi-
sion to boundless horizons.
Global Preventive Security. This is how Didier Bigo (2014) refers to the geoloca-
tion system developed by the US military and used by the criminal justice system.
The author analyzes the transversalization of surveillance practices, connected to
the contemporary processes of intersection between strategies of crime control and
techniques of war management. Over and above the exchange of technologies
between penal and military institutions, the capillarization of new mechanisms of
control emerges as both an effect and a driving factor of the tactical and cognitive
symbiosis established between internal and external security policies. The dis-
courses and practices associated with contemporary securitization strategies are
marked by a “dedifferentiation” between military, police and penal domains: a pro-
cess through which the armed forces are called to intervene in internal affairs; the
police engage in transnational conflicts; and criminal justice systems become dedi-
cated to the control and neutralization of offenders regarded as intimate enemies.14
Hence, the analytical relevance, underlined by Bigo, of combining sociological
research with internationalist studies.15
Shifting his gaze to outer space, political scientist Leandro Siqueira (2015)
explores the development of remote sensing systems based on a genealogical analy-
sis of campaigns to occupy Earth’s orbital space, driven by the arms race in the
second half of the twentieth century. Interested in the rearticulation of power prac-
tices operated by contemporary societies of control (Deleuze 1986, 1992), Siqueira
analyzes the deployment of monitoring technologies on a planetary scale, based on
14
See the theoretical-discursive conceptions based on the so-called Criminal Law of the Enemy, in
which the criminal is legally deprived of his or her condition as a citizen and considered as an ele-
ment to be neutralized by the criminal policy (Jakobs and Meliá 2009).
15
A similar movement is operated by Stephen Graham (2006), who draws attention to the impos-
sibility of understanding the spread of technologies for surveillance and monitoring of urban space
without considering the progressive militarization of cities as an emphatic strategy of public man-
agement. Taking up the perspectives of Paul Virilio and Mackenzie Wark, who place war at the
center of political analysis, Graham discusses the connections between global processes of urban-
ization and the technical and discursive repertoire mobilized by the US military. The use of geolo-
cation technologies and omnipotent surveillance systems constitutes a major aspect of the
reorientation of military strategies toward controlling urban insurgencies and managing the risks
posed by crime.
the technical and scientific accumulation obtained from the space ventures carried
out during the Cold War.
As a product of space research and geared toward the perfectibility of the war
offensive against the external enemy, GPS was now directed at internal targets,
bringing along the diagrammatic reconfiguration of crime control tactics, oriented
by the military objectives of identification, traceability, and pursuit at a distance.
Accuracy and mobility became essential attributes of a deterritorialized criminal
control armed with sidereal technologies. The qualities of the second generation
EM systems became yet another asset of the dispositif, which had already begun its
deployment around the planet, driven by companies interested in opening up prom-
ising markets in Europe, South America, and Oceania.
Still in the late 1980s, after the implementation of EM in Canada (1987), England
and Wales (1988) started their own tracking programs, combined with the probation
regime. In the following decade, Sweden (1994), Australia (1994), the Netherlands
(1995), Spain (1996), France (1997), Argentina (1997), Belgium (1998), and New
Zealand (1999) developed pilot projects that would be consolidated throughout the
2000s (Kaluszynski and Froment 2003; Leal 2011; Nellis et al. 2013). The many
different implementation models varied according to the political orientations of the
executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government in each country. The
levels of participation of private companies in the administration and operational-
ization of EM also differed according to national contexts. England granted broad
powers of action to private companies, which, in addition to providing equipment,
became primarily responsible for managing the monitoring centers (Paterson 2013).
In the cases of France, the Netherlands, and Sweden, private agents developed the
devices, but the control centers remained under State authority (Lévy 2013;
Nellis 2014).
Argentina was the first Latin American country to implement EM, and shortly
thereafter became one of the partners of Brazilian authorities who undertook techni-
cal visits to the neighboring country before implementing the system (Maciel 2014).
The Israeli company Elmotech, one of the most prominent in the industry, operated
in the province of Buenos Aires providing equipment and running the monitoring
center that would later be used in some of the pilot projects in the Brazilian state of
Minas Gerais (Idem).
In the 2000s, EM programs were adopted in other European countries, spread to
Latin America, and reached Asia, being used in Germany (2000), Italy (2001),
Portugal (2002), Mexico (2003), Israel (2005), Denmark (2005), Chile (2005),
Colombia (2005), Panama (2005), Dominican Republic (2005), Thailand (2007),
Norway (2008), Poland (2009), Bulgaria (2009), and South Korea (2009).
In June 2010, EM was legally authorized for the first time in Brazil. After 3 years
of experimentation involving federal legislative bills, initiatives by national and
international companies, tests by local judges, and unconstitutional authorizations
ratified by state governors, Federal Law 12258/10 authorized in the country the
electronic surveillance of people sentenced to a semi-open regime and home deten-
tion. As we shall see in Chap. 5, its integration into the national legal system was
orchestrated by a set of heterogeneous agents and eclectic rationalities that brought
together the diverse discursive frameworks from the USA and Europe, which were
organized, however, around the urgencies posed by the Brazilian criminal justice
system. Its introduction in the country would promote, on the one hand, the deploy-
ment of a new technology of control within the vast national punitive machinery
and, on the other hand, the shaping of a specific dispositif that would accommodate
the endemic characteristics of the Brazilian penal system.
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Chapter 4
Diagrammatic Compositions
What makes this tether different from the shackles of slaves?

–(Thaiane)
4.1 It’s a Signal Blockage
Ceará State Electronic Monitoring Cell, July 2017.

Judge: Is it a breach?
Monitor: No. It’s a signal blockage.
Coordinator: And it’s not a breakdown. If this was the case, it would go back and forth,
back and forth.
M: You can see the impacts. He moved, and it’s over. So you see that the information is
not that subjective.
C: Then he thinks he’s totally blocking it, but we can see that he’s outside the inclu-
sion area.
M: Because we see what was his last transaction, which was at home. And sometimes it
sends us a signal, lost, in the middle of that path. It will show that he is out.
C: We can see when he’s really violating. They test us.
M: Yes. Just to find out our reaction, if we’re really watching or not.1
While checking the software interface, the Coordinator of the Ceará State
Electronic Monitoring Cell and one of the monitors on duty flagged the violation
alert. They seized the opportunity of a visit from the Judge of the Third Court of
Criminal Enforcement of the state capital Fortaleza to clarify some details about the
system operation. In front of the bench that surrounds the octagonal room, the four
monitors of the daytime period keep up with six 30-inch screens and three comput-
ers, which lay out the various windows of the software. One of them displays the
analytical report automatically generated by the system, with a periodical record of
1
Ceará State Electronic Monitoring Cell (Célula de Monitoramento Eletrônico do Ceará). Record
extracted from field research carried out on 3 July 2017.

72 4 Diagrammatic Compositions
each monitored user’s itinerary and an indication of any noncompliance with the
monitoring rules.
The Cell had been installed 5 years earlier, but the system was new, and judges
had little familiarity with some of the procedures. It was not easy to establish a pro-
tocol that would unify the judicial decisions when some misconduct was committed
by the convict. The judges themselves were not really clear about the objectivity of
the information produced by the software and reported to them by the monitoring
staff. A minimum standardization was necessary and the Coordinator knew this,
repeatedly insisting to the Judge: “There is no standard, there is no standard.”
The monitors, however, seemed to take ownership of the mechanism. The detec-
tion of any violation was automatic in the system and the indication was evident in
the computer interface. “If the battery was running low, or the device ran out of
power, or they left the house, or approached the victim, any irregularity, and their
name would already flash red and go to the top of the list in the software.”2 That day,
the supervision work presented to the Judge pointed out the exact moment when one
of the monitored users dropped the tether’s connection to the server installed in
the Cell.
M: (...) we see that it’s right at the top of the day: 0 hour.
C: Everything’s fine.
M: There’s only that green and blue line. There’s nothing here, the signal is perfect,
nothing wrong, everything normal.
C: Then the impacts begin.
M: He starts moving the device. He taps it, touches it, causes this impact. And it shows
here in the screen: IMPACTO.
C: Then in just a moment, a few seconds after, all the signals disappear.
The transmission is interrupted. Most likely, a foil covering the tether blocked
the General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) communication with the server. A well-
known artifice among those who wear monitoring equipment, the foil prevents con-
nection to the satellite network and the sending of data to the central station. The
breakdown of the device would make it impossible to send sparse signals for the
next few hours. This was not the case. The impacts were just a test, due to the uncer-
tainty of the monitored individual about the effective supervision of the operators.
“Sometimes they leave the area for a minute and come back. Just for testing, to see
if we’re really watching,” explains the Coordinator. Under an EM program, one
never knows for sure the level of strictness of the monitor on duty. Hence, the tests
the user resorts to, only seconds before the blockage.
Doubt about the level of diligence in the surveillance performed by the monitors
constitutes in itself a key feature of the operation of the EM system. Coupled with
the technical drive toward inducing self-control in the monitored subject, some mar-
gin of uncertainty, even if not foreseen by the system’s programmers, prompts the
individual to assess for himself the dangers involved in risking a violation. No phys-
ical deterrent is imposed on the person, and a low level of noncompliance may be
tolerated. The consequences of possible violations will depend on the chain of
2
Supervisor of the Ceará State Electronic Monitoring Cell.
4.1 It’s a Signal Blockage 73
information provided by the software, the interpretation of the monitors, and the
final decision of the judges. A deliberate violation thus entails the acceptance
of a risk.
Likewise, a lack of precise information about the technological functioning of
the monitoring apparatus is common among people under EM. In general, the
agents in charge of installing the equipment on the users provide few details in this
regard. The relative ignorance of the monitored individual about the real capabilities
of the system gives the operators additional power in processing the tracking infor-
mation sent to the judges and used as a basis for evaluating the convicts’ conduct.
As a black box attached to the body, the device is endowed with a technical opacity
that keeps the monitors in control of its features.
Still, in the morning, the communication between the Monitoring Cell and the
monitored equipment is reestablished. The regular path between the individual’s
home and workplace is detected again. The blockage was temporary, not lasting
beyond dawn. The violation, however, was recorded by the software and will be
officially forwarded to the judge the day after his visit. The decision regarding a
possible return of the convict to prison is the responsibility of the magistrate and
will be communicated in a hearing. If the young man is lucky, a warning from the
judge and the continued house arrest with outside work should keep him from rel-
egation to a closed prison regime. Otherwise, his brief lapse of disobedience and
escape will take him back to one of the already known penitentiary facilities in
metropolitan Fortaleza. And the effectiveness of open-air supervision shall be ascer-
tained within the walls.
Starting thus from this brief occurrence of signal blockage performed by a moni-
tored offender and detected in the Ceará State Electronic Monitoring Cell, this
chapter revisits the data produced through ethnographic research in order to explore
some of the paradoxical effects of EM policies in Brazil. The first paradox concerns
the complementary relationship between prison confinement and open-air monitor-
ing in the country’s penal system. Conceived as an alternative to incarceration, EM
programs reaffirm the centrality of the prison as the main punitive technique and
transposes carceral controls beyond the limits of institutional walls (Devresse 2012;
Kilgore 2016; Gacek 2022). The second paradox is explored ethnographically in
this section and refers to the lack of control by the criminal justice system over the
ways in which the EM mechanisms work and operate. Although on the one hand,
EM devices act as a form of supervision that is supplementary to incarceration,
enhancing the surveillance capabilities of the criminal justice system, on the other
hand, the management of monitoring programs and their modes of appropriation by
local operators and monitored individuals are beyond the control of judicial authori-
ties themselves. In an effort to demonstrate this specific contradiction, this section
explores an occasional moment of interruption of communication signals as a gap
that reveals the operation of the EM system and its constitutive assemblages. It
advances, therefore, the methodological hypothesis briefly presented in the first
chapter, according to which the error, the failure, or the interrupted communications
identified in a given technology provide important elements for examining its per-
formance and functionalities.
***
The technopolitical facility available in the Cell was remarkable. Inaugurated in
2012 by the Secretariat of Justice of Ceará (Secretaria de Justiça do Estado do
Ceará, SEJUS) the unit was responsible for the execution and coordination of the
EM programs in the state. A team of 12 outsourced monitors alternated in shifts to
perform the tracking 24 h a day. Three supervisors were in charge of issuing viola-
tion reports to the judges. Three prison agents provided direct assistance to the moni-
tored users and performed maintenance on defective equipment. Another three
administrative assistants provided technical and operational support to the monitors.
At the head of the team, the Coordinator managed the work and established relations
with the SEJUS staff, with the Central Office for Community Sanctions (Central de
Alternativas Penais) and with the four Courts of Penal Enforcement of the state.3
The technological equipment was composed of a server, three computers, six
monitors, and a TV set, all supplied by the company Spacecom, hired by the state
government through a bidding process. The server detected the tracking information
emitted by the equipment attached to the users and sent it to the computers in the
control room, where the SAC24 program interface was displayed on the monitors
and TV screen. Violations such as communication signal interruptions, battery expi-
ration, anklet breakage or noncompliance with conditions relating to schedules and
circulation zones were signaled by automatic alerts activated in the software and
registered in the convict’s monitoring report. A total of 3000 anklets were available
in Ceará, of which 2881 were in use in 2017. The equipment was distributed between
the state capital and four other base stations located in the municipalities of Quixadá,
Sobral, Iguatu, and Cariri. In charge of controlling 1607 people in compliance with
pre-trial restraining orders, 1156 in penal compliance, and 118 in emergency protec-
tive measures (DEPEN 2017a), Ceará had one of the most comprehensive EM
structures in the country.
Nevertheless, the blockage of communication signals that had been displayed to
the Judge on the day of his visit to the Monitoring Cell highlighted a number of
vulnerabilities in the state’s EM system. The interruption of communication caused
by the tracked individual revealed some of the problems displayed by the device,
both from the technological point of view and in terms of the legal–political man-
agement of the monitoring activities. It was not the first, nor would it be the last
occasion on which the team of monitors encountered this type of violation. Unlike
evasion, which would require disruption of the device, the sustained interruption of
3
The Central Office for Community Sanctions (Central de Alternativas Penais) has a psychologist
and a social worker, who provide individual and collective psycho-social assistance to the people
being monitored. The Courts of Penal Enforcement (Varas de Execução Penal) are responsible for
the files of convicted individuals, whereas the Criminal Courts (Varas Criminais) handle the files
of those who are serving pre-trial restraining orders or emergency protective orders.
signal transmission was based on the artificial and temporary interception of com-
munication between system components, establishing a time interval, at the com-
mand and discretion of the offender, during which the connection is cut and
monitoring is suspended.
Aluminum foil is like that, it breaks the signal. The guy doesn’t break the anklet. He just
rolls up a bunch of aluminum foil and cuts the signal. And it reports a violation. The
violation is immediately reported. But the signal interruption also happens if he is in the
elevator. It will also be interrupted if there is a storm. If there is a satellite failure. If he is
standing under a concrete slab. So, he can always blame it on this. But whenever there is a
breach or a breakdown, it is an objective fact.4
As a tactical obstruction, the blockage causes a temporary inversion of the relation-

ship of command over the mechanism, by means of which the operating competence
of its activation and deactivation is transferred to the offender, who is nevertheless
subject to possible police capture and return to the prison system. Preserving the argu-
ment of defense based on the fallibility of communication signals – a questionable
alibi, depending on the duration of the blockage – this intervention restores one
instance of autonomy to the individual, based on his or her own subterfuges, regard-
less of any specific command over the forms through which the system is constituted
and organized, thus neutralizing its capacity for connection and control.
Episodes like these were a cause of concern for the Coordinator. In the absence of
clear instructions and unified judicial procedures on how to act when faced with pos-
sible violations committed by users, she would usually instruct monitors to call the
police. “We log the incident, we register the number, and we report it to the Judge.”
Before that, a warning was activated by the monitor on the equipment carried by the
offender, prompting them to contact the Cell to explain the violation. “There is a
light on the anklet that is always flashing some color. (…) When I click here, it will
immediately flash the purple light and the anklet will vibrate every 5 minutes. It
vibrates and beeps too. It has a vibrating and sound alarm.”5 If the individual does
not respond, the occurrence is sent to the Integrated Coordination of Security
Operations, which manages the police patrol cars, so that the arrest is carried out.
However, the lack of a clearly outlined standard of operations on the procedures
to be adopted in episodes of violation was still a management problem to be
addressed.6 For their part, the judges were unable to determine whether a violation
detected in the system was the result of equipment failure or foul play by the
offender, as the automatic report generated by the software, delivered in technical
language, did not spell out the circumstances of the various possible forms of non-
compliance. The mere list of dates, times and types of violation presented in the
report may give rise to doubts about the intentions of the monitored individual in
4
Psychologist of the Central Office for Community Sanctions of Fortaleza. Interview held on 4
July 2017.
5
Supervisor of the Ceará State Electronic Monitoring Cell (Célula de Monitoramento Eletrônico
do Ceará).
6
An attempt to standardize the EM procedures and services all over Brazil was recently made by
the National Council of Justice (CNJ), through Resolution no. 412/2021.
provoking the interruption of signals, damaging the equipment or allowing the

anklet’s battery to run down.
Alarme Data de Data de Data de Duraçäo

inÍclo violaçäo finalizaçäo (com alarme)
Sinais de GPS e GPRS 23/04/2017 23/04/2017 23/04/2017 00:00:00
perdidos (uSip) 22:38:01 23:08:01 23:08:01 (00:30:00)

perdidos (uSip) 03:36:50 11:28:03 11:29:03 (07:52:13)

perdidos (uSip) 21:30:03 22:00:03 22:16:03 (00:46:00)

perdidos (uSip) 05:27:52 05:57:52 05:58:52 (00:31:00)

perdidos (uSip) 03:22:28 03:52:28 04:03:28 (00:41:00)
Excerpt from the automatic infringement report generated by the SAC24 software
The purely computerized aspect of the data generated by the software made it
difficult to determine the intentional nature of the violations detected. Thus, it was
necessary to interpret the information provided, taking into consideration the moni-
toring rules established for each user and the specifics related to their compliance
conditions, such as the quality of the communication signal coverage in their envi-
ronments of circulation, the permanent availability of electricity, the practical feasi-
bility of remaining at a fixed address, among a series of other factors that would
affect compliance with the EM conditions. The automatic report required a brief
translation of the data generated by the software, according to the particularities of
each case, carried out by those who had knowledge of the language and operation
of the system: the monitors.
This is how the technical teams played a crucial role in the prosecution of indi-
viduals under EM, as judicial decisions regarding the intentionality of offenders in
committing violations were based on the monitors’ and supervisors’ analysis of the
information provided by the software. If the judges did not fully understand the
automatic violation data, the technicians, on the other hand, seemed confident
enough about their own readings of the warnings listed in the program. They were
therefore the ones who provided the basic information for the final decision by the
magistrates about the motives of the users in breaching the rules. It was the apex of
the system, the monitors and the supervisors, who had the practical and cognitive
elements for the evaluation of the conduct of the monitored individuals.
Thus, more than the lack of legal, legislative or normative regulation regarding
the procedures to be adopted by the agencies in charge of managing the EM pro-
grams, the operating power vested in the monitors resulted from the technological
make-up of the tracking systems, endowed with their own semantics, encoded in
communicational parameters and behavioral alerts, whose reading and interpreta-
tion required technical training. Inverting the formal hierarchy that would assign to
judges the responsibility for handling criminal proceedings, the monitoring policy
bestowed on the technical teams, and the pragmatic capabilities of procedural inves-
tigation. Instead of the magistrate’s robe, it was the technician’s uniform that ruled
over the criminal legal process.
But the software also had an effect, as any kind of irregularity or communication
breakdown was reported by the system as a violation. It is common knowledge that
interference in signal transmission systems is frequent in all equipment based on
global positioning system (GPS) and GPRS technologies, such as cell phones, geo-
location applications, and the like. Failures are a constituent element of any techno-
logical communication mechanism, susceptible to weather changes, problems in its
internal components or external interceptions, regardless of the intention of its
users. Unaware of the circumstances, the EM software developed by Spacecom con-
verted any communication failure between system components into violation
warnings.
Subjected, hence, to the secret judgments of the software (Pasquale 2015), the
technocratic jurisprudence instituted by the EM policy confers an uncanny central
role to the interface between the team of monitors and the technological tracking
platform. The production of the legal truth about the convicts’ behavior becomes
conditioned to the sociotechnical assemblage (Latour 1994, 2013) represented by
the EM system and the criteria set by the Information and Communication
Technologies professionals.
For reasons like these, from the point of view of the Judge of the Third Court of
Penal Enforcement of Fortaleza, it was imperative not to remain hostage to the
interpretations made at the forefront of penal policy when making decisions regard-
ing the legal status of the individuals being monitored. Hence the need to better
understand how the system works. The Coordinator herself seemed troubled by
such responsibility given to her team, requesting categorical orientations from the
Judiciary.
In this sense, some meetings had been held between the Judge and the monitors,
with the objective of solving doubts about the technological aspects of the control
platform. A technical specialist would be brought in within a few weeks to explain
the details of the information emitted by the ankle monitors and replicated by the
software. The Coordinator hoped that, with this, some clarification of the adminis-
trative procedures concerning the consequences of violations and the referrals to be
made by the Monitoring Cell would finally be provided.
But it was not only the judicial authorities who were unaware of relevant and
sometimes critical details about the EM devices. Most of the people under EM who
were interviewed for this research had not received precise information about how
the equipment they were carrying worked. In Ceará, the guidelines for the use of the
equipment are transmitted to the inmates by a video shown in one of the cubicles of
the Monitoring Cell, bypassing the specifics and the kind of explanations that
require face-to-face interaction between monitors and monitored. Issues related to
the perimeter limits of the control zones or entry and exit times in the areas of inclu-
sion are often poorly clarified. Individual particularities related, for example, to the
difficulties of remaining at a fixed address or the impossibility of constant access to
electricity sources, are often ignored by operators, generating violations in the sys-
tem without the users themselves being clearly aware of it.7
In the state of São Paulo, few or no formal instructions are given to the individu-
als being monitored, for whom the technological intricacies of the EM device
remain obscure. Guidance on the use of the equipment is limited to the booklets
provided by the monitoring companies, leaving it up to each individual to ensure
that the rules are followed and to deal with the consequences of possible violations.
In this way, it is not uncommon for people to violate the EM conditions without
knowing that they are doing so, incurring disciplinary sanctions or regression into a
penal regime. As reported by some monitored offenders, the devices developed by
the company Synergie and used in São Paulo during 2017 did not even indicate to
the users possible absences from the inclusion area. Violations were recorded in the
system without any knowledge of the convicts.
In Rio de Janeiro, the level of misinformation perpetuated by the State Secretariat
for Penitentiary Administration (Secretaria de Estado de Administração
Penitenciária, SEAP) concerning the EM policy reached the point where, in early
2017, the services were interrupted for months, without users having any knowl-
edge of it. The lack of payment by the State to the company responsible caused the
supervision activities to be suspended, but the equipment were kept on people’s
bodies. The monitoring centers did not work, the systems did not operate, but the
users continued to wear the anklets attached to their legs.
However, it should also be noted that the opacity of the mechanism is not merely
evidence for a poorly provided service, nor is it specific to the Brazilian case. Based
on interviews held in the UK with EM operators, Craig Paterson (2007) emphasizes
the importance that EM officers attribute to a certain degree of imprecision in the
guidance given to the monitored offenders regarding the functioning of the system.
One of his interviewees explicitly stresses this factor: “I think the whole thing works
a lot better when it’s potential is a bit clouded.”8 The users’ ignorance or uncertainty
about the tracking operation affords the operators additional discretion, fueled by
the technological mystification that endows the device with untapped potentialities.
7
Problems such as these were reported at the Fortaleza Center for Community Sanctions (Central
de Alternativas Penais de Fortaleza), visited on 4 July 2017.
8
Monitoring Officer (apud Paterson 2007, p. 319).
The opaque aspects of its operating methods seem to be an attribute of the mecha-
nism itself, through which monitors and supervisors obtain detailed information
about the daily lives of monitored users, whereas little is known about the ways in
which the system works.
The basic principle is not new. The investigation of the activities of others, with-
out allowing the scrutiny of one’s own activities, constitutes one of the most tradi-
tional strategies of power (Pasquale 2015). The consecrated formula that allows
seeing without being seen, rooted in the penitent confessional and enshrined in the
modern panoptism (Foucault 1995, 2013), is now reinstated in the sociotechnical
mechanics of EM systems. Omniscience and opacity shape the performance of
ubiquitous surveillance, simultaneously distant and present: open and remote in its
unlimited reach; hermetic and reluctant as a technical condition. Whereas the pan-
optic model of disciplinarization is disfigured through the deterritorialization and
decentralization of remote monitoring programs, its ambiguous regimes of visibility
and secrecy are re-enacted in the technopolitical operation of EM devices. These are
conditioned to the transparent reading of their targets for observation and to the
concealed preservation of the operating procedures of a penal mechanism that is
ultimately conceived as a black box in its physical, technical, and political aspects.9
Thus, whether viewed from the perspective of the users, the system’s operators,
or the discourses that support the EM dispositifs in Brazil, the purpose of this study
is to shatter the black box and break it open, to dismantle it into fragments, to dis-
rupt the connection between its multiple interfaces so that its heterogeneous ele-
ments and fractured parts can be more fully understood. A certain epistemological
Luddism (Winner 1978), based on ethnographic observation and documentary anal-
ysis, is mobilized here as an investigative tool of the political dimensions of a new
techno-penal dispositif, covered with the obscure layers that characterize both the
technological systems and the Brazilian penal and penitentiary institutions. This is
the primary goal of this chapter. To disassemble the artifact. To select some of its
pieces in order to render intelligible its power effects. To detect the connections
established between its internal components and its external interfaces. To observe,
in particular, its direct connection with the prison apparatus.
What are the links established between prison and EM in the Brazilian penal
system? How do the devices of remote surveillance fit into the dynamics imposed
by the country’s carceral reality? At what precise point and in what exact manner
are monitoring technologies and institutions of confinement connected? How are
these two distinct power diagrams articulated? Going back to São Paulo’s prison
system, the following section explores these questions.
9
The concept of black box is employed by Bruno Latour (1994) and Frank Pasquale (2015) to
designate the political importance of the opacity created by sociotechnical systems. For Latour, the
opaque aspects of a sociotechnical assemblage enable a given object to operate as a serial and
invisible set of subprograms, over which no one has any control. Based on its opacity, the purpose-
ful actions and intentionalities inscribed in technical objects become inaccessible. Pasquale, in
turn, analyzes the black box aspects that are preserved by companies, governments and financial
market operators as a way of shielding their activities from regulation and public scrutiny.
4.2 Superimposed Diagrams
The structure consists of two quadrilateral blocks of similar dimensions, which

together occupy 27,000 m2 of built-up area. To the left, an alley passes through four
external concourses intersecting with the cell blocks arranged side by side. Following
the blueprint of the ‘compact’ or ‘synthetic’ unit – a reduced and readjusted version
of the widespread ‘fishbone pattern’ – every block is cut through by a central longi-
tudinal axis, where the main internal circulations occur. Interspersed with security
gates and cluttered with hydraulic pipes and electric wires, the axis is lined with
steel doors that separate it from the hallways and the ambulatory. There are eight
hallways in each unit, four to each side, parallel to each other and perpendicular to
the main axis. Every hallway contains a courtyard facing eight cells of approxi-
mately 16 m2 each. The whole structure is built on ground level, except for the
concourses in front of the hallways accessing the high-security wing and the isola-
tion cells on the first floor. The complex’ outer perimeter is surrounded by a rectan-
gular wall comprising six surveillance towers – one at each corner and two bisecting
the long sides of the rectangle – making up the outer face of the prison diagram.
Located at the shores of the Tietê river in São Paulo’s eastern zone, the Chácara
Belém prison complex comprises two Centros de Detenção Provisória (provisional
detention centers, CDPs) and two Alas de Progressão Penitenciária (penitentiary
progression wings, APPs). In São Paulo’s prison system, the CDPs are reserved for
prisoners awaiting trial – the so-called provisórios. Because they were mainly
planned for detainees serving short-term custody, they are smaller and less elaborate
than regular prison units. In turn, the APPs are specific wards accommodating con-
victs kept in semi-open detention, which entails the possibility of working outside
the facility.
Thus serving distinct purposes, the architectural model of the Chácara Belém
complex updates the old prison designs known in Brazil as “telegraph poles,” which
consist of a long central corridor into which the different modules built separately
converge. In the compact version, the modules are smaller and closer together, and
the administrative rooms are projected outward from the radial, preventing rebel-
lious prisoners from gaining access to prison officials.10 Connecting its four units,
the interior of the complex is chained by discrete sectors and sub-sectors, annexes
and extensions – both planned and improvised – whose daily grind is characterized
by the asphyxia of its sealed compartments and the inescapable overcrowding. Each
of its locked doors holds dozens or even hundreds of men awaiting a reply, be it
from a lawyer, a doctor, or their kin.
10
The compact units were widely adopted in the state of São Paulo over the last two decades,
replacing the large prison complexes and the practice of keeping prisoners without a conviction in
police precinct jails. The option for this model, designed for fast and economical construction, is
part of the recent changes in the state’s prison policy, characterized by the expansion of the state’s
prison system to the countryside triggered by two major events: the Carandiru Massacre and the
emergence of the criminal faction Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC). See: Godoi (2017a).
4.2 Superimposed Diagrams 81
At the entrance of APP II, to the right of the front cage, an Intel Core i-5 computer
and hundreds of portable transmitters connected to it via web, GPS, and GPRS, are
part of the configuration of another diagram, as a promise of penal experience in
freedom.
***
These dots represent prisoners, they have an electronic emitter on their ankle. You can
select a prisoner and you know his identity. The identity.
… Video cameras multiply the perspective of control. Their cold eye should illustrate the
prison, demystify it.
A biometric device for access control.
… And the search of a visitor with technical means, at a distance (Harun Farocki,
Gefängnisbilder).
Harun Farocki’s images would be enough to describe the current overlap between
different morphologies of power reproduced in Chácara Belém, were it not for the
abject singularities of the penal system in the state of São Paulo. In his feature film
produced from scenes captured in North American and European prisons, the German
filmmaker presents a sequence of images in which the prison environments are occu-
pied by clusters of electronic equipment for identification and remote control. Internal
security cameras and body scanners make up the carceral apparatus aimed at detect-
ing the movement of prisoners and the penetration of forbidden objects into the jail.
Inmate trackers are installed inside prison facilities, signaling the movement of
detainees through the different sectors of the units. An emerging machinery of open-
air supervision is superimposed on the old models of confinement. Just like the con-
tent, the images themselves juxtapose one another, imbricating the harmonic
anachronism between techniques of fixation and of motion generation. “Prison tech-
nology: electronic shackles are attached to the foot of the convict” (Farocki, 2000).
In São Paulo, across the courtyards of the Chácara Belém penitentiary progres-
sion wings, the path of prisoners tracked by electronic tethers is observed in the
control software installed in the computer next to the entry cage. When they return
from outside work, the semi-open regime inmates remain in the prison units with
their monitoring equipment on their bodies. Some of them have wounds on their
heels, caused by friction between the skin and the equipment’s strap. Others report
burns, provoked by the eventual heating of the bracelet when charged in the socket.
“It overheats,” they say. Others still are not bothered. They get used to the equip-
ment. The penitentiary security agent in charge of the wings observes their move-
ments during working hours through the screen of the old Intel placed on the desk
in his room, the same space where the devices are installed in the prisoners. The
unused equipment is stored on a shelf at the back of the room, amid a tangle of
cables, chargers, and line filters.
At the prison’s main entrance, access control measures include an array of walk-
through metal detectors, X-ray screening devices, and CCTV cameras. The visitors,
the vast majority of whom are women, wait 8–12 h on Saturday nights to be searched
in the morning in stuffy rooms equipped with body scanners recently acquired by
the Secretaria de Administração Penitenciária (Secretariat of Penitentiary
Administration, SAP-SP). The body scanners were installed after years of pressure
from social movements and civil society organizations to eradicate the so-called
vexatious searches, which subject prisoners’ families to invasive exposure of their
bodies. The equipment would avoid physical contact between prison agents and
visitors and would make it unnecessary to strip the people being searched. Pleas in
defense of the dignity of the family members of prisoners culminated in the approval
of state law 15,552 in August 2014, which bans intimate searches in the state’s pris-
ons. Four years after the approval of the law, recent research reveals the persistence
of vexatious search procedures, in parallel with the use of body scanners.11
The uncanny affinity between the crude carceral mechanics and the highly
sophisticated paraphernalia of a digital age is hardly surprising given the security
industry’s rapid innovation cycles, as Farocki’s images suggest. Indeed, high-tech
penitentiaries have been a recurrent topic of both sociological and criminological
research for decades (Christie 1993; Wacquant 1999; Bouagga 2010; McKay 2022).
However, the particularities of the connections between the blocks of prison geom-
etry and the new control apparatuses are quite remarkable when combined with the
traditional mistreatment of prisoners and their families, perpetuated in São Paulo’s
penal system, despite its innovations (Salla 2006; Godoi 2017a, b).
Among the states that were included in the fieldwork for this research, São Paulo
was the only one that hired equipment that would have burned the legs of its users.
Developed by the company Synergie, the devices from the so-called Phoenix plat-
form have caused burns to be reported both in the Chácara Belém APP II and in the
correctional progression center (CPP) of Franco da Rocha, aka Castelinho. Also
unique to the SAP-SP is the use of ankle monitors inside prison units, as reported by
the acting director of the National Penitentiary Department (Departamento
Penitenciário Nacional, DEPEN) in 2016, who affirmed that “São Paulo is anti-
exemplary in everything,”12 contradicting political discourses that build the image
of São Paulo as the Brazil’s most “civilized state.”
Keeping tethers on inmates inside the prison is a standard practice in the state.
Between 2010 and 2019, all semi-open regime prisoners who worked under EM
outside the units were required to keep the equipment on when they returned to the
carceral facilities. Prison officials argue that the removal and subsequent reinstalla-
tion of the equipment would require extra effort every time the prisoners go out to
work. According to Rubens, a guard at the Butantã CPP, “it would be impossible to
put on and take off an anklet every day on everyone.”13 The detainees are constantly
tracked inside and outside the units.
Effectively, this was not the purpose of the EM policy mentioned in the legisla-
tive proposals that advocated the implementation of the system as a substitute for
incarceration.14 Nor was this the use intended by the first creators of the EM
11
ITTC. Revista Vexatória e Audiências de Custódia. Available at: http://ittc.org.br/revista-
vexatoria-audiencias-de-custodia/ (Accessed on 20 January 2019).
12
Interview held at the DEPEN headquarters on 29 March 2016.
13
Informal conversation held on 3 June 2016.
14
See Chaps. 1 and 5.
echanisms, back in the 1960s, when they foresaw the obsolescence of prisons. For
m
Dr. Ralph Schwitzgebel, researcher at Harvard University’s Scientific Committee
on Psychological Experimentation and one of the main developers of the experi-
mental electronic control systems in the USA, just as “the ball and chain have given
way to the prison courtyard, and the prison courtyard is now giving way to the half-
way house, someday prisons may become museums or monuments to the inhumanity
and ineffectiveness of social retribution” (Schwitzgebel 1969).
About 50 years later, on the front yard of the Butantã half-way house in metro-
politan São Paulo, female inmates in the semi-open regime roam with their ankle
monitors under the command of the prison agents. When the time comes for the
daily searches and their bodies are lined up against the corridor bars, they carry on
their legs the electronic prosthesis originally designed by Dr. Schwitzgebel. Thaiane
recalls:
When the tether is attached to you, it is sealed on your ankle. In a room next to the duty
station, they have TV screens, with little green dots. Right there inside the unit. So, when you
had the tether attached, it had a number. And that number was activated on that screen and
you were told to leave the room, to stay outside in the courtyard in front of the prison build-
ing, which is a huge courtyard where the cars are parked. Then they would tell you to walk
to the other gate and come back: “Turn around, go there and come back, and so.” We did
this so that they could see if we were being properly monitored. Then you would leave for
work. When you were about to leave, they would take a good look at you. Because if you
spent the whole night trying to, let’s say, saw it off, for example, they would look and see
that you had a problem. We slept in jail with it, we always had it on us, there was no way to
remove it.15
Similar procedures are adopted at Castelinho, where the installation, supervi-

sion, and exchange of equipment are carried out in the waiting room of the prison’s
administration sector. Rows of monitored inmates line up in front of the barred gate
that separates the corridor from the administrative areas. Their tethers protrude from
beneath their beige uniform pants. It was in one of these lines that Anderson stood
when his equipment malfunctioned, or when a new model of device was acquired
by the SAP. During the year he was monitored, Anderson slept and woke up every
day in prison with his anklet attached to his body. “The anklet doesn’t come off, we
always have it on. You shower with it, you do everything with it.”16
In addition to the redundancy of employing EM systems inside prisons, whose
only logical motivation would be to facilitate installation procedures and to increase
escape prevention, the actual use of the device for surveilling offenders in the semi-
open regime would hardly have any impact in terms of curbing the growth of the
prison population or having it become a substitute for incarceration. Even if the
equipment were properly removed at the moment the inmates returned to prison, no
other purpose would be served by electronic supervision of external work and tem-
porary exits other than enhancing the control exercised over those who already had
the right to work outside the penal facility or to be with their families on specific
15
Interview held on 31 August 2015.
16
Interview held on 14 October 2015.
dates. Still, when EM was authorized in Brazil in June 2010 through the approval of
federal law no. 12,258, the prison authorities of São Paulo state decided to make
their monitoring program available exclusively for the supervision of offenders
under semi-open sentences, purchasing equipment dedicated to this sole scope.
Since then, the devices made available to judges by the state government have been
reserved for monitoring the semi-open regime and for reinforcing control on occa-
sions of external work and temporary leave.
It must be noted that the right to external work and temporary leave is provided
for by the penal execution law (7.210/84, Art. 122–126), characterizing the semi-
open sentences and constituting a central element of the progressive penal system,
whose legal purpose is to offer the convict a gradual return to society. Based on a
penological perspective oriented by rehabilitative purposes – a principle that lays at
the heart of official justifications for the implementation of EM in Brazil – the track-
ing of individuals in these situations adds another barrier between the sentenced
person and society, by extending the State’s guardianship to the occasions when the
detainees were granted some autonomy that would allow them to return to society.
In any case, this was the function assigned to EM in the state of São Paulo: to con-
trol outside work and temporary leave in the semi-open regime; to make the process
of penal progression slower and more regulated; to convert the semi-open into a
more closed regime.
The predictable outcome of the modes of employing EM as determined by São
Paulo’s prison administration can be readily seen in the evolution of the number of
people monitored in the state, concomitant with the growth of the prison population.
In 2009 – just over a year before the introduction of EM in São Paulo –154,500
people were incarcerated in the state, amounting to a rate of 376.8 prisoners per
100,000 inhabitants (DEPEN 2017b). In 2016, this number had already surpassed
240,000, representing a rate of 536.5 per 100,000 inhabitants. In 2022, according to
data provided by the National Council of Justice, the state already had more than
260,000 people incarcerated and the imprisonment rate reached 608 for every
100,000 inhabitants.17
Parallel to the increase in the number of people locked up in São Paulo’s prisons,
the development of the state’s EM policy led to approximately 4200 people being
tracked in 2015. Between 2016 and 2017, the services were interrupted in the state
owing to contractual problems between the SAP and Spacecom, causing a drop in
the number of individuals monitored. After a new contract was signed in 2017, with
Synergie this time, a total of 6900 monitoring devices would be put into operation
in 2019.18 The volume of people subjected to electronic supervision grows, while at
the same time incarceration rates keep rising, reproducing the net-widening effect,
described and analyzed by Stanley Cohen (1985). New densities are added to the
17
Conselho Nacional de Justiça. Banco Nacional de Monitoramento de Prisões. Available at:
https://portalbnmp.cnj.jus.br/#/estatisticas (Accessed on 4 September 2022).
18
Data provided by the Secretariat of Penitentiary Administration of the State of São Paulo, in
accordance with the Access to Information Law.
penal network, tied to the old institutions of incarceration that nevertheless retain
their unrestricted centrality.
But the steady growth of the imprisoned population, parallel to the development
of the EM policy, is not exclusive to the state of São Paulo. The expansion of the
punitive network linked to the deployment of the new electronic control devices can
be observed all over Brazil. In the year 2009, the Brazilian jailed population totaled
469,546 people. In 2021 – a decade after the start of EM programs in the country –
the absolute number of individuals locked up in Brazilian prisons reached 679,067,
ranking as the third largest prison population on the planet. In relative terms, if in
June 2009 there were about 248 prisoners for every 100,000 inhabitants in Brazil, in
December 2021 this rate reached more than 318.5/100,000 inhabitants (DEPEN
2017b). In the same year, the total number of people monitored in the country
reached 80,332, the vast majority of them in the penal enforcement phase.19
A brief examination of the quantitative data on incarceration rates indicates that
the electronic modality of penal enforcement and supervision of restraining orders
has been part of the process of expansion and intensification of the penal system
throughout the country. The increased capacity for control made possible by remote
monitoring cannot, therefore, be regarded as a specific feature of any state adminis-
tration in particular. EM has been increasingly establishing a relationship of com-
plementarity and supplementary control with imprisonment in all of Brazil.
However, in their qualitative aspects, EM technologies fit into local penitentiary
practices, which in Brazil are notoriously coercive and in the state of São Paulo
reach unsurpassed levels of brutality (Salla 2006; Godoi 2017a, b). The episodes of
physical violence against monitored individuals due to equipment failure20; the arbi-
trary isolation of detainees under EM21; and the wounds and burns caused by over-
heated ankle monitors during electric recharging moments update and rescale in the
most crude way that which Rafael Godoi (2017a, b) has described as diffuse and
continuous torture, perpetrated by the Secretaria de Administração Penitenciária de
São Paulo and by the engagement of its correctional institutions in the systematic
production of suffering. The multiple violent incidents involving prison technolo-
gies reinforce the repertoire of atrocities practiced daily by São Paulo’s prison
authorities, whose defining feature is the extralegal infliction of physical and disci-
plinary punishment (Salla 2006; Pastoral Carcerária 2016; Godoi 2017a, b).
Strict complicity is thus established between the array of penal practices revolv-
ing around physical violence, mass incarceration, and remote electronic surveil-
lance. Far from the envisioned scope of replacing prison by the enforcement of EM
programs, there is instead a superimposition of punitive techniques shaped by the
mutual complementarity between the open and closed regimes, by the symbiotic
interdependence between the inside and the outside, permeated by the reproduction
19
Departamento Penitenciário Nacional. Levantamento Nacional de Informacões Penitenciárias.
Available at: https://www.gov.br/depen/pt-br/servicos/sisdepen (Accessed on 7 August 2022).
20
See Chap. 2.
21
Idem.
of that form of torture that is inherent to imprisonment. The link between prison and
EM has become a defining aspect of the penal journey of individuals in situations of
regime progression.
In this sense, the very enforcement of the sentence under EM is inevitably
attached to the possibility of regression to the closed regime in cases of noncompli-
ance with the established judicial provisions (federal law no. 12.258/10, Art. 146-
C). Prison remains a constant threat to those who serve their sentences under
electronic surveillance. Therein lies the virtuality of the closed regime, inscribed in
the open-air electronic control. Although the notion of “virtual prison” is often
evoked as a symbolic image in analyses of EM (Roberts 2004; Maciel 2014; Robert
et al. 2017), the virtuality of prison lies rather in its imminence and immediacy than
in any kind of symbolism. Prison is upheld as a necessary risk, palpably retained on
the near horizon of the monitored subject. There is no metaphorical dimension.
4.3 Silicon and Rubble
The rock, this is where silicon reigns, this is the reign of the inorganic. (…) today it is true
that everything we hear about machines of the third kind can be marveled at as a revenge
of silicon in relation to organic carbon. (…) What one calls the chips [puces] that are the
fundamental element of machines of the third kind, and the chips are made of silicon. The
machines of the third kind represent a veritable revenge of silicon on carbon. And now it is
silicon that presents the incontestable advantages. One can conceive machines of the third
kind on carbon. It has even already been announced, for the computers of the future, the
machines of the future to come, will return to carbon. We are indeed told that the true robots
will be organic robots. There will be … this is a bit of a detour, it would be beautiful to give
it a figure, we are in full prophecy mode. You see: you have the machines of the third kind,
the modern machines which represent … founded on silicon, they represent the great
revenge of silicon. There is a war of chemical elements (Deleuze 1986, p. 2).
The idea of superimposition has always been present in the Deleuzian philoso-
phy of difference and perhaps even more manifest in the Foucauldian genealogy of
power. The postmodern concept of “hybridity” emerges as a rather tenuous formula-
tion alongside the topological analysis first proposed by Deleuze and Foucault and
more recently revised by Mathieu Bietlot (2003) and Stephen Collier (2011). The
cumulative coexistence between disciplinary and control morphologies, parallel to
the reactivation of sovereign states of exception, would conjure the possibilities of
giving history a single, bounded meaning. As Deleuze (1986) observes, carbon and
silicon do not annihilate each other. In recent years, synthetic biology has finally
been able to establish bonds of the C-Si type, constituting what is called organosili-
con, whose molecular composition has had substantial impacts on industrial pro-
duction. The so-called third-generation technologies are then recombined to the old
methods of energy extraction based on concentration and discipline, and the institu-
tions of enclosure are perpetuated through their own transformations and couplings.
4.3 Silicon and Rubble 87
But it is also true that some have come to believe in the near extinction of the
prison-form and its raison d’être as a paramount penal technique. If the paths taken
by contemporary penality do not contradict, they at least strain the clues left by
Deleuze (1992) in his Postscript on the Societies of Control. Expanding on previous
observations, the philosopher calls upon Foucault’s work to declare the terminal
condition of the age of disciplines.22 The methods of internment would soon be
overtaken by the articulation of new lines of force. It was only a matter of time for
the ruins of the asylum model to give way to the informational connections estab-
lished by circuit-driving machines.
Although hyperbolic, the Deleuzian prognosis would be careful enough to admit
the suspicion that the purported replacement of societies of discipline by societies of
control would imply, in reality, an unlimited imbrication of power dispositifs and a
progressive overlapping of technopolitical diagrams, sustained by concomitant and
conjoined practices of confinement and regulatory distribution of flows. More than
a process of replacement of internment models by open-air control mechanisms and
suppression of one by the other, the new regulation techniques that had been emerg-
ing since the nineteenth century implied the correlative proliferation of biopolitical
technologies, guided by multifaceted strategies of behavioral training and circula-
tion management.
In any case, a certain undertone of farewell to the austere mechanisms of punitive
confinement seems evident in Deleuze’s Postscript, just as it was in the last pages of
22
The Postscript on the Societies of Control systematized some of the propositions introduced by
Deleuze in a conference presented on 8 April 1986, in his course on Michel Foucault, taught at the
University of Vincennes. This was when the philosopher first sketched the idea of a society of
control, associating it with the notion of biopolitics. Deleuze said: “(...) even if there is an overlap-
ping, using Foucault’s texts as a basis one cannot rule out the ensuing hypothesis of three (and not
two) juridical formations. First: the formation of sovereignty, with the French Revolution as termi-
nation, broadly corresponding to the Middle Ages in part and the classical age. Absolute monar-
chy. The second formation: the disciplinary formation of the post-revolutionary period, Napoleon
and the 19th century. And, of course, in the process of being unlocked already at this period, the
apparition of the third formation, founded this time on a biopolitics of populations, sketched out in
the 19th century and bursting forth in the 20th. You see where I want to get to: corresponding to
these three formations, there would be three very different subjects of right, three very different
juridical formations. How to name the third, if one manages to isolate it? One will say, to use the
word that the American author I spoke to you about with regard to literature, Burroughs, makes
use of, this is a formation of the power of control. One would therefore have: power of sovereignty,
disciplinary power or power of discipline, and power of control” (Deleuze 1986, p. 12).
Discipline and Punish (Foucault 1995),23 which would later prompt an author such
as Loïc Wacquant to underline the equivocal assumption and devote his Sociology
of Punishment to the analysis of mass incarceration fostered by the emergence of
neoliberalism (Wacquant 1999, 2009, 2012). The development of neoliberal penal-
ity would be primarily characterized by exploding prison populations, concomitant
with the pulverization of new systems of control and security, as witnessed in Brazil
over the last two decades.
But as in any situated context, the Brazilian penal system is endowed with its
own nuances, eluding, in the most agonizing manner, any pretense at universal for-
mulation, as often intended by French social and philosophical thought.
***
São Luís, capital of Maranhão, 8 November 2010. A massive riot in the Pedrinhas
Penitentiary Complex (Complexo Penitenciário de Pedrinhas) ends with 18 prison-
ers killed, three of them decapitated. During a brief period of inattention of the
prison guards, their weapons are taken by some of the inmates, only moments before
the entire jail breaks out in rebellion. Throughout the day, 15 prisoners are executed
in Outbuilding III of São Luís I Penitentiary, and another three in Pedrinhas
Penitentiary. Despite statements from local authorities that there were “no reasons
for such barbarism,” the rebel leaders listed their grievances: overcrowding, rotten
food provision, and scarce water supply. They also demanded the removal of the
prison director and the interruption of torture practices (Pedrosa 2014). It was the
beginning of a macabre festival of explicit violence whose main stage were the
facilities of the Pedrinhas Complex.
On 7 February 2011, six prisoners were executed in the jail of the regional police
station of the neighboring municipality of Pinheiro, three of them decapitated. In an
23
At the end of the book, Foucault suggests that the central position occupied by the prison as a
technique of punishment and administration of misery would lose its meaning in contemporary
Western societies, in the face of the other technologies of power that would be playing this role:
“In the midst of all these mechanisms of normalization, which are becoming ever more rigorous in
their application, the specificity of the prison and its role as link are losing something of their
purpose. If there is an overall political issue around the prison, it is not therefore whether it is to
be corrective or not; whether the judges, the psychiatrists or the sociologists are to exercise more
power in it than the administrators or supervisors; it is not even whether we should have prison or
something other than prison. At present, the problem lies rather in the steep rise in the use of these
mechanisms of normalization and the wide-ranging powers which, through the proliferation of
new disciplines, they bring with them” (Foucault 1995, p. 306). Three years after the publication
of Surveiller et punir, the author would revisit the hypothesis of stepping out of the picture of
contemporary penality in his inaugural class of the seminar Security, Territory, Population, when
he pointed out that the technologies of power and punishment cannot be understood as “a series of
successive elements, the appearance of the new causing the earlier ones to disappear. There is not
the legal age, the disciplinary age, and the age of security. Mechanisms of security do not replace
disciplinary mechanisms, which would not have replaced juridico-legal mechanisms. In reality you
have a series of complex edifices in which, of course, the techniques themselves change and are
perfected, or anyway become more complicated, but in which what above all changes is the domi-
nant characteristic, or more exactly, the system of correlation between juridico-legal mechanisms,
disciplinary mechanisms, and mechanisms of security. In other words, there is a history of the
actual techniques themselves (Foucault 2007, p. 8).
inspection conducted in the unit by the National Council of Justice (CNJ), the insti-
tution confirmed the jail’s overcrowding; precarious installations; criminal factions
in charge; poor hygiene conditions; lack of proper lighting; improper food; unquali-
fied staff; poor security conditions, among other elementary problems (CNJ 2013).
A total of 97 prisoners were being held in four cells with a capacity for 40 (Pedrosa
2014). The barbarism referred by government authorities seemed to have been
unleashed by the State’s agencies themselves.
On 9 October 2013, another rebellion in the Pedrinhas House of Detention left at
least nine dead and 30 injured, in addition to the destruction of the unit’s premises.
At the time, the prison security forces claimed to have discovered a tunnel that
would allow 60 inmates to escape. The resistance of the prisoners to the cell search
would have sparked the riot. In December of the same year, the CNJ reported 25
deaths in the Pedrinhas Complex. In all, 62 executions were recorded in Maranhão’s
prisons in 2013 (Ibid.).
The only thing more sinister than the tally of deaths were the methods employed
by the inmates to kill. In a video sent to the CNJ, pertaining to one of the riots that
occurred in the Pedrinhas Provisional Detention Center, a man is shown with the
skin of his lower limb dissected, exposing his muscles, tendons, vessels and bones,
before being executed. Photographs of the complex show bloodied bodies, torsos
detached from their heads, and a machete buried in the skull of one of the detainees
(CNJ, 2013). Severed limbs, decapitated heads, and bodies punctured with knives
and shivs composed the grim scenario that emerged in Pedrinhas in the early years
of the 2010s.
The images recorded on cell phones were readily disseminated and shared on
digital networks, adding a new spectacular character to the massacres. This time, the
sensationalism of the mainstream press was not necessary to turn the prison carnage
into a media performance. The inmates themselves were in charge of producing and
circulating the images of executions, dismemberments, and decapitations: “You
have to set the focus to catch the mess,” an inmate was heard saying on camera
(apud da Costa 2014). The mutilated body would again come to the spotlight of the
punitive theater, now equipped with cinematographic resources. With the absence of
public phones in carceral facilities, thus preventing the contact of prisoners with
their families, the penetration of smartphones inside prison units24 became
24
It should be noted that in the Brazilian prison system there are no public phones, depriving pris-
oners of any contact with their loved ones, as pointed out by the lawyer and activist Raquel Lima,
from the Instituto Terra, Trabalho e Cidadania: “Cell phones are instruments of communication
and, in prison, they are the only means for children to ask their mothers for help when they are sick
or for mothers to monitor the school performance of their children.” (ITTC. Available at: http://
ittc.org.br/celular-na-cavidade-vaginal-para-entrada-em-presidio-nao-e-crime-diz-juiza-ao-
rejeitar-denuncia-oferecida-pelo-ministerio-publico/ – Accessed on 10 December 2018).
Moreover, contrary to what the press and the authorities themselves usually claim, the number of
cell phones introduced into prison units through visits and family members of prisoners in a state
like São Paulo, for example, is all but negligible (0.02%) (See: Rede Justiça Criminal. Available at:
https://redejusticacriminal.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/rede-boletim-revista-vexatoria-2015-
web.pdf – Accessed on 10 December 2018).
i nstrumentalized as a way of rendering visible the prison killing and transforming it

into a public performance, replicated by traditional communication channels.
The episodes that unfolded in Pedrinhas revealed how precarious the Maranhão
penal system was, with its overcrowded prison units, lack of basic services, excep-
tionally high numbers of provisional detainees, and blatant racial selectivity. In
2008, the prison population in the state reached 5258 prisoners for 1716 vacancies,
according to the report produced by the Parliamentary Inquiry Commission on the
Prison System (dos Deputados 2009). Inspections and visits made by organizations
such as the CNJ, the Prosecution Service and the Prison Pastoral Care highlighted
the dire situation of prison facilities in Maranhão since 2006 (Pedrosa 2014). In
2011, the percentage of inmates without conviction was one of the highest in Brazil,
accounting for 63% of Maranhão’s prison population. As a cross-cutting marker of
prison demographics, the highest incarceration rates of the Black population in the
country were in Maranhão, according to data released in 2013 by the research insti-
tute Brazilian Forum on Public Security.25
On the verge of collapse and in the face of indictments made by nongovernmen-
tal organizations to the United Nations and the Organization of American States, the
Ministry of Justice announced the preparation of an emergency plan to contain the
prison crisis in Maranhão. In January 2014, then-Minister Eduardo Cardozo – who
the following year would compare Brazilian prisons with “medieval dungeons” –
listed 11 actions that included integrated initiatives among the executive, legislative,
and judiciary branches. Among them were prison inspections by public defenders,
the construction of new prison units, and the incentive to use alternatives to incar-
ceration.26 Community sanctions were some of the answers to the urgency imposed
by the prison chaos.
In the same year, 2014, the National Executive Branch began funding the EM
policy in Maranhão. The serial massacres in Pedrinhas Complex was the catalyst for
the deployment of EM programs in the state. From that point on, local and national
governments would begin to invest in the implementation of a dispositif that was
designed amid the prison crisis and conceived to contain it. Alongside the states of
Alagoas, Goiás, and Espírito Santo, Maranhão was one of the first federal states
supported by the DEPEN in its campaign to structure the EM policy in Brazil, which
had a total investment of R$ 60 million by the year 2017 (DEPEN 2017a, p. 56). At
the time, DEPEN recommended focusing the scope of EM programs on the supervi-
sion of pre-trial community sentences under federal law 12,403/11 (law of pre-trial
custody), with the purpose of reducing the high numbers of people imprisoned with-
out conviction. The official purpose was to favor “decarceration and social inser-
tion of the monitored individual” (DEPEN 2015, p. 50).
25
Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública. Available at: http://www.forumseguranca.org.br/produ-
tos/anuario-%20brasileiro-de-seguranca-publica/7a-edicao – Accessed on 20 January 2019).
26
IPEA. Available at: http://ipea.gov.br/participacao/noticiasmidia/direitos-humanos/892-
ministro-anuncia-plano-emergencial-para-conter-crise-em-presidios (Accessed on 20
January 2019).
The law of pre-trial custody (Lei das Cautelares) was approved in May 2011,
providing the judiciary with a range of intermediate sanctions that could be applied
to replace pre-trial detention during the course of criminal proceedings. Such rem-
edies are listed in article 319 of law 12,403/11: periodically appearing in court;
prohibited from access to or presence in certain locations; being prohibited from
contact with a given person or from leaving the district; being confined at home at
night or on days off; being suspended from a public office or activity of an eco-
nomic or financial nature; being given bail; and, lastly, being electronically moni-
tored (art. 319, IX). EM may be applied in addition to other sanctions (such as
prohibition of access to certain places or home detention), or on its own.
In the executive branch’s evaluation, the exclusive focus of electronic surveil-
lance for the supervision of pre-trial measures, to the detriment of its use in the
phase of penal enforcement, would serve the purposes of reducing incarceration
rates, as it would prevent certain defendants from being kept in provisional deten-
tion before the final judgment. If the monitoring of convicted individuals could
represent a reinforcement of punitive control over those who would already be serv-
ing their sentences in home detention or in a semi-open regime, EM on a provisional
basis could be a way of avoiding incarceration during the pre-trial period. Instead of
awaiting trial in prison, the defendants could be sent home under electronic surveil-
lance. According to the National Penitentiary Department,
DEPEN should encourage EM programs in the pre-trial phase, as a residual solution, and
when these are deemed necessary, considering the fundamental rights of the persons
involved and whenever other pre-trial measures prove insufficient to prevent incarceration
(DEPEN 2017a, p. 124).
Thus, during the first 2 years of implementation of EM in Maranhão, almost all

the equipment available in the state was geared to the supervision of pre-trial mea-
sures. According to the local government’s data, out of 987 people monitored in
October 2016, a total of 812 were serving restraining orders, representing 82% of
the monitored population.27 The state sought to contain its high rates of pre-trial
detention, which amounted to 59% of the prison population in June 2016.
However, between 2016 and 2017, the development of the EM policy in
Maranhão was furthered with a shift in its scope, now focused on the surveillance of
convicted offenders. Although the number of individuals monitored while serving a
pre-trial order rose from 812 to 867 between 2016 and 2017, the number of con-
victed persons under EM jumped from 132 to 1437 in the same period, bringing the
total number of people tracked in the state to 2319 (DEPEN 2017a). The quantita-
tive leap in the Maranhão EM policy was boosted by the reinstatement of tracking
programs, now aimed at the supervision of penal enforcement.
At the same time, the rise in incarceration rates in the state shows that, in the first
4 years of its implementation, EM has not had any effect on curbing the growth of
the prison population. Quite the contrary, its introduction and expansion follows the
27
Data from the SEAP, gathered from a field survey carried out on 20 October 2016 at the Maranhão
State Electronic Monitoring Center (Central de Monitoramento Eletrônico do Maranhão).
progressive slope of the prison demographic curve. Two years before EM programs
were first implemented in Maranhão, in 2012, the state’s prison population totaled
5263 people. Between 2012 and 2014, its average annual growth rate was 8%,
whereas in the first 2 years of EM implementation, this rate reached 22% per year.
Regarding specifically the number of pre-trial detainees, the absolute and relative
growth of their population levels has also been constant, concomitant with the
increase in the number of people monitored. Although in 2012 a total of 3376 peo-
ple were imprisoned without conviction in the state, 2 years after the introduction of
electronic surveillance, in 2016, this figure reached 5177. Between 2012 and 2014,
the average growth rate of the number of pre-trial detainees was 10% annually,
whereas between 2014 and 2016 this rate rose to 14% (DEPEN 2017a).
Data cross-referencing on the total number of people incarcerated and the num-
ber of monitored individuals expresses the net-widening process of the criminal
justice system in Maranhão, fostered by the use of EM. As has been observed
throughout the country, the adoption of this policy in the state has promoted an
increase in the number of people subjected to the punitive supervision of criminal
justice. The expansion of incarceration structures is perpetuated, concomitant with
the diffusion of new control techniques in the open environment. Monitoring tech-
nologies and prison institutions are juxtaposed, boosting the expansion of the penal
and penitentiary system.
At this point it might be useful to establish a differentiation between two distin-
guishable, though interconnected, effects of the EM policy: intensification (densifi-
cation) and expansion (dilatation) of the penal network (Cohen 1985). In the first
case, verified in the state of São Paulo, the impacts of EM refer to the strengthening
of the supervision exercised over persons who were already serving their sentences
in the semi-open regime, and who now began to be electronically monitored. EM
programs intensify the control exercised over individuals who are in the stage of
regime progression, who have the right to periodically leave the semi-open facili-
ties. In the second case, which is preponderant in Maranhão, the very number of
people placed under penal surveillance is increased by the enforcement of EM, as a
growing number of people are now being supervised in the open regime, while at
the same time the incarcerated population continues to grow. The control nets
expand as the catalog of sanctions available to the justice system diversifies. In one
way or another, the mechanisms of control and punishment are potentialized and the
hypothesis of replacing prison with EM falls apart.
It must also be emphasized, though, that the contribution of the EM policy to the
punitive upsurge observed in Maranhão, São Paulo, and, in general, throughout
Brazil, is in line with international trends. In the USA, similar effects were observed
in the early 1990s by Palumbo et al. (1992), and more recently by Kilgore (2012),
Lilly and Nellis (2013), and Silverman (2021). In Western Europe, the expansion of
penal systems promoted by EM was pointed out by Kaluszynski and Froment
(2003), Paterson (2013), Aebi et al. (2015), and Dünkel (2018). With the exception
of the Netherlands and Denmark, there is no clear evidence for countries having
reduced their prison populations with the enforcement of EM programs. In the most
diverse contexts where it has been implemented, electronic surveillance has served
as a method of expanding and densifying punitive power, overlapping with impris-

onment as a supplementary penal technique. In this sense, the effects of EM pro-
grams observed in Brazil is connected to political–penal processes that transcend
borders.
However, the deleterious conditions of the Brazilian penal system and its impli-
cations regarding the recent escalation of violent deaths mainly centered in the
prison units of the country’s Northeast region ascribe distinctive characteristics to
the EM policy in Maranhão. Indeed, a series of specificities must be taken into
account while examining the configurations assumed by the EM dispositif in the
various contexts where it was introduced, considering the different relationships
established between its local and global political aspects, its institutional context of
deployment, as well as the conditions of its historical emergence.
Instead of being perceived by local authorities as a sign of exhaustion of the
punitive strategy in its stated task of containing crime and violence, the massacres
that broke out in Pedrinhas would be used as a pretext for new ventures aimed at
expanding the prison archipelago and the State’s punitive apparatus (Teixeira 2014).
A glimpse at the Maranhão government’s investments in the areas of public security
and criminal justice reveals a growing spiral of expenditures, without this having
been translated into crime reduction or in basic guarantees of survival in the prison
system. Between 2005 and 2013, spending on the state prison system went from
R$3.8 million to R$222.2 million, an increase of 5750% (Teixeira 2014).
Pedrinhas Inc. is how sociologist Wagner Cabral da Costa (2014) refers to the
commodification of public policies to control crime in Maranhão, “whose budget
has allocated increasing sums to the sector, without any link to practical results”
(p. 45). The construction of more prison facilities, the outsourcing of penitentiary
management and services, and the employment of EM systems constitute the pack-
age of actions adopted by the Maranhão government and by the national executive
to deal with the prison situation that Pedrinhas had exposed.
Investigating the process of implementation of electronic surveillance in
Maranhão thus means detecting the coexistence of heterogeneous practices that
cause a convergence on the same territory of the degraded structures of the state’s
old prison farms, of the ostensive retrieval of dismembered bodies in the penal sys-
tem, and of the technical and modernizing deployment of telematic supervision
technologies, whose consequences foster the unrestrained expansion of the punitive
machinery. Observing the social and political scenario of the introduction of EM
programs in the state thus means discerning the intersection between the irremedi-
able nationalization of prison gang conflicts – which are now increasingly rooted in
new factions from the North and Northeast regions (Pedrosa 2014) – and the intro-
duction of georeferenced mechanisms for locating criminals, sourced from the great
powers of global capitalism and supplied by the local punishment industry.
Moreover, it means contemplating the unfortunate encounter between the program-
matic limits of neoliberal penality – focused on the punitive management of poverty
and on the penitentiary absorption of the Black population and the urban marginal-
ized groups – and the rescaling of inflicted death, which began with peasant mass
killings and is today amplified by prison massacres (Teixeira 2014). Ultimately, it
means confirming the reinstatement of execution techniques and exposure to death,

intertwined with the auspicious deployment of high-tech penal programs, thus
establishing an unusual point of convergence between the novel and the rudimen-
tary, the modern and the backward, the filthy and the aseptic, around which there
would be rather ambiguity than contradiction, rather continuity than disruption.
The classic allegory evoked by sociologist Chico de Oliveira (2003), according
to which Brazilian society would resemble a platypus – a venomous and improbable
animal cast within a dualistic rationale that opposes precariousness and develop-
ment as two static poles in the social evolutionary scale – must be revisited when
assessing the current political configuration of the penal systems throughout the
country – from São Paulo to Maranhão, and from Rio de Janeiro to Ceará. A kind of
living mosaic, oddly combining technological development and preservation of
archaic institutions, the Brazilian carceral system stands out as the iconic expression
of a punitive platypus: an entity that is neither this nor that, congregating in the same
complex of penal agencies the humanitarian promise of techno-scientific penal sur-
veillance and the perpetuation of massacres in overcrowded prisons.
Therefore, in order to grasp the different configurations assumed by a specific
criminal policy, we must take into account, on the one hand, the ways in which it
combines and conforms to the contextual dynamics within which it is embedded,
and, on the other, the full range of effects its implementation triggers. The overall
strategy informs the dispositif, and the dispositif impacts the overall strategy (Lemke
2018). A dual conditioning mechanics pervades the connections between power
technologies and the contextual and strategic realities in which they are deployed.
With this in mind, the analysis of the many layers that compound EM systems in
Brazil further requires an investigation of their original programming, as devised by
the agencies and agents responsible for their implementation. Understanding the
mutually conditioning interplay between the dynamics of the Brazilian penal sys-
tem and the capabilities attributed to EM programs requires an exploration of the
lines of force that prompted their adoption. The next chapter reviews the process of
implementation of EM in the country, with particular attention to the social pro-
cesses and discursive practices that informed its genesis.
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Chapter 5
Converging Enunciations
The new thing washed up on the beach... –(Gilberto Gil, A

novidade)
5.1 Eclectic Discourses and the PCC Attacks
Brasília, 7 March 2007.

Chamber of Deputies Plenary, Deputy Ciro Pedrosa:
The Brazilian prison system is broken. The constant and recent riots have revealed the fra-
gility and impotence of the system. It is necessary to urgently address the issue of the execu-
tion of the sentence. Prison overcrowding makes it impossible for the responsible authorities
to control the convicts efficiently. Dangerous prisoners coexist with less dangerous ones,
generating a veritable promiscuity and pushing the inmates to become more and more
beastly and savage. One solution that could help to relieve the burden on prisons, tackling
the problem of overcrowding, would be the use of devices such as electronic bracelets, in
order to monitor the less dangerous convicts who serve their sentences in the open regime.
Instead of going to prison, these convicts could remain at their homes while serving their
sentences, which would allow a more efficient resocialization process. To this end, we pres-
ent this bill, and we count on the support of our Distinguished Peers (Pedrosa 2007, p. 2–3).
The excerpt above is part of the Statement of Grounds for draft bill no. 337/07,
elaborated by Deputy Ciro Pedrosa and presented to the Chamber’s plenary in
March 2007. It was the first of a series of legislative proposals on electronic moni-
toring (EM) presented that year to the National Congress. Before that, the draft bills
no. 4.342/01 and 4.834/01 had been submitted in 2001, dealing with the same sub-
ject. For about 5 years, however, proposals to introduce EM into the Brazilian legal
system were put aside, being resumed only in 2007, with Pedrosa’s proposal. From
then on, an intense output on the subject would bring the discussion back to the
agenda of the country’s legislative houses. Between March and June 2007, four
draft bills were presented to the chamber of deputies and two to the senate, with the
aim of authorizing EM at the national level.

98 5 Converging Enunciations
This chapter examines the legal as well as institutional introduction of EM in

Brazil. The focus here lies in both the identification and the analysis of the dis-
courses and argumentation strategies that justified and endorsed the approval of EM
in the Brazilian context. To this end, the key players who steered and outlined the
implementation of EM in the country are identified, as well as the array of social
and political processes that motivated them. The chapter therefore begins with the
examination of the drafting of bills and the legislative debates that unfolded around
the EM policy 3 years before its constitutional ratification, which took place offi-
cially in 2010 with the approval of federal law no. 12,258/10.
Deputy Ciro Pedrosa’s bill announced some of the arguments that would be fur-
ther developed by lawmakers while dealing with proposals to implement an elec-
tronic surveillance system. According to the rapporteur, the pertinence of the
proposed tool lies in the collapse of the Brazilian prison system. Overcrowding and
the shortcomings of prison management mechanisms had produced a state of “sav-
agery” and “beastliness” that was taking over the country’s jails. If overpopulation
rendered it impossible to achieve any form of prison control, an efficient process of
decarceration and social reintegration of offenders was a precondition for the State’s
ability to feasibly manage the national correctional system.
Despite the odd language, the reasoning was not trivial. The start of the twenty-
first century in Brazil was marked by an exponential growth in the size of its incar-
cerated population. From a total of about 90,000 individuals in 1990, the prison
population jumped to almost 233,000 in 2000, reaching 422,373 in 2007. The
imprisonment rate rose from 137.1 people incarcerated for every 100,000 inhabit-
ants in 2000, to 229.6/100,000 in 2007, when the number of individuals being held
in excess of the system’s capacity came close to 173,000.1 The system’s overcrowd-
ing, the scarcity or lack of medical and legal assistance provided to detainees, and
the total insalubrity of prison establishments led to the formation and consolidation
of gangs and to the outbreak of rebellions inside carceral facilities.
However, the whole range of violations engendered by the prison system did not
stop at the limits of the institutional walls. The year before the intensification of
legislative output on EM would be remembered in the country’s history by a chain
of events that would bring to light the explosive effects of mass incarceration poli-
cies, beyond the confines of the prison building.
On 12 May 2006, a series of actions coordinated by the criminal faction Primeiro
Comando da Capital (PCC) in the state of São Paulo put authorities and the press
throughout Brazil on alert, by clearly revealing the destructive capacity of an orga-
nization that had been created within the very prison system. The so-called “May
attacks” kicked off a mega-rebellion that spread across 84 prison units, and more
than 300 attacks on government agencies, police stations and vehicles, fire stations,
city buses, and bank agencies (Adorno and Salla 2007; Dias 2011; Biondi 2014;
Feltran 2018; Manso and Dias 2018). It was the largest wave of armed attacks ever
commanded from inside prison walls. A “war on the system” had been declared by
1
Available at: http://depen.gov.br/DEPEN/depen/sisdepen/infopen. Accessed on 20 June 2018.
5.1 Eclectic Discourses and the PCC Attacks 99
the PCC. The actions resulted in the death of 52 police officers and prison guards,
and the state’s counteroffensive led to at least 221 being killed by the police over the
following week2 (Feltran 2018).
The trigger for the attacks was the planned transfer of prisoners belonging to the
PCC to units in the interior of the state of São Paulo, distant from the prisoners’
social and family circles (Adorno and Salla 2007). The so-called Party of Crime (as
the PCC is also known) had been strengthening its position for more than a decade,
fueled by wide-scale incarceration and by the terrible living conditions in prisons,
which required inmates to form their own management and organization networks
to ensure their survival (Jozino 2004; Biondi 2014). Precariousness and overcrowd-
ing were the basic ingredients that would turn the prison apparatus into a mecha-
nism for producing and amplifying violence. Rather than an instrument for
correction, prevention, or even merely punishment, São Paulo’s prisons turned into
a kind of time bomb.
Since its emergence in the early 1990s, the PCC has claimed for itself the role of
regulating inter-prisoner relationships in the São Paulo state penitentiary system,
with the explicit purpose of managing living conditions within prison spaces and
protecting the incarcerated population from abuse and violence by prison guards
and authorities (Jozino 2004; Biondi 2010; Dias 2011). At the start of the twenty-
first century, the group had consolidated and had begun expanding through prisons
and urban peripheries across Brazil, supported economically by the PCC’s adminis-
tration of the illegal trade in drugs, weapons, and other contraband (Feltran 2018;
Manso and Dias 2018). The attacks launched in 2006 were an important demonstra-
tion of the strength and violence of the group, which in a few years would become
the largest criminal gang in the country. From that point on, its presence and capil-
larity throughout the nation would inform politicians’ plans and attempts to reform
the Brazilian penal system.
The episodes of May 2006 mobilized the executive, legislative and judicial
branches to put forward several proposals that pointed in different political and
penal directions. On the one hand, an attempt was made to promote the “moderniza-
tion” of the penal and penitentiary systems, taking into account global agreements
and conventions linked to the defense of human rights. Guided by the 1st and 2nd
National Human Rights Programs, launched by the federal government in 1996 and
2002 respectively, the executive and judicial branches pursued governmental actions
that sought to increase the capacity of the prison system and reduce overcrowding
(Adorno and Salla 2007), in addition to fostering the incipient policy of alternative
sentences through the creation, in March 2007, of the National Committee in
Support of Alternative Penalties and Measures (CONAPA). On the other hand, the
attacks in 2006 revived recurring debates around the reduction of the age of criminal
responsibility in the country and the approval of tougher disciplinary measures
against prisoners. The attacks by the PCC triggered the hasty approval by congress
2
Human rights organizations point to a total of 493 homicides in the state of São Paulo between 12
and 20 May 2006, among which 52 police officers were murdered, 221 individuals were killed by
the police, and there were 220 unsolved homicides (Feltran 2018, p. 256).
and by Brazil’s president of federal laws 11,464/07 and 11,466/07, which, respec-
tively, restricted prisoners accused of heinous crimes from serving in semi-open
regimes or being allowed out on bail, and classified as a serious disciplinary offense
the possession or use by prisoners of mobile phones or other communication devices
(Ibid.).
Among the proposed solutions, the parliamentary debates on EM as a penal mea-
sure were ignited. The events of 2006 would create a political and cognitive envi-
ronment conducive to demanding new out-of-prison punitive techniques. Throughout
the first semester of 2007, the proposals to approve electronic surveillance systems
would engage the parliament, rallying opinions derived from the most diverse peno-
logical perspectives. In the Chamber of Deputies, 15 days after the submission of
Ciro Pedrosa’s bill, Deputy Carlos Manato brought to the plenary bill no. 510/07,
stressing the potential of social reintegration, economy of resources, and greater
security, all made possible by electronic supervision. According to the deputy, EM
would foster “the resocialization of convicts, relieving the State and guaranteeing
the peace of mind that our people need at this time of undeniable failure of the
Brazilian prison system” (Manato 2007, p. 2–3).
The following week, another proposal would be discussed in Congress. It was
bill no. 641/07, drafted by Deputy Edio Lopes and submitted to the Chamber of
Deputies on 12 April 2007. The bill underscored the need to enhance the State’s
capacity for criminal control, as well as the technical and market viability of EM
systems. According to the bill’s Statement of Grounds,
It is widely known that the State has not been fulfilling its obligation to oversee sentence
enforcement due to the impossibility of hiring and retaining enough human resources to
continuously supervise the inmates, especially when the convict is authorized to leave the
prison system, whether to do outside work or to serve his sentence in open regime due to the
nonexistence of appropriate shelters or other correctional facilities. The total absence of
surveillance has become synonymous with impunity. The present bill has precisely the aim
of solving this problem, since it enables surveillance of the convict, restricting the places
where the person may enter and stay, in addition to serving as a means of exercising more
effective control over the provisions established by the judge in the sentence (...). We are
confident that, from the point of view of technological feasibility, the present proposal is
fully enforceable, considering that not only in the international market but especially in the
domestic market there are companies prepared to readily address the requirements laid
down in this proposal (Lopes 2007, p. 4–7).
Lopes’ draft also mentioned the development of research, carried out by the São
Paulo State Prosecution Service, on the tracking systems used in the USA and
Europe, comparing the prices of different monitoring technologies with the incurred
costs of imprisonment. The bill’s Statement of Grounds predicted, based on a state-
ment by the director of the National Penitentiary Department at the time, Maurício
Kuehne, that EM could reach about 42% of the prison population, thus allowing a
“considerable reduction of overcrowding in the Brazilian prison system” (Ibid., p. 6).
On 27 June 2007, bill no. 1.440/07, drafted by Deputy Beto Mansur, ended the
set of proposals submitted to the Chamber of Deputies seeking to implement
EM. This time, the humanitarian aspects of remote supervision were emphasized,
by allowing the prisoner to work, participate in educational activities and live with
his or her family. According to the rapporteur,
It should not be forgotten that the use of electronic monitoring greatly contributes to the
humanization and reintegration of the convicts into society, since it allows them to work,
attend courses and educational activities, and, above all, enjoy daily family life. In addi-
tion, it is a solution that may prevent the less dangerous convicts from being forced to live
with highly dangerous offenders, which is known to pose a risk to their survival or physical
integrity, thus preventing prisons from becoming true ‘schools of crime.’ Moreover, its adop-
tion also implies unquestionable economic advantages for the State, considering that any
expenses with activities only aimed at the electronic monitoring of convicts’ location would
obviously be much lower than those currently incurred with their confinement and mainte-
nance in correctional institutions or other facilities (Mansur 2007, p. 7).
In the deputies’ assertions, resocializing motivations were combined with eco-

nomic arguments and security purposes in the drafting of the federal legislation that
would authorize EM at the national level. The versatility of the device permeated
the speeches delivered to the Chamber of Deputies, whose common denominator
was the urgency posed by prison overcrowding.
However, the drafts that officially culminated in the legal approval of EM came
from another legislative house: the Federal Senate. It was from there that bills no.
165/07 and no. 175/07 came, both introduced in March 2007 and drafted by mem-
bers of Congress from supposedly opposing positions in the Brazilian political–
institutional spectrum, namely Senator Aloízio Mercadante, author of bill no.
165/07, and Senator Magno Malta, author of bill no. 175/07.
An exponent of the left-wing political sphere, Aloízio Mercadante was one of the
founding members of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party) and his polit-
ical career had been marked by active opposition to the military dictatorship in force
in the country between 1964 and 1985, and by a prominent role in shaping the eco-
nomic agenda of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva’s government. Magno Malta, on the
other hand, was a member of the Partido Republicano (Republican Party) and one
of the main leaders of the evangelical caucus in Congress, traditionally dedicated to
the defense of conservative agendas, such as the continued prohibition of abortion
and the unrestricted repression of drug trafficking, themes to which the Senator had
devoted himself throughout his parliamentary career. Despite their ideological dif-
ferences, the arguments of both senators displayed a significant alignment when it
came to the approval of their respective bills for tracking offenders.
In a session held on 25 April 2007 in the Senate’s Constitution and Justice
Commission (CCJ), Magno Malta revived an old formula of disciplinary surveil-
lance, which he updated by drawing on the technological resources now available:
“(...) A computer software requires a single person to be in the courthouse, in front
of the computer screen, supervising all those who are being electronically moni-
tored. Just one person!” (Senado Federal 2007, p. 7), the Senator said, replicating
the strategic model of panopticism, formulated by philosopher Jeremy Bentham,
who saw in the economy and efficiency of penal policy the measure and principle of
the delinquent’s correction (Bentham 1995). In the same session, Aloízio Mercadante
pointed out: “We are taking another step in restoring discipline, control, and at the
same time introducing the effective perspective of rehabilitation of convicted pris-

oners in the Brazilian legal system.” And he went on to stress the importance of
creating measures to prevent “criminal organizations from contaminating and con-
trolling the penitentiary system” (Senado Federal 2007, p. 5).
The CCJ session inaugurated the debates on the proposals to implement EM that
had been presented to the Senate, having as object of discussion Magno Malta’s bill
no. 175/07. The original draft envisaged the use of tracking devices on criminals
sentenced to open regime and parole. At the end of that day, the bill submitted by
Mercadante would be appended to that of Malta, incorporating the possibility of
monitoring temporary periods of leave in the semi-open regime. Thus, the proposal
approved by the Commission authorized the use of EM in the cases of open regime,
parole, and temporary leave in the semi-open regime.
The draft received the opinion of Senator Demóstenes Torres, affiliated with the
right-wing Democratic Party and president of the CCJ at the time. In his opinion,
Demóstenes highlighted the modernizing aspects of the EM technologies and relied
on international initiatives from countries regarded as references in penal policy:
I do not see in the mere use of an electronic ankle bracelet any offense to the principle of
respect for the physical and moral integrity of the prisoner (...) Moreover, the mechanism of
electronic tracking of convicted persons, as emphasized in the Statement of Grounds of
Senate Draft Bill no. 175 of 2007, is already successfully employed in some of the major
democracies of the West. Technological advances must be incorporated into the criminal
justice system. This is the case with the hearing of defendants and witnesses by videoconfer-
ence system and the automated fingerprint identification systems used by the police. This is
also the case with the electronic monitoring of convicts. Therefore, I believe that it is advis-
able for Brazil to adopt this system (Torres 2007, p. 2).
The technological argument was thus added to the series of statements that justi-
fied the importation of EM into the Brazilian context. As had been preached in the
USA and Europe during the last decades of the twentieth century, efficient solutions
to the problems related to the upsurge of hyper-incarceration required modern
instruments. The discourses that emerged in the National Congress regarding the
EM policy activated a political fascination with the technical possibilities of moni-
toring systems, adapting the lines of reasoning that had circulated in European and
North American parliaments, based upon an apparently politically neutral techno-
logical pragmatism (Kaluszynski and Froment 2003).
From the Senate, bill no. 175/07 was sent to the Chamber of Deputies for debate
and voting. In the ordinary session held on 14 May 2008, Deputy Flavio Dino, a
member of the Communist Party of Brazil, opened the debates in the Chamber in
favor of the matter:
Mr. President, distinguished peers, this bill is one of those that has the capacity to unite the
House, because it deals with a matter that has already been much debated, both in the
Chamber and in the Senate, concerning the so-called electronic tracking or monitoring of
offenders. (...) The practical effects of the proposal can be found on three fundamental lev-
els. The first of them is that we will have the possibility that, today, these benefits of regime
progression, which are based only on the principle of trust, will be supervised by the State,
through electronic monitoring. Today, therefore, we have no supervision, or almost no
supervision. With the bill, we will have the follow-up for these benefits. (...) So, the second
positive point, Mr. President, that I would like to highlight, is the possibility of stimulating
alternative sanctions so that we can contribute to the reduction of prison overpopulation.
The third positive point has to do with the economic impacts of this policy. We know that
each vacancy in the penitentiary system will cost three times more than this electronic
device, which shall not be mandatory, but the judge will be allowed to decide upon its use
in examining each concrete case. I conclude by telling the honorable Members of Parliament
that this proposal is compatible with human rights, that it allows for a more favorable
regime of sentence enforcement, that it stimulates alternative sentences, that it helps to
decompress the penitentiary system, and that it reduces the costs of the public administra-
tion in enforcing the sentence (Câmara dos Deputados 2008, p. 361).
Flavio Dino was the rapporteur of Substitute draft bill no. 1.288/07, which
appended to Malta’s bill all the other drafts being considered by the Chamber of
Deputies on the EM. His speech to the plenary systematized the discursive triangle
that anchored the proposals for the implementation of the project, listing the three
main arguments in support of it: (a) Strengthening surveillance capacities on com-
pliance with community sanctions; (b) Stimulating the application of alternative
sentences to substitute imprisonment; and (c) Reducing public spending on the
criminal justice system. Modulating the tone of the speeches, these were the funda-
mental elements raised by the parliamentarians.
Thus, alongside Ciro Pedrosa, Carlos Manato, Edio Lopes, and Beto Mansur,
Deputy Flavio Dino played an important role in the Chamber’s approval of the bill.
From the right to the left wings, a significant consensus was reached in the National
Congress about the pertinence of the EM policy, whether for its control capabilities,
its economic advantages, or its humanitarian qualities. Rare were the voices that
raised any serious objections to the draft laws submitted to the Senate or the
Chamber of Deputies. The only significant challenge came from Deputy Luciana
Genro, then a member of the Partido Socialismo e Liberdade (Socialism and Liberty
Party). In that same May 2008 session, the Congresswoman made her rebuttal:
Mr. President, colleagues, I will disagree with the Members that have already spoken and
with the apparent consensus in this Plenary because we understand that this policy of elec-
tronic monitoring of prisoners in semi-open regime does not solve the problem of recidi-
vism, does not prevent this offender from committing new crimes, nor will it reduce the
prison population. We understand, first of all, that the best way to prevent former inmates
from committing new crimes, whether in the semi-open regime or already at liberty, is to
offer them conditions to be reintegrated into society. This is part of a vision of public secu-
rity integrated with social policies that can and should be implemented by the municipali-
ties through specific programs for prisoners in semi-open regime, on parole or released
from the prison system. (...) The idea that a prisoner in semi-open regime is a threat to
society and, therefore, needs to be electronically monitored contradicts the very idea of the
semi-open regime, which is precisely the understanding that this citizen is able to leave
prison and stay in the semi-open regime. This is a relationship of trust established with the
judge that will give them this right. So, we understand that electronic monitoring will cause
a clear embarrassment to these people, and will not be accompanied by any policy that
really guarantees that these citizens will be reintegrated into society (Câmara dos Deputados
2008, p. 372–373).
Genro anticipated some of the implications that would materialize with the
authorization and nationalization of EM programs over the following years. Without
much effect, however, her remarks were but an isolated dissent. The proposal was
put to a vote by the deputies. The bill was approved by the Chamber and sent back
to the Senate, including not only the electronic surveillance of people in an open
regime, on parole, and in a semi-open regime but also the monitoring of individuals
subjected to right-restricting penalties and probation.
On 1 April 2009, a new session was held in the Senate Constitution and Justice
Committee to debate the issue. This time, the discussion would be brief. Lawmakers
such as Romeu Tuma, a traditional defender of repressive agendas, and Serys
Slhessarenko, from the Workers’ Party, made brief statements in support of the bill.
The Senate seemed convinced that the law was sufficiently solid and its authoriza-
tion was not only opportune but urgent. Without further changes, Senator Demóstenes
Torres issued a new opinion and the bill was finally approved and sent for presiden-
tial sanction.
On 15 June 2010, ordinary law no. 12.258/10 was enacted by the President of the
Republic Luís Inácio Lula da Silva, with a number of vetoes that excluded the pos-
sibilities of applying EM in cases of an open regime, right-restricting penalties,
parole, and probation. Therefore, the electronic surveillance of judicial rules deter-
mining home detention or temporary release in the semi-open regime remained in
the legislation. The vetoes would be justified in the following terms by the Ministry
of Justice:
The adoption of the electronic monitoring in cases of open regime, right-restricting penal-
ties, parole, and probation goes against the system of penalty compliance established in the
Brazilian legal system and, thus, against the required individualization, proportionality,
and sufficiency of penal enforcement. Moreover, the proposal increases the costs of penal
enforcement without helping to readjust the population of prisons, since it does not remove
from prison those who should not be there and does not prevent the inflow of those who
should not be imprisoned (Presidência da República 2010, p. 2).
The argument that the use of EM in the vetoed cases would contradict the prin-
ciples of individualization, proportionality, and sufficiency of penal enforcement
lacked explicit grounds, as the observance or not of such premises would depend on
its specific application in cases defined by the judge. However, if the central goal of
the policy was to remove from prison “those who should not be there” and prevent
“the inflow of those who should not be imprisoned,” it would make little sense to
retain the possibility of tracking individuals on temporary leave in the semi-open
regime, since it introduces an additional control over people who are already in a
situation of regime progression.
In any case, the legislative process that preceded the authorization of EM at the
federal level reconciled a variety of actors and positions that were, prior to this,
assumed to be antagonistic to each other. From politicians of the so-called bullet
caucus – policemen, ex-police officers, or congressmen committed to the defense of
arming civilians and hardening penal and public security policies – to lawmakers
associated with humanitarian agendas, eclectic perspectives were engaged in the
process of preparing the bill that would authorize the EM policy in the country. The
traditional political distinction between right and left would hardly be useful in
characterizing the agents in charge of the legislative process that unfolded around
the initiative. Furthermore, a transversal alignment of political–discursive practices

in favor of EM emerged, bringing together multifaceted positions. In its penological
content, the legislative work devoted to the EM made evident the versatility of a
penal rationality that was pendular in nature, oscillating between a demand for
strengthened surveillance on community penalties on the one hand and greater effi-
ciency in the rehabilitation of offenders on the other. These discursive fronts inter-
twined with each other, producing a polyphonic chorus supportive of implementing
EM in the country.
Cutting across the discursive mesh that produced the legal design of the monitor-
ing policy, the urgency of finding penal techniques able to replace imprisonment
was a common element in the justifications presented within the proposals. The
frequent rebellions exposed the inadequacy of prison and the need to reform the
criminal justice system, with the help of a technological device that could favor, at
once, an effective resocialization of convicts and the economy of resources allo-
cated to the prison system. To some extent, the argument based on the utility, effi-
ciency, and optimization of penal practices promoted the intersection among
economic, punitive, and rehabilitative statements that cemented the approval of EM
in Brazil. The social reintegration of the criminal was then translated in terms of
utilitarian efficiency and perceived as an urgency, sparked by the demographic
boom of the nation’s prison system, exacerbated, in turn, by the rise of prison fac-
tions. The riots orchestrated by the PCC acted as a trigger for the legislative propos-
als to implement the monitoring dispositifs in the country.
This is not to say that the PCC attacks alone would have motivated the national
legislative authorities to introduce EM policies in Brazil, as a reductionist analysis
of historical–political processes could suggest. A number of other factors associated
with the reliance on technology and the interests of the burgeoning punishment
industry must be taken into account and they will be outlined in the subsequent sec-
tions of this chapter. However, the justifications stated in the draft laws and the
chronological synchronicity of their elaboration with the violent episodes of 2006
indicate the relevance of the successive prison uprisings in the process of legal
enactment of the electronic monitoring. It is not fortuitous either that the first legal
proposals aimed at authorizing EM, drafted back in 2001, were also presented
shortly after the outbreak of riots sparked by the PCC, when the first mega-rebellion
coordinated by the group, on February 28, 2001, involved 29 prison units in 19 dif-
ferent municipalities in the state of São Paulo (Biondi 2010; Dias 2011; Feltran
2018). Shortly thereafter bills no. 4.342/01 and 4.834/01 were drafted and submit-
ted in March and June 2001 respectively.
Hence, the calamitous scenarios of prison riots and their overflows into the urban
territory were key factors in promoting and intensifying the debate on the need to
reform the Brazilian penal system, among which EM would be one of the main
strategies. The campaigns in support of alternative sentences would gain momen-
tum after that, led by governmental entities and representatives of organized civil
society. This was the approach adopted in the guidelines of the National Human
Rights Program III, for example, regarding the “modernization of penal
enforcement policy,” prepared by the Presidency of the Republic with the support
and participation of a long list of nongovernmental organizations3 (Campello 2013).
The reaction of State authorities to the fractures of the prison system would,
therefore, be construed within the political-programmatic framework established by
the penal system itself, repositioning the reformist project as an invariable horizon
of crime control strategies, and highlighting the fact that prison riots and resistance
uprisings would also be crucial elements in the production of penal policies. Far
from encouraging an effective review of the systematic practices of criminalization,
penalization, and incarceration, the PCC attacks provided new precepts for reform
and modernization of the Brazilian criminal justice, perpetuating the punitive logic
as the central strategy for conflict management.
5.2 Unlikely Origins
Known as the “Queen of the Marshlands,” the remote provincial town of Guarabira
is located in the countryside of the northeastern state of Paraíba, 98 km from the
state capital João Pessoa. Its reputation in the region of the Paraiba marshlands is
due to its local prominence in trade and services. The municipality is served by
important commercial networks from the capital, and its residents boast with relish
the regional slogan: “In Guarabira, one can find everything.”
In 2007, the city’s vocation, along with the initiative of a judge from João Pessoa
and a local businessman, would result in the first experiment of electronic monitor-
ing of offenders in Brazil. On 13 July of that year, the judge and professor of
Constitutional Law, Bruno César Azevedo Isidro, launched his project called
“Surveilled freedom, protected society,” in a promising partnership established with
the company Insiel Tecnologia Eletrônica. Five inmates serving their sentences in a
closed regime at the jail of Guarabira began to perform services in public works,
carrying with them small black boxes attached to their ankles and monitored via
satellite. The prisoners would leave the unit at 8 in the morning to clean the squares
and streets of the city, returning at 5 in the afternoon. At night, they slept in prison
while their equipment was recharged (Isidro 2017).
It was the initial stage of a pilot project that would reverberate, a short time later,
in nationwide academic and legislative debates on the subject; an inaugural experi-
ment of a criminal surveillance program that had already surfaced in declarations by
businessmen, jurists, deputies, and senators discussing the inefficiency of penal and
penitentiary policies in Brazil, but that now had found practical resonance for the
first time in the country. Bruno Isidro’s project was the pioneer in a series of local-
ized experiments of EM of offenders, which preceded, however, the legal authoriza-
tion of the measure at the federal level.
3
See: Programa Nacional de Direitos III (Available at: http://www.dhnet.org.br/dados/pp/a_pdf/
pndh3_programa_nacional_direitos_humanos_3.pdf. Accessed on 10 June 2019).
5.2 Unlikely Origins 107
Some years later, the judge would recount that the first steps of his successful
experiment had taken place 3 months earlier, in a classroom, when he met a young
university student called Percival Henriques. Isidro was teaching his course at the
Law School of the State University of Paraíba when the young man suggested that
he should meet the businessman João Pinheiro, owner of Insiel, a cargo tracking
company in the municipality of Campina Grande, so that they could develop a sys-
tem for remote monitoring of convicts.
According to Isidro’s account,
The idea came up in the classroom, at the State University of Paraíba – UEPB, when I was
explaining to the students the criminal justice system in the USA, and at the time there was
a couple of Brazilian religious figures who were making use of electronic anklets. In that
context, a student suggested that, if I wanted to, I could monitor prisoners in Guarabira.
From that class to the actual implementation of the project, it took three months. That stu-
dent introduced me to a friend, who had a cargo tracking company in Campina Grande. He
accepted the challenge and the idea of being a partner of the Court of Penal Enforcement
in the project of electronic monitoring of offenders in the judicial district of Guarabira
(Isidro apud Campello 2013, p. 159–160).
João Pinheiro’s company was responsible for developing the equipment, while
Bruno Isidro was in charge of applying it in his district. For this, two computers
were installed at the Insiel headquarters, where the movements of the inmates were
observed on a digital map; a computer at the Guarabira Court of Penal Enforcement,
so that the judge and his team could also monitor them; and five electronic tethers
that weighed approximately 100 g and emitted geolocation signals through the
Global System for Mobile Communications, operated by the cellular telephone net-
work. The tests continued for a little over a year and the mechanism was labeled
online system, through which the supervision activities were carried out uninterrupt-
edly, logging the prisoners’ positioning wherever they were (Isidro 2017). The tech-
nology used corresponded to the systems called continuous monitoring, with data
transmission capacity 24 h a day.
A period of 4 months was set for the analysis of issues related to the weight and
anatomy of the device, as well as the accuracy in recording the information about
the location of prisoners, with the cooperation of the Institute of Metrology and
Quality of Paraíba. According to Isidro, the model was designed to provide “greater
comfort to the users and attention to the principle of human dignity” (Ibid., p. 203).
The following year, Insiel developed a second system, similar to the mechanisms
used in European countries, which he called the “home anklet.” The equipment was
specifically designed to supervise house arrest (or fixed monitoring), in which the
convicted or prosecuted person is bound to remain in his or her home, only to leave
it with judicial consent. A radius of up to 400 m from their residence could be
allowed as a margin of flexibility. At the time, the system was tested on a woman
who had returned from the open regime and would now serve her sentence at her
house under EM (Ibid.).
The judge’s initiative was aimed at developing in Brazil a techno-penal mecha-
nism equivalent to devices already widely used in the Global North, with the expec-
tation of containing the levels of incarceration through the use of remote location
technologies. The first decade of the century witnessed the overflow of prison facili-
ties in many parts of the planet, and the possibility of carrying out an open-air con-
trol over individuals sentenced by criminal justice seemed imbued with
self-explanatory reasons, particularly in the country whose prison population ranked
fourth in the world at the time.
A testing ground for EM programs in Brazil, the project implemented in the
unlikely town of Guarabira gained visibility in the country’s major media outlets4
and unfolded into a series of conversations between its creators and members of the
National Congress. The experiment was being carried out in the aftermath of the
riots orchestrated by the PCC in May 2006, and the legislative branch was engaged
in devising answers to the problems unleashed by the prison system’s overcrowd-
ing. The debates on EM were underway in Parliament, with the passing of draft bills
337/07, 641/07, 510/07, 1.440/07, 165/07, and 175/07.
Judge Isidro was invited to report his pilot experience to the Chamber of Deputies
during the Parliamentary Inquiry Commission on the Prison System, installed in
August 2007 with the purpose of investigating the causes and solutions to the recur-
rence of prison riots, unexplained deaths in the penitentiary system, torture, sexual
abuse, corruption of public officials, strengthening of criminal gangs, rising recidi-
vism rates, high maintenance costs of prisoners, among other aspects of the Brazilian
prison landscape (Câmara dos Deputados 2009). In a public hearing session on the
use of technology applied to the prison system, held on 23 April 2008 as part of the
parliamentary inquiry, the judge explained to the congressmen the procedures of his
project, expressing his hopes that Congress would not hesitate to approve the legisla-
tion authorizing the EM policy nationwide: “May the federal law be adopted, because
it unifies the procedure in a country like ours, a continental country” (Ibid., p. 66).
Isidro was one of the main characters guiding the process of implementing EM
in Brazil, attending legislative and judicial forums in defense of the initiative. A
pioneer and enthusiast of a “criminal law of the future,” the magistrate carried on
with his campaign, also being welcomed in the Federal Senate by Senators Aloizio
Mercadante and Demóstenes Torres, who were interested in the description and
preliminary results of his pilot project. Both were responsible for the legal proposals
for the implementation of EM that were still being examined in the Senate. After the
experience in Paraíba, there was a “race among the most important states of the
federation to see who would be the first to launch and implement electronic moni-
toring” (Isidro apud Campello 2013, p. 160).
Also in 2007, the Intelligence Department of the Secretariat of Penitentiary
Administration of the State of São Paulo performed tests with georeferenced track-
ing equipment, audited by experts in computer science, electronics, and security.
The following year, then-governor José Serra signed state law no. 12,906/08,
4
TV Globo. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0X7f1nWj0U (Last accessed on 7
November 2018); TV Paraíba, a branch of Rede Globo. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=rGrSyC0IgbU (Last accessed on 7 November 2018); ConJur. Available at: https://www.
conjur.com.br/2007-jul-13/presos_testam_tornozeleira_eletronica_paraiba (Last accessed on 7
November 2018).
5.2 Unlikely Origins 109
authorizing EM in the state of São Paulo. Prior to federal legislation, São Paulo’s
law was based on a bill drafted by State Deputy Baleia Rossi and established the
possibility of tracking individuals in the semi-open regime. The responsibility for
managing and operating the system would fall on the Secretariat of Penitentiary
Administration (Campello 2013, 2014).
Still in 2007, the governor of Minas Gerais, Aécio Neves, and the Secretary of
State for Social Defense, Mauricio Campos Junior, traveled to Israel with the aim of
getting to know the offender tracking system used in that country and establishing
contact with the Israeli company Elmotech, one of the world leaders in the field. The
following year, representatives of the executive and judiciary branches and the
Prosecution Service of Minas Gerais made a technical visit to Argentina, the first
country in South America to implement EM. In April 2008, a trial period began in
Minas Gerais as part of the “Pilot Project for the Electronic Monitoring of Convicted
Persons”. At the time, one of the monitoring centers installed in Argentina was used,
as well as a center located in the state capital Belo Horizonte (Maciel 2014).
Following, in the state of Alagoas, the monitoring trials began in August 2008,
when the General Intendence of the Penitentiary System performed tests on three
individuals sentenced to the semi-open regime and a prison guard, monitored 24 h a
day via GPS. At the time, the local press reported that the company Monitore
Vigilância Eletrônica, based in Brasília, Federal District, would offer their services
free of charge during a test period, so that the State could get to know, in practice,
“the advantages of the service and the quality of the equipment.”5 The General
Intendant of the Alagoas Penitentiary System, Lieutenant-Colonel Luiz Bugarin,
declared that the equipment was a “change of concept, because it changes the way of
controlling inmates in the semi-open regime, but in a more human way.”6 The IGESP
also celebrated that the device would save more than 50% in costs (Campello 2013).
In the same month, in Pernambuco state, four semi-open regime prisoners from
the Penitenciária Agroindustrial São João (São João Agroindustrial Penitentiary),
on Itamaracá Island, and five prisoners from the Colônia Penal Feminina do Recife
(Recife Women’s Penal Colony), in the state capital, took part in the pilot project
implemented by the Secretariat of Social Development and Human Rights. The trial
lasted 60 days and relied on technology developed in partnership between the US
company Security Alert and the Brazilian company from Pernambuco Tron
Controles Elétricos (Ibid.).
In November 2008, the state of Rio Grande do Sul enacted Law 13,044/08,
authorizing EM to supervise compliance with home detention, prohibition to visit
certain places, conditional release, progression to semi-open and open regimes,
authorization for temporary release from prison or external work (Art. 1). The pilot
project included four voluntary prisoners sentenced to the semi-open regime, who
5
Alagoas 24 horas. AL testa monitoramento eletrônico de presos. Available at: http://www.ala-
goas24horas.com.br/conteudo/index.asp?vEditoria=Pol%C3%83%C6%92%C3%82%C2%ADci
a&vCod=51634 (Accessed on 16 July 2018).
6
Idem.
returned to their homes on weekends, but had to spend the night at the halfway
house on weekdays (Oliveira and Azevedo 2011).
In February 2009, it was the state of Goiás’ turn to launch its own trials with
criminal tracking. The experiments lasted 30 days, during which, initially, ten pris-
oners in semi-open and open regimes received the equipment, whose technology
was also imported from Israel (Conte 2010). The surveillance was done by agents
assisted by computers installed in the Secretariat of Public Security and in the local
Court of Penal Enforcement. In addition, other officials performed external moni-
toring to verify compliance with the judicial requirements (Corrêa Jr 2012).
In Rio de Janeiro, a draft bill on the subject, authored by State Deputy Cidinha
Campos, also made its way through the Legislative Assembly and, on 3 September
2009, state law no. 5.530/09 was sanctioned by Governor Sérgio Cabral. The docu-
ment regulated the EM of people serving sentences in semi-open and open regimes.
The Rio de Janeiro law would be the last state legislation to authorize the tool before
its approval at the national sphere. Parallel to the experiments carried out in the
states of Paraíba, São Paulo, Minas Gerais, Alagoas, Pernambuco, Rio Grande do
Sul and Goiás, this was part of the series of EM experiments that preceded the fed-
eral law (Campello 2013).
Thus, it may not be possible to establish a unique genesis moment of the EM
dispositif in Brazil, for there was a series of localized experiences, associated with
discourses on behalf of strengthening the penal control, optimizing public spending,
and humanizing sentences. As of 2007, the policy was introduced into the country
by experimental practices of magistrates and state secretaries, working with private
security companies, telecommunications, information technology, or automotive
security. Later, there were instances of the formal implementation of EM by state
legislators, which were then endorsed by the respective executive branches.
Note, however, that the laws enacted at state level in São Paulo, Rio Grande do
Sul, and Rio de Janeiro between 2008 and 2009 were all unconstitutional, because
Article 22 of the Brazilian Federal Constitution states that “The Union has the
exclusive power to legislate on: 1. (…) criminal law.” This means that, constitution-
ally, only the federal legislature has the power to enact laws regarding penal
enforcement.
The debates on the unconstitutionality of the state laws rallied jurists, and faced
the argument of state governors and deputies, anchored in Art. 24, I of the Federal
Constitution, which stipulates that penitentiary matters can be legislated on a con-
current basis by the states and the Union. Hence, Art. 24 would supposedly grant the
federate states the possibility of instituting and regulating EM, if it were to be con-
sidered an exclusive matter of penitentiary law. The controversy opposed Articles
22, I and 24, I, of the Brazilian constitution, raising doubts about whether the policy
would be legally characterized as exclusive to penitentiary law, or would require a
change in the penal execution law (7.210/84), for which the Union is exclusively
competent. Eventually, it was assumed that EM is not restricted to penitentiary mat-
ters, comprising issues related to criminal law, since it has, as underlined by jurist
Pierpaolo Bottini, “a penal nature of restriction of intimacy (...) not only of those
who are in the prison system but also of those who are outside it, such as, for
5.3 The Trade Show 111
example, those submitted to right-restricting sentences or to house arrest” (Bottini

2008, p. 392).
Nonetheless, the policy was already in place in the country, either as a test or
based on laws unconstitutionally enacted in state legislatures. In June 2010, federal
law no. 12258/10 would authorize the EM of offenders nationwide, thereby ratify-
ing practices that had already been implemented. Law no. 12258/10 amended the
penal execution law and established that it would be incumbent upon the judiciary
to determine EM programs in cases of sentencing in a semi-open regime or home
detention. The following year, the approval of federal law 12,403/11 amended the
Code of Criminal Procedure (decree-law no. 3689/41), including EM among the
pre-trial restraining orders other than imprisonment (Article 319, IX).
With its adoption, electronic surveillance would be rolled out and heralded as an
economical, efficient, modernizing practice, favorable to the social reintegration of
convicts. These were the advantages of the device ascribed by Judge Bruno Isidro to
the project he had devised:
(...) Monitoring through electronic anklets is an efficient and effective method, that meets
the new challenges of our times, because it allows a constant surveillance in an economical
way and with the possibility of not losing contact with society, which facilitates resocializa-
tion and consequently may decrease recidivism in crime (Isidro 2017, p. 355).
During its pilot phase, the resocializing goal of EM contributed to its acceptance
both in the legislative branch and among entities engaged in fostering and promot-
ing innovative and socially responsible penal practices. In the early years of consoli-
dation of the EM policy in Brazil, Isidro would be acknowledged and awarded for
his initiative, which would, in his words, encourage the “engagement of society in
the fight against violence” (Ibid.). More recently, the judge has been advancing in
lectures and interviews the idea that the use of ankle monitors would now be super-
seded by the use of subcutaneous microchips surgically implanted in the intrader-
mal layer of the bodies of convicts or suspects:
I believe the anklet represented a first moment in the electronic monitoring of prisoners and
it is still being developed and structured in other states. However, the time has come to
move forward. Instead of an anklet, the monitoring should be done by chips. Apart from
being imperceptible, it makes it more difficult to remove them.7
5.3 The Trade Show
The ideal of our prisons would be a thousand automatons, rising and working, eating and
going to bed, by electric currents transmitted to them from a single warder. This would be
economical; and it is not to be wondered at that men accustomed to being mere machines
do not prove to be the men whom society needs (Kropotkin 1887, p. 407–408).
7
G1. Juiz que iniciou uso de tornozeleira eletrônica no país defende chips para monitorar presos.
Available at: https://g1.globo.com/pb/paraiba/noticia/juiz-que-iniciou-uso-de-tornozeleira-
eletronica-no-pais-defende-chips-para-monitorar-presos.ghtml (Accessed on 25 November 2018).
The scene ironically evoked by Piotr Kropotkin at the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury was part of his studies on the Russian and French prisons and the role played
by the criminal justice system of the time, when forced labor regimes had assumed
a crucial role in the productive mechanics relayed by the factories. Mills and work-
shops were installed within prison institutions that were responsible for providing
and concentrating on their premises a steady supply of free or low-wage labor.
“Whoever approaches the immense circular wall, which still hangs at a distance of
four kilometers, would believe to be in the midst of a small labor population and not
in a prison” (Ibid., p. 347), observed the anarchist geographer, whose research on
prison systems had begun against his will, when he was arrested in 1872 by the
Czarist State.
At this point, however, we know that the solitary watchman imagined by
Kropotkin was not able to operate, by himself, the multiple techniques of control
and punishment that grew more complex over the centuries. A whole professional
and technocratic network of monitors, guards, penitentiary agents, technical super-
visors, and public and private employees has been put into operation as a human
component of the machinic assemblages that constitute the new mechanisms of
control of prisoners. It is also in this sense that the panoptic model would be insuf-
ficient to explain the power diagrams composed of contemporary systems of remote
monitoring.
On the other hand, the virtual image of automated prisoners, handled by means
of electric chains, today finds its complete actualization with the electronic supervi-
sion of offenders in an external work regime. Under the command of alert systems,
thousands of prisoners are sent to their work stations daily, which seems more like
extensions of the prison facilities to which they return at the end of their working
day. This is the case in the Centros de Progressão Penitenciária in the state of São
Paulo and in the Casas de Albergado of Rio de Janeiro.
But Kropotkin continued: “With its lofty chimneys, which day and night send
their smoke towards a mostly cloudy sky, and the rhythmical throbbing of its machin-
ery, which is heard late in the night, it has the aspect of a little manufacturing town”
(Ibid.). This was a description of the central prison of Clairvaux, located in eastern
France. The penal and economic systems were already feeding off each other,
through the industrial production of prison labor, or through the repression and
imprisonment of workers who rose up against the exploitative regimes of factory
labor (Ibid.).
A few decades after the writings of the Russian anarchist, sociologists Georg
Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer (2017) would further analyze the correlations between
punitive practices and the European and North American socioeconomic structure
during the Modern Era. Moving away from the theoretical approaches that con-
ceived punishment as a mere legal consequence of crime, Rusche and Kirchheimer
investigate the history of punishment in the West, examining the reasons why cer-
tain penal techniques were adopted or rejected in a given social configuration. In a
world that oscillated between free competition and monopolistic capitalism, the
regulation of the labor market and the absorption of a growing industrial reserve
army, generated by the transformations of the production system, became
dependent on penal institutions able to correct the unruly worker and adjust the bal-
ance of supply and demand of the labor force (Ibid.). A reciprocal complicity was
established between the prison machine and the industrial apparatus.
Nowadays, however, it would be hard to believe in penal systems as an eco-
nomic–political instrument for the education and training of an obedient labor force,
as in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In Brazil, despite the remaining labor
activities in certain prison units – and the rhetorical statements that reiterate work as
a method of penance – the overall jobless situation and the overpopulation of the
penal system belie the viability of turning the prison into a simulacrum of a factory,
company, or workshop. A series of economic activities are coordinated with and
from prison, but they cannot be summarized to the conformation of a docile and
useful productive force, similar to that found by Rusche and Kirchheimer and later
analyzed by Michel Foucault (1995). The delinquency manufactured by the prison
has eluded its agenda and its grasp.
Nevertheless, the participation of economic for-profit agencies and agents is
increasingly present in the projects to redesign penal strategies. Although private
companies deal with basic punitive activities (building penitentiary establishments,
providing food services to prisons, prison security teams, carrying out administra-
tive functions, etc.), State entities deploy not only an economic–business grammar
as a guiding principle of criminal policy, but they also perform practical roles of
commercially and financially negotiating crime-management programs, making
penal and security activities a profitable ground for capital investments (Lilly and
Knepper 1993; Minhoto 2000, 2002; ACLU 2011; Paterson 2013; Pastoral
Carcerária 2014; Aviram 2016). It is this mutual intersection between penal and
economic domains that is meant here as the governmentalization of the penal sys-
tem, quintessential of neoliberal governmentality and its corresponding penality
(Foucault 1979, 2004). Public authorities pretend to be businessmen, and business-
men pretend to be public authorities in the manufacturing process of punitive prac-
tices. Penal law itself has been drafted and instituted out of this exchange
(Aviram 2016).
The development and deployment of security technologies is currently generat-
ing a new impetus to this process, offering the electronics industry a fertile field of
action. If, on the one hand, the spread of electronic apparatuses in correctional facil-
ities turns prisoners into “captive consumers of the crime control industry” (Christie
1993), on the other hand, their availability encourages state consumption and feeds
into the fetishist imaginary of politicians, public managers, and legislators around
technological surveillance systems (Neocleous 2007; Paterson 2013). Cutting-edge
technology and cost optimization display their own mesmerizing powers.
Still revisiting Kropotkin, the economy of resources afforded by the output of
automaton prisoners under the spell of technological stimuli is repositioned on the
dystopian horizon of today’s operators of a booming market and nurtured by a bur-
geoning industrial complex whose traded commodity is the infliction of punish-
ment. However, the inventiveness of the market no longer seems to focus on
enhancing the productive capacities of prison labor, but rather on technical proce-
dures for managing prison overpopulation, whether by creating methods of open-air
penal supervision or by trying to achieve a calculated annihilation of disorder in the

prison environment.
***
Chamber of Deputies, 23 April 2008.
Public Hearing at the Parliamentary Inquiry Commission on the Prison System:
Mr. CHARLES SABA – Good afternoon, Deputies. It is an honor to be here today. Thank
you very much for the invitation. (...) I came here to talk about a non-lethal piece of equip-
ment called a Taser. (...) A gun that uses an electric wave, a T-wave, to block the brain,
causing the human being to freeze and drop to the ground. It works with a laser pointer, like
you have here behind me, pulling the trigger sparks at 50,000 volts (firing noise) and the
duration of one shot is 5 seconds. The person hits the ground. It is instantaneous, but there
is no permanent injury, no lethal injury. So, the equipment we use costs $779, it is cheap to
save the lives of these men here when it is needed. They have a lethal weapon, which is for
exceptional use. This one here, non-lethal, is for everyday use. That one is life insurance,
this one here is health insurance.
Mr. DEPUTY AYRTON XEREZ – How does it work, please?
Mr. CHARLES SABA – It works by blocking the muscles of the target person, and they
collapse to the ground (Câmara dos Deputados 2008, p. 17–18).
The dialogue reproduced above is an excerpt from the presentation by business-

man Charles Saba, president of USPIT, an American company dedicated to special-
ized training in public security and civil defense actions, and Permanent Consultant
to the Latin American Committee of the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules
for the Treatment of Prisoners. On that afternoon of April 2008, the Public Hearing
session hosted by the Chamber of Deputies was set to showcase technological
instruments made available by the private sector to the Brazilian penitentiary sys-
tem. The exhibitors represented security companies as well as local and global
manufacturers of products for the prison industry. They had been invited to speak by
members of the executive and legislative branches, interested in the solutions that
the market had to offer in the wake of the recent upheavals in the prison system.
Charles Saba introduced to Congress the latest innovations his company had
developed for the prison environment. During his presentation, he explained how
the Taser pistol works, emphasizing its technical qualities and the cost reduction
made possible by its use, in comparison with lethal weapons. According to Saba, the
equipment was unequivocal: “They are blocked, and the name for making a human
being drop like that to the ground is ‘toilet seat,’ they stiffen up and hit the ground”
(Ibid., p. 19). The electroshock weapon had an effect on the central nervous system,
paralyzing its target in a split second.
Following his speech, Antônio Carlos Magalhães Soares, Institutional Relations
Director of Condor Tecnologias Não Letais, presented to the plenary a series of
artifacts designed to contain unrest:
Mr. ANTÔNIO CARLOS MAGALHÃES SOARES – (...) We have a whole lineup of prod-
ucts. (...) I will quickly talk about each one. Here, first, the controlled-impact ammunition,
the famous rubber bullets. (...) This is a new line of munitions that includes controlled
impact, explosive rounds, tear gas rounds, and even illuminating rounds. (...) Chemical
ammunition that is fired by a 12-gauge weapon, or a 37/38, which is a very large caliber
weapon, that fires a tear gas powder that incapacitates [targets] for a long time. (...) This
grenade is an entry grenade, it makes a very loud noise that stuns the criminal. So, it is
thrown into the environment, and the tactical group has 6 to 7 seconds to act, and it is very
efficient. Stun grenades. An innovation that can be used in a prison environment. (...) There
are situations that can be solved with an electric gun; there are others that you won’t be
able to solve with an electric gun, you will need a rubber bullet, or a tear-gas grenade. (...)
So, in this case, there is a certain number, a variety of items that can be used. This, within
a penitentiary, provides great operational versatility (Ibid., p. 28).
The market was well-equipped for the “war on crime” and the maintenance of
order in prisons. If government needed to restore the capacity to manage the prison
system, the private sector saw in the prison crisis a wide window of opportunity.
Antônio Carlos Magalhães Soares brought to Congress a generous sample of
products. Ammunitions with tear-gas emission; pyrotechnic signaling devices;
explosive grenades made of malleable rubber; pepper sprays with no long-lasting
physiological effects; smoke-grenades with incapacitating effects; plasticized
ammunitions that do not pierce the body; flashlights with momentary blinding
effects, among others. In addition to displaying each of the artifacts, the Condor
sales representative justified the relevance of the products and demonstrated his
expertise in the field of urban conflicts:
(...) The nature of conflicts has changed. Today, these conflicts are being fought in cities.
Wars in the past were fought in defined locations, on battlefields. Today, war is being fought
in cities, and this situation demands new doctrines and technologies that are consistent with
this reality. In public security, the evolution of crime is exposing law enforcement agents to
serious risks, requiring training, professional qualification, and adequate material
resources to act effectively and humanely, which is achieved primarily through the use of
non-lethal technologies. There is a worldwide demand regarding this humanitarian aspect,
in dealing with the delinquent, with the criminal, not only in public security actions but also
in war (Ibid., p. 23).
The businessman mentioned some of the main aspects of the reconfiguration of

contemporary states of violence (Gros 2006) and the so-called new urban militarism
(Graham 2011), addressing the need to reconcile the armed neutralization of the
internal enemy with respect for international humanitarian standards. The contextu-
alization of his speech placed the prison at the focal point of urban conflicts and
ascribed to the private sector a relevant role in the fight against crime. And the pub-
lic hearing organized on behalf of the Parliamentary Inquiry on the Prison System
quickly took on the appearance of a punishment trade show.
The displays seemed to excite the parliamentarians, who at the end of each pre-
sentation asked for details regarding the technical capabilities, costs, and implica-
tions of using the items being showcased. X-ray equipment; metal detectors; body
scanners; CCTV systems; 360-degree mobile cameras; integrated IP camera systems
with bullet-proof coating; biometric access control mechanisms; infrared sensors for
alarm triggering, along with a series of other security artifacts geared toward prison
consumption were all part of the arsenal offered up to the deputies at the hearing.
Among the speakers were businessmen Savio Bloomfield and Hebert de Souza,
who presented to Congress the many advantages of the portable transmitters, con-
trol software, and monitoring centers for offender surveillance that their companies
would make available to the State. The company Insiel, from Paraíba, was not the
only one to manufacture EM systems for a new type of penal enforcement, without
even legal authorization for the policy, which would only be approved 2 years later.
After the talk by Antônio Carlos Magalhães Soares, it was time for Sávio
Bloomfield to take the floor:
Good afternoon. I congratulate this House for the initiative (...). My company is called
Spacecom, the company is focused on the development of electronic products. Well,
Spacecom is a fully national company, we are the only manufacturer in Brazil of electronic
prison monitoring equipment (...). We call our system SAC-24, that is, Sistema de
Acompanhamento de Custódia 24 horas [24-h custody monitoring system]. It is a system
designed to monitor criminals with the use of electronic anklets (Câmara dos Deputados
2008, p. 52).
Spacecom was thus introduced to the federal legislative chamber. Bloomfield’s

presentation emphasized the technical, social, and economic benefits of the system
developed by his company, which could provide better social reintegration for pris-
oners and guarantee a reduction in spending on criminal justice. A common thread
in the public–private interface and a central argument within the criminological
reasoning that found its place in the Brazilian political-criminal imaginary, the
parameters of cost-efficiency were emphasized by the businessman in his contribu-
tion to the public hearing.
(...) The advantages of this type of service, as we have seen here, are in removing prisoners
or accompanying those prisoners who are in the regime of sentence progression. The main
advantages are: the social aspect, allowing the inmate a better return to society, making it
possible for the State to continue monitoring him after he leaves the prison, or the shelter,
under the open regime or during temporary custody. Savings as well; a reduction in current
costs, as the Government’s expenditures, approximately, as already said here in this com-
mission, is around 1,300 reais per month per inmate. This equipment could bring the costs
to about 50% or 40% of these costs for the Government. (...) The system developed by
Spacecom is composed of two pieces: one anklet that weighs less than 80 g and one por-
table tracking unit. Why is it made in two pieces and not in only one? It is made to improve
security, to avoid the convict wrapping aluminum foil around his ankle and interrupting the
equipment’s communication. When you have two pieces of equipment one next to the other,
it does all this detection to know if it is being covered up or not, to avoid the fraud of locat-
ing the prisoner, very common in single systems. Well, this device, which is this little box
here, is responsible for capturing the satellite signal and storing information about the
proximity of the prisoner who is using this anklet. So, it captures the geographic informa-
tion, stores the information from the anklet saying that the inmate is close to it and sends it
to the monitoring center. How does the inmate use this? It is so practical that I wear it, I am
wearing it now, and nobody has noticed. I wear it on my waist and an anklet strapped to my
foot. My wife is always monitoring me. (Laughter). (...) We decided to invest in this national
technology because we own the technology and we want to contribute to this problem here
in Brazil (Câmara dos Deputados 2008, p. 52–54).
In his long presentation, Bloomfield also reported that he had been in contact
with the National Penitentiary Department (DEPEN) since 2004, when its director
at the time, Mauricio Kuehne, and the director of Penitentiary Policies, Alexandre
Cabana, visited the company’s headquarters in the city of Curitiba, state of Paraná
(Câmara dos Deputados 2008, p. 59). A few years later, Cabana would be
investigated by the Ministry of Justice itself, under the suspicion of participating in

the smuggling of cameras, microphones and other equipment supplied to DEPEN
by the company Segurança e Vigilância Patrimonial. Cabana would have super-
vised the acquisition of counterfeit devices that were part of the intelligence plat-
form installed in the maximum security Penitenciária Federal de Catanduvas
(Federal Penitentiary of Catanduvas), in Paraná. According to a report produced by
the Catanduvas Criminal Enforcement Section, out of the 210 video cameras
installed in the maximum security unit, only 93 were working. The suspicion was
that the equipment had been smuggled from Paraguay at a price of 600,000 reais,
when the total value of the contract was 6,000,000 reais.8
At any rate, the reported meetings between the representatives of DEPEN and
the owner of Spacecom indicated that the negotiations between the public and pri-
vate sectors in the incipient national market for EM systems were not restricted to
the legislative and judicial arenas, and predated the whole project headed by Judge
Bruno Isidro and João Pinheiro’s cargo tracking company in the city of Guarabira.
Three years before the project in Paraiba, research and private investment in the
technology required to implement the system were already being done by Spacecom,
and the DEPEN signaled its interest in the innovations offered by an embryonic
Brazilian industry of EM. The new penal policy had been under discussion between
representatives of Spacecom and of DEPEN since 2004.
The hearing in the Chamber of Deputies proceeded. After Bloomfield’s speech,
it was the turn of the competitor. Hebert Saul de Souza, technical director of STOP/
BR, showed the deputies the tracking device developed by the company he
represented:
(...) the product we have to present, as Dr. Savio says, is an electronic monitoring tool for
criminals, it uses only one piece, we are only working with one piece. If you want to take a
look (...). And STOP/BR is a company that is already located in Brazil (...). We use a soft-
ware called Very Tracks, which is already running in a Portuguese-language version. Our
headquarters are in Houston, Texas; we operate in the whole Brazilian territory for the
South American region. (...) Well, the technology is patented; the implementation is very
simple, it is a single product, a single device, a single piece (...) There is no false alarm of
a missing clamp, which is often the case with some 2-piece devices. And it is revolutionary
GPS software. (...) Now we have a brief comment about where they can be used, right?
Convicts on parole, semi-open regime offenders, as has even been mentioned by the Deputy.
People who are on trial should not attend the school, the master’s degree, the PhD of crime
(...). So, I think that this social aspect that we have all mentioned, which is very important,
is the primary element to be highlighted here (Câmara dos Deputados 2008, p. 68–71).
Stressing his social concerns, the director of the Texan company did not fail to
emphasize the technical advantages of his product over the system previously pre-
sented by the owner of Spacecom. The race for the new market had begun within the
Chamber. And the parliamentarians intervened, exposing their doubts to the compa-
nies’ representatives.
8
ConJur. MJ vai investigar câmeras piratas em presídios. Available at: https://www.conjur.com.
br/2012-jan-13/ministerio-justica-investigar-cameras-piratas-presidios-federais – (Accessed on 23
November 2017).
(...) Mr. PRESIDENT OF THE CHAMBER (Deputy Neucimar Fraga) – I just wanted to
ask a question. The cost that has been stated, the cost per prisoner with electronic monitor-
ing, is it really based on the cost of the equipment or is it based on the cost that a prisoner
supposedly incurs for the Brazilian government today?
Mr. SÁVIO BLOOMFIELD – It is a combination of several variables. First, the amount
of information that the government will want, the redundancy of the system, the redundancy
of the central station, the amount of equipment to be produced to do the monitoring, and if
they want to buy the equipment or if they want to outsource and have the service provided.
So, it is a variable.
Despite Mr. Bloomfield’s evasive response, the widespread assertion that EM

mechanisms would allow a reduction in the expenses incurred by the criminal jus-
tice system requires some caveats. In the first place, the data referring to the costs of
the monitoring systems are often imprecise, insofar as the studies evaluating the
economic impact of EM programs display considerably disparate results,9 by taking
into account, in a not quite uniform manner, the required expenses with profession-
als (monitoring technicians, social workers, psychologists, prison agents) and the
upkeep of the physical structures (monitoring centers, offices of community sen-
tences, technical infrastructure), required for the system’s implementation. A calcu-
lation restricted to the prices of EM equipment is clearly misleading (Lévy 2019).
Moreover, public authorities tend to compare the costs of EM programs with the
average spending on the prison system, whereas the former are concentrated, as a
rule, on the so-called “soft end” of the criminal system, i.e., individuals in the pro-
gression phase of their sentences or whose sentences are to be served outside of
prison facilities, or even people subjected to pre-trial community measures, which
would require a less costly structure than that allocated to prison units or maximum
security facilities, thus raising the average cost of the penal sector. In this sense, the
comparison between the costs of EM and the expenses that prison imposes follows
the same erroneous reasoning of calculating the costs of privatized prisons in rela-
tion to state institutions. As Minhoto (2000) rightly observes, the private models are
usually reserved for prisoners considered to be “less dangerous,” who require a
security structure that is less rigid and, therefore, cheaper, making the comparison
unrealistic. Finally, the main and last observation regarding economic costs lies in
the fact that EM has not been applied as a substitute to prison, thus representing a
supplementary expense. Investments made in structuring the EM policy come in
addition to investments in the expansion of the prison system.
In any case, considering the active participation of the private sector in the draft-
ing process of the law that authorizes and regulates the tracking policy in Brazil, it
must be taken into account that the apparently unorthodox coupling between the
correctionalist discourse relied on social reintegration and the economic argument
of cost reduction has largely responded to the latent interest of the Brazilian crime
control industry in expanding its customer base. The concern expressed by
9
In Europe, cost assessment surveys for EM programs range from €2.64 in Estonia to €100 in
Norway. The calculations use different bases, making a reliable assessment of the economic bur-
den of the programs difficult. In the USA, the costs range from $8.60 to $23.66, without account-
ing for the costs of professionals involved in monitoring (Lévy 2019, p. 109–112).
representatives of Spacecom and STOP/BR with the rehabilitation of convicts must

be understood as a publicity stunt, rather than as a commitment to this or that crimi-
nological school or line of interpretation about the true purpose of punishment.
However, the discursive entanglement based upon the articulation of social argu-
ments and economic approaches revealed its effectiveness in the lawmaking proce-
dures, and the campaign for EM implementation was marked by a transversality of
interests, statements, and actors, through which the concerns based on the cost-
efficiency calculation, linked to the expectations for the universalization of elec-
tronic surveillance, were expressed in an undifferentiated manner by businessmen
as well as deputies, senators, and judges. Although the social argument emerged
from the speeches of the manufacturers, bestowing the private agent with a similar
role to that of a lawmaker, the marketing language was constantly replicated in both
the legislative and the judiciary branches, converting the juridical–political arenas
into a sort of business desk.
This “functional dedifferentiation” (Minhoto and Gonçalves 2015) among the
legal, political, and economic systems – leveraged by the widespread dissemination
of government practices and rationalities that mirror the corporate model – creates
additional consequences when the consumer good being negotiated is punishment.
Consequences that are associated not so much with the deterioration of the onto-
logical dimensions of the public or private spheres as with the fateful political influ-
ence of corporate groups in setting the agendas of criminal policy, which unfolds as
the unlimited expansion of the population subject to penal control as a condition for
profitability and development.
Sustained, thus, by a penal economy whose field of action is no longer limited to
prison – feeding, rather, on its permanent crisis – the EM dispositif has found a
fertile soil in the Brazilian penal system. Its proponents operated among the three
branches of government and the corporate universe, organizing the political and
cognitive conditions for its deployment. From the legislative debates in the Chamber
of Deputies and in the Senate to its constitutional approval by the Presidency of the
Republic, including the initiative of national and foreign manufacturers, and also
pilot projects carried out by judges and state secretaries, the implementation of elec-
tronic surveillance was articulated in Brazil on the basis of exchanges established
between public and private actors assembled around the answers that technological
advances offered to the instabilities of the prison system.
In less than a decade, state EM programs were established all over the country.
The development of the monitoring policy throughout the 2010s would result in
more than 80,000 people being tracked by the Brazilian penal system in 2021, with-
out any evidence at all for furthering the alleged goals of decarceration or replacing
imprisonment with electronic punishment in an open environment. Far from a para-
digm shift, the policy reinstated prison as the central instrument for managing con-
flicts and rescaled the capabilities for penal control on behalf of the State and its
private partners. Aiming, thus, to offer a systematization of the main effects of EM
programs in Brazil, in its social and political dimensions, the next chapter retrieves
the data collected during field research and highlights in a schematic way the range
of impacts of the EM dispositif on the Brazilian penal system. Returning to the
interviews and ethnographic observation, the Chap. 6 concludes the expository cir-
cle drawn around the practices and techniques that permeate the prison–EM sym-
biosis in the largest country in Latin America.
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Feltran G (2018) Irmãos: uma história do PCC. Companhia das Letras, São Paulo
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Isidro BCA (2017) O monitoramento eletrônico de presos e a paz social no contexto urbano: nova
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Chapter 6
Out of Control
“It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the

accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost
amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around
me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing
that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain
pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly
burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I
saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard,
and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.” –(Mary Shelley,
Frankenstein)
6.1 Success in Failure
Ceará State Electronic Monitoring Cell.

Judge: We are in the phase of analyzing the information from the Secretariat. Informing
with due dates. Because we have doubts about what is the equipment’s failure, what is the
prisoner’s fault. This is what the criminal justice system is going through. What is a fault?
What is equipment failure? So much so that we have often held hearings with the monitor-
ing staff to clarify doubts, to decide on specific cases.
Coordinator: Now someone will come to explain the system, because not knowing the
system and what is in the report generates this doubt. And once you understand how the
system works, it’s easier to trust the report.
Judge: Perfect.1
It was July 2017 when the Judge visited the Cell. Ceará was experiencing some
of the most jarring impacts of the historic rift between the Comando Vermelho (CV)
and the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), the two biggest criminal factions in
Brazil. The hearings held with the team of monitors were meant to enlighten the
judiciary about the operation of a mechanism that would contribute to coping with
1
Ceará State Electronic Monitoring Cell (Célula de Monitoramento Eletrônico do Ceará). Interview
held on 3 July 2017.
124 6 Out of Control
the violence that had recently flared up in the state. There was a need to know pre-
cisely when a violation detected in the monitoring system installed in the Cell
resulted from an equipment failure or from a deliberate fault committed by the mon-
itored user. It was necessary to better understand the data produced by the monitor-
ing software so that the criminal justice system could finally take ownership of a
penal policy developed to contain the prison crisis that was piercing through the
walls and shaking the public security system.
In the previous month, six people had been shot in a summer house on the beach
of Porto das Dunas, 40 km from the city of Fortaleza.2 A party celebrating the
release of a young man accused of being the leader of a synthetic drugs gang ended
with ten hooded men invading the mansion shooting .40 pistols. Nine days later, five
people would be killed in a bar in the municipality of Horizonte, among them a
3-year-old child.3 In the early morning of 20 July, another four men were executed
in the town of Paraipaba, located on the west coast of Ceará. The episodes were part
of a sequence of reprisals unleashed across the state after the end of the partnership
established between the CV, founded back in the late 1970s in one of Rio de Janeiro’s
penitentiaries, and the PCC, born in the prisons of São Paulo.
Since 2010, Fortaleza had been establishing itself as a strategic diffuser point for
the flow of weapons and illicit drugs toward Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.
The city’s importance in the geopolitical criminal scene resided in the quality of its
port structure and its proximity to transatlantic consumer markets (Sá and Aquino
2018; Feltran 2018). The cocaine coming from Peru and Colombia crossed the
northern states on routes disputed between the PCC and the Amazonian gang
Família do Norte, before reaching the capital of Ceará, which saw the birth of the
local group Guardiões do Estado in its poor neighborhoods. In addition to the
increase in trafficking activities, there was also an armed territorialization of the
city’s peripheries, established by small gangs since the late 1990s (Sá and
Aquino 2018).
In 2015, a peace agreement between factions in Ceará promoted a significant
reduction in murder rates. The deal would have been prompted by the commanders
of both the PCC and the CV, bothered by the statistical increase in violent deaths,
which drew the attention of the press, attracted the police, and jeopardized the
smooth running of business. During the first half of 2016, the residents of the mar-
ginalized areas of the state capital celebrated the sensitive changes in the daily life
on their streets, in a pacification that was unrelated to the work done by official
agencies (Ibid.). However, with the broken alliance between the factions of the
2
Diário do Nordeste. Seis pessoas são mortas em chacina em uma casa de praia no Porto das
Dunas. Available at: http://diariodonordeste.verdesmares.com.br/editorias/seguranca/online/seis-
pessoas-sao-mortas-em-chacina-em-uma-casa-de-praia-no-porto-das-dunas-1.1765572 (Accessed
on 10 December 2018).
3
Diário do Nordeste. Preso suspeito de ter executado vítimas da Chacina de Horizonte. Available
at: http://diariodonordeste.verdesmares.com.br/editorias/seguranca/online/preso-suspeito-de-ter-
executado-vitimas-da-chacina-de-horizonte-1.1775739 (Accessed on 10 December 2018).
6.1 Success in Failure 125
Rio–São Paulo axis, the radicalization of violence took hold in Ceará.4 Poor
neighborhoods in urban areas became a battleground for criminal groups that
engaged in economical partnerships and political rivalries. The violation of these
agreements led to an escalation of bloody episodes in the coastal capital, revealing
the centrality of the CV and the PCC in the management of war and peace in the
outskirts of Fortaleza, as well as in other municipalities of the region. The violence
that erupted in the Brazilian Northeast had been engendered inside the prisons of the
Southeast, and Ceará experienced some of its most brutal episodes.
When the Judge of the Third Court of Penal Enforcement of the District of
Fortaleza tried to understand the details of the technological operation of an elec-
tronic system that had not long been implemented in Brazil, what he wanted was to
acquire the tools to prevent his own participation in retro-feeding this process; what
he wished was to have alternative sanctions at his disposal, in the redundant hope
that the problems produced by the penal system would be solved within the penal
system itself.
Faction culture is still taking hold in the state of Ceará. You have many prisoners that are
bound to the factions in order to survive inside the prison. If there was a true rehabilitation
process, we wouldn’t need the prison walls. Because, in fact, they don’t hold anyone any-
more. So here we have a very humane work, a very big effort, to make the monitoring sys-
tem work.5
Setting up alternatives to incarceration was a legal–penal endeavor not only to

control the instabilities of the prison system, but also to contain the waves of attacks
that had spread throughout Brazil and were now concentrated in the North and
Northeast regions. Institutional spaces no longer circumscribed the uprisings and
massacres fostered by prison overcrowding. Between the inside and the outside of
the walls, connections were established, and information circulated commanding
attacks on a national scale. New forms of punishment had to be found to meet the
demands of the security sector and interrupt the process of densification of faction
presence and activity that was taking place in Ceará’s prison system. According to
the Judge, this was the main goal of the EM policy applied in the state.
But in Ceará, too, the development of EM programs went hand in hand with the
steady growth of the prison population. As has been observed throughout Brazil, the
electronic surveillance increased the punitive controls exerted by penal agencies,
without resulting in a decrease in imprisonment rates. In 2012, the year in which
tracking programs were introduced in the state, a total of 18,304 people were locked
up in Ceará’s prisons, representing a rate of 216.6 incarcerated individuals for every
100,000 inhabitants. In June 2017, the absolute number of imprisoned people
4
The open conflict between the PCC and the CV had been triggered mid-2016. The apparent rea-
sons for the split consisted of disputes over the wholesale illicit market on the Brazil–Paraguay
border, as well as alliances established between the Rio de Janeiro faction and enemy PCC groups
in the states of Santa Catarina, Rio Grande do Norte, and Amazonas (Feltran 2018; Manso and
Dias 2018).
5
Third Court of Criminal Enforcement of Fortaleza (3ª Vara de Execuções Penais de Fortaleza).
Interview held on 5 July 2017.
reached 26,863, and the imprisonment rate rose to 297.8/100,000.6 Between 2015
and 2017, the total number of monitored individuals in Ceará jumped from 296 to
2881, according to data published by the Departamento Penitenciário Nacional
(DEPEN 2015, 2017). Ceará’s experience would not be an exception in the process
of expanding the penal network, for which EM was yet another driving element.
The distribution of EM equipment in the state sought to meet the recommenda-
tions of the national executive branch, emphasizing its application in the pre-trial
phase. Alongside the states of Goiás, Minas Gerais, Pará, Paraíba, and Sergipe, the
Court of Justice of Ceará was one of those that was mainly targeting the use of EM
to supervise compliance with pre-trial measures. Corresponding to the guidelines
established by the DEPEN, about 56% of the EM orders in Ceará were carried out
within the scope of pre-trial restraining orders, aiming to reduce the number of pro-
visional detainees (DEPEN 2017).
However, during the initial years of the EM policy in the state, the number of
people imprisoned without conviction was still on the rise. Between 2012 and 2017,
the total number of pre-trial prisoners went from 8121 to 12,767, approaching half
of the state’s prison population. Meanwhile, in 2017, a total of 1607 people serving
pre-trial community measures were now subject to EM, most of them with night and
weekend home restriction while awaiting trial. Thus, most of the EM programs
were not applied in order to replace imprisonment. Its use as a preventive mecha-
nism has also strengthened the penal system’s control over people who had not even
been convicted, being applied under the premises of defense of public security and
convenience of procedural investigation.
In the case of Ceará, the EM applied in the procedural phase also resulted in an
increase in the length of sanction in cases involving a subsequent conviction, as the
period in which the defendant is awaiting trial under EM is not deducted from the
sentence at the time of the conviction. The psychologist of the Central Office for
Community Sanctions of Fortaleza explains:
At the end of the day, that won’t count for anything positive in his life, other than that he
will be free pending the trial. It’s not going to count in setting the length of the sentence. It’s
not going to be deducted. So he didn’t leave his house for two years on the weekend and
what he can say is that at least he was free, but if he were in jail, it would be deducted from
his sentence. Since he is not in jail, this is not done. So in reality, sometimes the pre-trial
supervision may represent an extension of the sentence.7
According to the psychologist, the absence of a specific legal provision regulat-

ing the EM on a pre-trial basis allowed the normalization of procedural arrange-
ments of that kind. “There is no legal provision for this. This is something that I am
advising, I have already raised it in several meetings with the Ministry of Justice, I
am raising it nationally.” His efforts consisted in pressuring executive and judicial
authorities to define a jurisprudence that provided for the deduction of the time
6
Available at: http://depen.gov.br/DEPEN/depen/sisdepen/infopen. Accessed on 10 July 2019.
7
Central Office for Penal Alternatives of Fortaleza (Central de Alternativas Penais de Fortaleza).
Interview held on 4 July 2017.
6.1 Success in Failure 127
spent serving a pre-trial order when calculating the length of the sentence. “But at
this moment, they are not even petitioning for this. The public defenders are not even
paying attention to this.”8 Whether through negligence or through a controlling urge
by the judiciary, EM as a pre-trial restraining order ended up leading to an antici-
pated extension of the penalty.
Thus, even though the Judge of the Third Court of Penal Enforcement was com-
mitted to understanding and overcoming the possible flaws displayed by the techno-
logical tracking systems – such as the breakdown of communication signals or
possible malfunctions in the equipment’s battery – little attention was paid to the
legal and political aspects that made the EM device become an instrument for
increasing the punitive intervention of the State. Although on the one hand, the
magistrate was aware of the technical fallibility of the EM mechanisms, on the
other, he ignored the general fallibility of the EM policy as a strategy of decarcera-
tion and containment of the urban violence perpetrated by prison factions. If his
primary goal was to foster alternative sentences in order to mitigate the overcrowd-
ing of the Ceará prison system and thus contribute to dismantling the criminal orga-
nizations operating in the state, greater diligence should have been devoted to the
inverse effects caused by the monitoring policy, such as the intensification of the
penal custody exercised by the State.
However, the genealogical study of the EM dispositif suggests that the flaws it has
displayed in performing the functions originally assigned to it are also conditions for
its permanent development. Rather than expressing its failure, the fact that EM does
not promote a downward trend in incarceration rates paves the way for its functional-
ity to be redefined, in the opposite direction of its inaugural objective. The develop-
ment of the EM policy is thus characterized by a permanent process of ‘functional
overdetermination’ (Foucault 1979), through which deviations in its application are
reinterpreted and reused in order to convert its apparent failure into a dominant strat-
egy and core functionality. The institutional failure of the EM dispositif is trans-
formed into a guiding principle and driving element of its proliferation.
Nevertheless, this same mechanics of converting failure into a functional and
usable aspect is also verified on a micro-political level, with the incidence of techni-
cal and socio-technical problems in EM systems. The reports of monitored offenders
whose equipment malfunctions demonstrate that the occurrence of technical failures
paves the way for a range of discretion on the part of operators in defining the con-
sequences to be imposed on the users. Battery problems and communication signal
breakdowns are frequently interpreted by judges and prison officials as violations
intentionally provoked by the users, leading to revocation of temporary release per-
mits, suspension of authorization to work outside the prison, or even determinations
of relegation to a closed regime. Converted into a violation of the system, the techni-
cal failure is taken as a pretext for disciplinary sanctions and harsher sentencing.
8
Idem.
Quite emblematic in this sense was the case of Deivid, in the state of São Paulo,
who, in addition to being relegated to a closed regime, was kept for a month in the
disciplinary cell of Penitenciária II in Sorocaba, after returning from a temporary
period of leave during which his EM device had a malfunction in the transmission
of signals, as reported by him and his wife. The agents responsible for his supervi-
sion interpreted the failures as violations, thus substantiating the judicial decision
for regime regression. Less drastic consequences, but in the same sense, were
reported by Diego and Felipe, monitored in external work when they served time in
the semi-open regime in the Ala penitentiary progression ward II of Chácara Belém.
According to Diego, several times the battery of the equipment was delivered to the
users with a low charge, resulting, afterward, in a violation due to battery failure.
This is what happened to Felipe, who reports that his name was removed from the
list of prisoners authorized to work outside the prison unit because of problems with
the battery in his equipment. In Diego’s words, “The monitoring officers are bang-
ing their heads, and the ones who end up suffering the consequences are us.”9
Thus, in its political, technical, and sociotechnical aspects, the flaws displayed
by EM are revealing of how it operates and how it is closely connected to incarcera-
tion, evidencing the reinstatement of intramural confinement as the central punitive
strategy around which the mechanisms of open-air supervision revolve. Although
from a legal–political point of view the practical application of electronic surveil-
lance deviates from its intended goal of decarceration and substitution of imprison-
ment, acting as a control mechanism that is supplementary and complementary to
prison, from a technological point of view the many technical problems of the track-
ing systems reinforce incarceration as a primary sanction, operating as a retro-
feeding vector of the prison system.
With this in mind, the analytical and methodological proposal developed here
consists in observing the failure as a feature of the EM device in itself, and not as a
mere malfunction or error. Rather an intrinsic attribute than a residual deficiency.
Technical or institutional, the failure is a constitutive element of the regular opera-
tion of EM, defining its effects, determining its performance, and directing its forms
of practical application. Analyzed as a distinctive feature of a given policy or tool,
the failure highlights the series of elements and characteristics that guide its main
functions. Situated in the interfaces between the machines and human beings that
constitute and operate the monitoring device, failure produces and induces its forms
of use and performance, regardless of whether this performance eludes the initial
purposes assigned to the dispositif, or else, to the very extent and in the precise
sense that this performance eludes them.
9
Penitentiary Progression Ward II of Chácara Belém (Ala de Progressão Penitenciária II da
Chácara Belém). Informal conversation held on 10 June 2017.
6.2 Out of Control 129
6.2 Out of Control
Through some strange process a man-made creature, machine, or advanced system takes on
lifelike properties – consciousness, will, and spontaneous motion – which place it in rebel-
lion against the human community. (Winner 1978, pp. 30–31).
Over the last few decades, political and philosophical research on technical sys-
tems has shown that technological solutions developed by humans are often genera-
tors of new setbacks (Ellul 2008, 2017; Winner 1978, 1986). In certain cases,
depending on the dimensions, purposes, and uses projected to technological innova-
tions, their effects have repercussions in potentiating the very problems they were
designed to solve, eluding the control capacities of the agents responsible for their
creation. Jacques Ellul (2008) employed the concept of autonomous technology to
define the processes through which certain machines transcend their initial purposes
and acquire autonomous development with regard to the designs of their inventors.
In a classical parabolic movement, which for centuries has been the theme of myth-
ological and literary manifestations – from Prometheus to Frankenstein – the crea-
ture turns against its creator.
The advancement of EM programs in Brazil and its relationship with the social
conflicts engendered by the penal system is illustrative of this process, in which the
technical solution aimed at confronting a particular problem ultimately veers out of
control, adding a new dimension and new potential to the original problem.
Conceived and designed as a form of minimal penal intervention, whose general
purpose would consist of reducing the dimension and intensity of the impact caused
by the State punitive action, the monitoring dispositif is currently evolving in the
opposite direction, expanding in volume and density the population absorbed by the
penal system and becoming associated with the violence that is produced and repro-
duced by its agencies and institutions. The penal intervention that was intended to
be minimal reveals its tendencies to be maximized.
Recalling, thus, the multiple effects unleashed by the deployment of EM in
Brazil, this last section presents a general systematization of the effects triggered by
the EM dispositif in its social and political aspects, whose current operation extrap-
olates the capacities of projection and control of those agents responsible for its
initial implementation.
As we have seen, in Brazil, the modes of application ascribed to EM vary from
one state to another. They are determined by the magistrates of the state courts of
justice, or by the state secretariats of penitentiary administration, which specify the
cases and circumstances for using the device, based on the hypotheses provided by
federal legislation. However, none of the federal legal provisions contains precise
regulations for the EM policy, leaving it up to the state administration to decide on
its implementation and vesting the judiciary with the power to determine the spe-
cific situations in which it should be applied. Each federative unit has, therefore, its
own peculiarities concerning the purpose and operation of EM programs. Even so,
the expansion and intensification of the penal networks are effects that transcend the
different contexts of each state.
In São Paulo, the EM policy is applied exclusively for the supervision of convict
prisoners in the semi-open regime. The Secretariat of Penitentiary Administration
specifies that the devices should be directed toward the semi-open prison units in the
contracts signed with the EM companies. The semi-open prison managers select the
inmates deemed qualified to work outside the units, evaluated in accordance with
their behavior. Thus, prison authorities recommend to the judges those inmates who
should benefit from the outside work under EM. Hence, in the state of São Paulo, it
is the executive and not the judiciary branch of power that defines, in practice, the
eligible cases for application of EM, as the equipment contracted by the SAP is
available for exclusive use by the semi-open regime prison units, the Centros de
Progressão Penitenciária.
In Maranhão, the services were initially geared toward the supervision of pre-
trial restraining orders. Between 2014 and 2016, almost all of the tethers available
in the state were used for pre-trial supervision. From 2016 onward, however, the
system shifted to the control of penal enforcement. Since then, there has been an
increase in the total number of people monitored by the Maranhão justice system,
concomitant with the growth in prison demographics, which implies an increase in
the number of people subjected to some kind of penal control in the state.
In Rio de Janeiro, the EM devices are used mainly for the supervision of convicts
in home detention. A total of 4008 devices were in operation in the state in 2019, of
which 3887 were used by people under home detention. The implementation of the
measure did not contribute to curbing the growth of the prison population in Rio de
Janeiro either. Between 2010 and 2017, the total number of people incarcerated in
the state more than doubled, rising from 24,399 to 52,691.10 In Rio’s context, both
the expansion of the penal system, evidenced by the increase in the volume of peo-
ple under the custody of justice, and the intensification of the forms of control exer-
cised over individuals serving sentences in the open regime are verified.
In Ceará, even though the system was mainly aimed at controlling pre-trial
restraining orders, which would supposedly favor a reduction in the rate of pre-trial
detention, the rapid development of EM programs in the state has also occurred
simultaneously with the growth of the prison demographics. In this regard, the fact
must be stressed that the time spent serving pre-trial restraining orders is not
deducted from the length of the sentence in cases of subsequent conviction. Sanction
is anticipated and extended with the application of EM.
Thus, in all the states where field work was carried out, as well as throughout
Brazil in general, the implementation of EM had the effect of increasing the puni-
tive intervention exercised by the State, alongside the private sector. Some variation
of details regarding the forms of application and destination of the equipment not-
withstanding, the social results of the EM policy consist of a qualitative and quanti-
tative escalation of the legal custody enforced by the penal system.
It is therefore useful to establish a brief systematization of the impacts of the EM
dispositif in the country, based on data collected in the field and on the analysis of
10
Available at: http://depen.gov.br/DEPEN/depen/sisdepen/infopen. Accessed on 10 July 2019.
statistical information made available by state and national executive bodies. A

schematic synthesis of the results of the EM programs, verified throughout its first
decade of implementation, may contribute to an overview of its effects and func-
tionalities in Brazilian penal and penitentiary policy. Such effects are schematized
here through the articulation of four main processes resulting from the implementa-
tion, consolidation, and development of the EM policy in Brazil, namely: (a) a
centrifugal expansion of the penal system; (b) a centripetal densification of punitive
control; (c) the securitarian management of the prison system; and (d) the virtual-
ization and de-territorialization of carceral violence. These four specific categories
comprise, on the one hand, the main social and political effects of EM programs in
Brazil, and, on the other hand, some of the fundamental elements that configure the
contemporary processes that the country’s penal system is going through.
(a) Centrifugal expansion of the penal system
The first effect refers to the expansion of the penal system fostered by EM and
by community sanctions in general. It corresponds to a classic phenomenon,
observed in several countries, since the emergence of the so-called “punitive wave”
that began in the 1970s in the USA and spread through many of the Western democ-
racies at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries (Cohen
1985; Wacquant 2009; Garland 2002). As justice and public security institutions
intensify their activities of capturing and absorbing criminals and suspects, there
has been an expansive development of programs dedicated to employing commu-
nity sentencing, simultaneously with the growth of prison populations. Punishment
while free has become a pragmatic alternative to the physical obstacles established
by mass incarceration. The ensuing drive consists in the unlimited expansion of
penal systems.
In this regard, the process of erosion of the boundaries between prison and free-
dom must be stressed, implied as it is by the increasing deployment of penalties
applied in an open environment and by the unlimited reach of controls exercised
through tracking technologies. To the extent that punishment no longer only affects
the prisoner, but also the “free” individual, who had been allowed to circulate in
freedom, it no longer recognizes limits. Social life itself becomes permeated by the
presence and incidence of the penal system (Kilgore 2016; Gacek 2022). Its modali-
ties of control become intertwined with free existence, whereas its techniques of
surveillance are reinterpreted in the guise of benefits. In other words, although the
activities of penal systems are no longer limited to the subtraction and containment
of freedom, but rather begin to regulate, order, control, and even produce freedom,
criminal justice ceases to admit a domain that is external to it. Its horizons are now
open to an unlimited expansion potential. And the project of minimal penal inter-
vention is turned into maximum punitive action. As we have seen, this has been the
first and most evident social implication resulting from the implementation of EM
in the Brazilian context.
(b) Centripetal densification of punitive control
The second effect involves a process that is distinct but concomitant and corre-
lates with the first. It refers to the centripetal densification of the very fabric of
control in the criminal justice system, caused by the electronic supervision of
offenders in regime progression or subject to pre-trial restraining orders. The move-
ment here is not one of expansively opening up, but rather of intensively closing
down programs, services, and institutions responsible for enforcing the sentences in
an open or semi-open regime, which in turn become increasingly rigid and subject
to strict oversight and supervision. This process is made explicit, for example, in the
application of EM to control individuals assigned to the semi-open regime, who are
now having their temporary release and outside work electronically tracked.At this
point, it should also be noted that the semi-open regime is generally referred to by
prisoners as semi-closed, both in the state of São Paulo and in Rio de Janeiro, as
there are few openings available for outside work and the occasions are rare in
which the vast majority of prisoners in regime progression are allowed to leave the
prison. In the Franco da Rocha halfway house, located in the metropolitan area of
São Paulo, at the end of 2016, out of the 3552 male inmates sentenced to the semi-
open regime and therefore entitled to outside work, only a few more than 200 were
allowed to go out to work.11 At the Butantã CPP, all of the female prisoners who
were interviewed reported that the period they had served in the closed regime had
been less “hard” than the time they had served in the semi-open regime. Having
spent most of their time in the Penitenciária Feminina de Santana (Santana Women’s
Penitentiary) or in the Penitenciária Feminina da Capital (Women’s Penitentiary of
the Capital), they unanimously felt that the semi-open unit was “worse” than the
closed facilities, both in terms of the relationship with the staff and the lack of open-
ings for external work.12 In Rio, the prisoners also refer to the semi-open regime as
semi-closed, stressing the difficulty in obtaining authorization for temporary peri-
ods of leave.
Electronic monitoring applied to the rare occasions of release has turned the
semi-open into an even more closed prison regime. The monitoring device operates
here as a technique of intensification of penitentiary controls and toughening of
semi-open institutions, reinforcing confinement as the gravitational axis around
which other penal practices revolve. In a sort of counter-intuitive paradox, what
were supposed to be softer institutions, characterized by the contemporary
11
Data extracted from conversations with Penitentiary Security Agents at the CPP of Franco da
Rocha on 22 September 2016.
12
The difficulty in finding jobs outside of prison was also an issue highlighted by Thaiane: “(...)
you go to semi-open regime and you have the illusion that you are going to have a life out there.
This is a lie. Because when you get to the semi-open regime, first you have to get your first (tempo-
rary) release in order to have the right to be on a long line to get a job. (...) The inmate, while in
the closed regime, has the idea that it would be a very nice thing to go to the semi-open regime. ‘I
am one step away from the open street, at least every three months I go out there...’ When I reached
the semi-open regime in Butantã, I saw the difficulty of jobs, because, first, I was already old, and
second, I didn’t have any children, minors, to support them. So I was at the end of the lines. From
the end of the lines, I took classes, I did a sewing class, and that’s when I finally managed, with a
lot of effort, to get out onto the street. It was terrible.” Interview held on 31 August 2015.
dissolution between open and closed – by the undefined symbiosis between inside
and outside (Cohen 1985; Cunha 2008; Godoi 2017) – are in fact operated as her-
metic and highly supervised prison centers, permeated by reduplicated mechanisms
of surveillance and control.13
(c) Securitarian management of the prison system
The third effect of EM programs concerns the administrative purpose this tech-
nology has assumed in Brazilian penitentiary policy. Although on the one hand elec-
tronic surveillance is imbued with the biopolitical function of regulation and control
of the flow of individuals and populations under the aegis of criminal justice, on the
other, its implementation is launched and proclaimed as a strategy for managing the
prison crisis. It has been assigned its tactical and administrative function since the
very first years of its inception. Whether as a measure to reduce public spending on
the penal system, or as a securitarian technique to prevent the strengthening of crim-
inal groups coming from the prison universe, it is the permanent crisis of the prison
system that gives rise to practices of open-air electronic supervision, aiming to man-
age the flow of specific segments of the prison overpopulation.
It is not fortuitous that, at different levels of government, it is the executive
branch that takes the front line in the procedures of operation and in the decisions
about the application of EM, to the detriment of the judiciary. It is not by mere neg-
ligence of judicial authorities that the technical teams of the Electronic Monitoring
Cell of the state of Ceará, although direct operators of the tracking systems, become
protagonists in steering the penal proceedings of monitored offenders. Nor would it
be due to a simple oversight by the magistrates – although this is an additional fac-
tor, both present and relevant in the political configuration of the EM policy in
Brazil – that the Secretariat of Penitentiary Administration of the state of São Paulo
decides the cases in which it is appropriate to apply the device. Rather than a legal
measure that offers an alternative to imprisonment, the EM technology assumes the
strategic role of managing and controlling the population subjected to the penal
system, particularly prisoners in situations of regime progression or under pre-trial
restraining orders other than imprisonment. In addition to its punitive character, an
eminently securitarian and administrative purpose is attributed to EM in
Brazilian states.
13
It is not our intention here to provide subsidies for the arguments that support proposals to sup-
press penal progression and the semi-open regime itself, driven by populist reasons or punitive
passions. It is not a matter of reaffirming isolation as a referential parameter and programmatic
horizon for conflict management strategies. On the contrary, what we strive to detect are the spe-
cific configurations assumed by the EM policy in the São Paulo context, whose central goal con-
sists in strengthening the punitive control at the service of prison management. We intend,
therefore, to present some of the silenced effects of the prisoner tracking programs, related to the
retro-feeding of the prison system and to the penological shortsightedness that permeates the belief
in the solution of conflicts by reformulating the exercise of punishment. It is precisely the cam-
paigns advocating the so-called “penal alternatives” that should be called into question with
detailed scrutiny of their effects.
(d) Virtualization and de-territorialization of carceral violence

The fourth and final effect of EM programs in Brazil verified throughout the
ethnographic research is related to the contemporary processes of de-territorialization
of the violent dynamics that characterize the country’s prison archipelago. The
wounds and burns produced by monitoring tethers in the state of São Paulo; the
assaults and beatings triggered by equipment failures, followed by disciplinary
sanctions in isolation cells; the threats and executions of monitored individuals by
militia groups in Rio de Janeiro; and the labeling of the body identified by its ene-
mies by the leg on which the bracelet is installed are some of the main elements
yielded by the fieldwork, pertaining to the de-territorial dimension acquired by
prison violence through the application of EM. Each of these dynamics – reported
in Chaps. 1 and 3 of this book – indicates the transition of the prison experience
from an actual to a virtual dimension. The virtualization of prison takes place when
the carceral reality imposes itself on the spaces and circumstances in which its phys-
ical institutional structures are not present. When the presence of prison violence
and controls moves from the penitentiary building to be installed in the prisoner’s
body, the set of rules, practices, and violence characteristics of the power relations
intrinsic to the prison apparatus are virtualized. Through the use of EM, the carceral
mechanics extrapolates its architechtural limits, without losing its immanent quali-
ties. Its exercise of power and its forms of subjection can no longer be spatially
circumscribed.
But the processes of virtualization always tend to be actualized (Lévy 1995). And
the actualization of the ‘virtual prison’ is then harnessed by the tendency and threat
of regression to the closed regime in cases of violation or failure of the monitoring
apparatus, entailing the permanent risk of the physical assaults invariably present in
the underground realms of the Brazilian prison system (Mallart 2021). The virtual-
ity of imprisonment resides in its imminence; in the risk of the closed regime as an
imminent reality. This is how EM has acquired in Brazil a particular configuration
and aspect, established by its connection with the set of practices that characterize
the country’s penitentiary system. The multiple forms of torture underlying national
prisons becomes one more real and virtual dimension of the surveillance technolo-
gies connected to it. The centuries-old techniques of physical punishment are super-
imposed on remote surveillance systems, constituting a multifaceted complex of
heterogeneous penal practices articulated to each other.
Chico de Oliveira’s (2003) allegorical figure of the platypus displays its apparent
contradiction in the singularities of the country’s penal system: the point of intersec-
tion between the neoliberal punitive programmatic and the perpetual reactivation of
the pervasive paus de arara14 scattered throughout the country’s prison system.
Indeed, it would be necessary to undertake in-depth research on the experiences of
other countries, with a good amount of field research, to detect possible forms of
violence linked to the deployment of EM programs in contexts other than Brazil.
14
‘Pau de arara’ is a Brazilian word that designates the instruments of torture used during the slave
regime and, later, in the period of the military dictatorship.
References 135
Hence, the relevance of comparative research. For now, we stick to the work that has
been done by foreign colleagues working on the subject. In none of the pertinent
research surveyed and analyzed in the review of the literature produced on EM
around the world is there any documentation of beatings, aggression, or extralegal
persecution resulting from the use of the electronic ankle monitors. Of course, this
is not meant to say that anything similar is not happening in criminal justice systems
around the world. As they say in the Brazilian militant jargon: “cadeia é cadeia”
(jail is jail no matter where).
Nevertheless, in order to consolidate and summarize some of the social and polit-
ical impacts of the EM devices identified in this study, the main effects and func-
tionalities of the policy are related to the expansion of the population submitted to
penal custody; the intensification of punitive control; the securitarian management
of penal institutions; and the virtualization of violence that takes place in prison and
reverberates beyond its walls. Each of the states in which fieldwork was carried out
features at least one of these aspects, if not an overlap between them.
To this extent, the technical repertoire of abuse and forms of arbitrariness at the
service of the Brazilian penal system seems to be widened and deepened with each
innovative solution. If we consider the criminal justice system itself as a socio-
political machinery, the philosophy of techniques elaborated by authors such as
Jacques Ellul (2008, 2017) and Langdon Winner (1978, 1986) would help us to
understand the phenomenon through which technological mechanisms evolve in
geometric progression, and the solutions to the problems created by a given tech-
nique are pursued through the invention of a new technique, which ends up generat-
ing new setbacks, and so on, thus overlapping technique upon technique. In this
unlimited process of technological accumulation, the problems produced by techni-
cal systems – and, notably, by penal systems – may be considerably more expressive
than those they were meant to solve (Ellul 2008).
If there is enough to fear in the exacerbated controls exerted by new surveillance
technologies, there is even more reason to fear the processes through which surveil-
lance technologies themselves tend to evade control.
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Feltran G (2018) Irmãos: uma história do PCC. Companhia das Letras, São Paulo
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Godoi R (2017) Fluxos em cadeia: as prisões em São Paulo na virada dos tempos. Boitempo,
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Lévy P (1995) Qu’est-ce que le virtuel ? Éditions La Découverte, Paris
Mallart F (2021) Findas linhas: circulações e confinamentos pelos subterrâneos de São Paulo.
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University Press, Durham/London
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA/London
Afterword
By Susana Durão, State University of Campinas, Campinas, Brazil

This is both an inspired and inspiring book. How can such a tough topic – an
analysis of electronic monitoring (EM) devices for prisoners in the empire of mass
incarceration, that deepen and extend it – make for such a sophisticated, elegant,
and engaging read? Besides the precise, methodologically accurate academic study
and the fluid and highly comprehensible writing, Ricardo Campello fulfills what I
consider to be our duty: to write social sciences to be read by the general public. I
will highlight the qualities of this work, which from the very first moment I felt
deserved an English translation and the possibility of circulating beyond Portuguese-
speaking contexts. The monographic style. The work is committed to the holistic
style of dealing with contemporary phenomena. This is a monograph that theorizes
on the basis of data; that emphasizes the empirical origin of its questions, but does
not shy away from theoretically explaining its findings.
Another positive point is the multiple scales of the analysis. Campello introduces
to us people with their bodies monitored by electronic ankle monitors; in their
voices we perceive the setbacks, anxieties, and fears of self-incarceration, in the
restrained subjectivities and localized effects of the bio-politics of control. But
Campello also makes us navigate the global, national, and subnational scale of the
economic politics of mass incarceration and the creation of these new technological
tools vested in a modernity that decoys, barely decoys, the old archaisms of the grim
and outdated punitive mega-structures.
This book also highlights the collaborations and multiplications of the agents
that penalize and control bodies and subjectivities while endorsing prison massifica-
tion and racialization. It is a book mindful of genealogies, in the Foucauldian sense.
It takes us on a journey to the moment when the electronic tether was invented and
sold as a successful tool in a world that is increasingly widening and immersing
itself in the technological fetish of micro-security and micro-punishment in motion.
This technology seeks to fix the prison and the captives, to curtail freedom by
encapsulating the coming and going. The anklet is a fundamental facet of this
plunge into punitive omnipresence.
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to 137
Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
R. U. Campello, Short Circuit, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21859-0
138 Afterword
Campello makes us understand that the socio-historical cradle of the ankle brace-
let in the 1980s is contemporary to the punitive turn in the USA. This was the
moment of the turning point in neoliberal penality. He explains to us, in detail, how
more liberalism was coupled with more penalization, and how since then the prison
project has been secured and fixed in the world, contradicting the beneficial and
simplistic vision of a technology that frees from prison. The author shows that,
almost everywhere in the world, and more markedly in the cases studied in Brazil
(as well as in the North American continent), new technologies aggravate the old
prison structures and definitely do not solve them.
This research shows that all the innovations that are underway are over-penalizing
and over-punitive: they are not a pretext to discuss the political and moral econo-
mies of prison or its collapse, which has been announced for decades and explained
from A to Z by myriad scholars. If one pretends to believe in technological neutral-
ity, this book makes it clear, not only theoretically but empirically, that such a claim
is spurious. The prison is here to stay. And surveillance is increasingly ubiquitous,
simultaneously distant and present.
“Punitive platypus,” Campello calls it, alluding to sociologist Chico de Oliveira’s
allegory to characterize Brazilian society – with its particularities in these socio-
technical punitive assemblages, after all. Among us, the convergences between the
old and the new are much more continuity than a rupture with the logics of punish-
ment. One would say that they are more on the plane of ambiguity than of
contradiction.
An ankle monitor is not merely a technically validated tool. It is the full policy in
an artifact; the punitive political machinery. It allows one to look at what Campello
explains as the “centrifugal expansion of the penal system,” where social life is
flooded with prison; and it is the “centripetal densification,” with the intensification
of controls of the so-called semi-open regime that, as the monitored individuals say,
is more like semi-closed. The anklet is administrative assistance provided by the
security system to the penitentiary system, with new roles of protagonism for the
monitoring agents. It is the point where prison violence becomes virtualized and
de-territorialized in order to be even more effective in its effects of containment and
punishment.
We can only conclude all this because Campello researches the discursive actions
of the key systemic actors that will support the ankle bracelets and make them avail-
able in the world, as well as enable their adoption in Brazil as of 2010, namely in
the states of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Ceará, and Maranhão. In his chapters, he
dissects who devised it, how it was marketed, the negotiations in the executive and
legislative branches to implement the policies, the device’s “black box,” and the
advance of technicians in decision-making that challenges the autonomy of the judi-
ciary. This opens an avenue for the outsourcing of punitive responsibility – which
Campello calls “technocratic jurisprudence.”
With great skill, he shows us the variations in the respective Brazilian states with
regard to the uses that deviate from the original design of the EM device. More than
contradictions, everything points to an efficacy of punishment and factual control,
ineludible to the author’s Foucauldian and Deleuzian magnifying glass. The study
Afterword 139
draws on an interdisciplinary theoretical framework of critical studies of prison and

punitive institutions, in a sociological and criminological tone combined with a sen-
sitive ethnographic approach.
Finally, the epistemological lesson. The book has the ability to construct scien-
tific truths. As Didier Fassin would say in L’Ombre du monde. Une anthropologie
de la condition carcérale, we need truths to be told about these worlds we inhabit.
But it does so without falling into the facile denial of the practices, their meanings,
and the discursive statements that act upon the world. This work shows us that it is
not hypotheses that build a thesis. The path is made from the ground up. This is
therefore a book that is essential and urgent reading.
Index
A E
Alternative sanctions, 58, 125 Electronic monitoring (EM), ix, x, xiii–xv,
Autonomous technology, 129 1–5, 7–14, 18, 20, 22–25, 27–30,
32–37, 39, 40, 43, 47, 48, 50, 51,
53–67, 71–74, 76–79, 82–86, 90–94,
B 97, 98, 100–111, 116–120, 123,
Behaviorism, 48, 51 125–135, 137, 138
Biopolitics, 23 Epistemological Luddism, 8, 9, 79
Black box, xv, 73, 79, 106, 138 Ethnography, 9, 12
C G
Carceral violence, 14, 131, 134 Genealogy, 9, 12, 56, 86, 137
Control, x, xiii–xv, 1, 2, 4–11, 13, 14, 18–24, Global positioning system (GPS), 3, 13, 21,
27–40, 42, 47–53, 55–59, 61, 62, 33–35, 63–65, 67, 77, 81, 109, 117
65–68, 73–75, 77, 78, 81–88, 91–93,
97, 98, 100, 101, 103, 104, 106, 108,
110, 112, 113, 115, 118, 119, 125, 126, M
128–135, 137, 138 Machinic assemblage, 21, 112
Criminal factions, 5, 14, 40, 42, 89, 98, 123 Massacres, 43, 89, 90, 93, 94, 125
Criminal justice, ix, xiii, xv, 1, 3–7, 9, 10, 13, Militias, x, xv, 12, 38–40, 134
14, 18, 22, 29, 50, 56, 57, 59–61, 63,
65, 66, 68, 73, 92, 93, 102, 103,
105–108, 112, 116, 118, 123, 124, N
131–133, 135 Neoliberal governmentality, 7, 30, 61, 62, 113
Neoliberal penality, 13, 33, 37, 54–63,
88, 93, 138
D Net-widening, 6, 65
Decarceration, xiv, 5, 90, 98, 119, 127, 128
De-subjectivation, 12, 21, 37
De-territorialization, 14, 131, 134 P
Dispositifs, xiii–xv, 3, 11, 12, 21, 23, 25, 28, Popular culture, 13
30, 43, 47, 48, 56, 57, 62, 63, 67, 68, Primeiro comando da capital (PCC), 14,
79, 87, 90, 93, 94, 105, 110, 119, 40–42, 80, 98, 99, 105, 106,
120, 127–130 108, 123–125
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to 141
Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
R. U. Campello, Short Circuit, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21859-0
142 Index
Prison diagram, 80 Signal blockage, 71, 73

Prison riots, 33, 105, 106, 108 Societies of control, xiii, 66, 87
Prisons, 18, 50, 73 Subjectivation, 2, 7, 11, 12, 21, 22, 24, 30,
Prison violence, 134, 138 37, 42, 62
Privatization, 6, 14, 61 Surveillance, ix, x, xiii–xv, 4–6, 8, 9, 12, 13,
Psychotechnology, 47–53 23, 28–30, 35, 37, 40, 43, 49, 55, 62,
Public security, 14, 53, 56, 60, 90, 93, 103, 65–67, 72, 73, 79, 80, 85, 86, 91–94,
104, 110, 114, 115, 124, 126, 131 98, 100, 101, 103–106, 110, 111, 113,
Punishment market, 6, 59 115, 119, 125, 128, 131,
Punitive platypus, 94, 138 133–135, 138
Punitive turn, 56, 138
U
R Urban violence, 8, 14, 127
Rehabilitation, 14, 49, 50, 102, 105, 119, 125
V
S Virtualization, 14, 131, 134, 135
Science fiction, 13, 53–63
Security, xiv, xv, 3, 13, 14, 23, 29, 36, 39, 42,
57, 59, 60, 66, 75, 80–82, 88, 89, 100, W
101, 108–110, 113–118, 125, 138 Warfare, 13, 64

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ISBN 978-3-031-21858-3 ISBN 978-3-031-21859-0 (eBook)

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique René Lévy

Electronic monitoring (EM) of people convicted or prosecuted by the justice

challenges, but perpetually reconfigured in strategic terms.2 Approaching EM as a

technicians’ explanations in order to decipher what had happened, is one of the

options available in the context of punitive practices and institutions in contempo-

University of São Paulo Marcos César Alvarez

6 Out of Control������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 123

Federal Senate, 29 March 2007.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 1

Brazil, according to data presented by the national penitentiary department

To start with a working definition, EM consists in the use of telematic transmitting

home detention, relating to the convict’s hours of circulation and confinement,

supervised by electronic tracking systems. The constellation is characterized by a

At the dawn of the historical process of industrialization in Western Europe, in the

incarcerated people in the country.10 As an atheist researcher, my activities in this

the chapter is devoted to the development of early EM technologies, notably at

of these four effects was detected through my ethnographic observation sessions

Le bracelet électronique: action publique, pénalité et connectivité. RMS Éditions, Geneva,

Strong restrained spasm of furious mechanisms!

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 17

commutes. A certain amount of time is determined for remaining in the place of

semi-open regime in metropolitan São Paulo, are steered by a range of incitements

punishment have undergone throughout the centuries, their fundamental procedures

Empirically departing from investigations into the reconfigurations in contempo-

2.2 The Jailer of Oneself

exacerbated when, according to him, his monitoring equipment started vibrating

techniques and the concomitant deterritorialization of surveillance (Froment 1996;

Rather than imposing physical limits defined by architectural structures, elec-

Social subjection equips us with a subjectivity, assigning us an identity, a sex, a body, a

Positioning System, is housed inside a visibly deteriorated building surrounded by

implementation of EM mostly directed at the supervision of pre-trial restraining

2.4 The Marked Body

In Marcados (Marked), photographer Claudia Andujar exhibits portraits of indige-

Wearing a tether may have different implications, depending on both location

According to Augusto, the mode of attachment of the tether would be mutually

The monitoring device reaffirms the convict’s identity as delineated by criminal

The mechanical explanation of vital functions presupposes,

3.1 Epistemological Progeny: Psychotechnology

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 47

behavioral repertoire of a given organism is shaped by changes in its environment.

Psychologists evoked the corrective function of punishment as one of its goals,

The experimentation program developed in Massachusetts offered justice an

control techniques. For Skinner, environmental changes and situational interven-

3.2 Science Fiction and Neoliberal Penality

How silly I was when I was just a puppet!

to data presented by the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology

agencies; and (d) the consolidation of a penological rationality essentially guided by

3.3 Martial Traces: Geopositioning as a Technology of War

technologies that would be widely employed in future international conflicts. The

Bureau of Justice Statistics. Available at: https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cpus10.pdf.

Accessed on 20 Mar 2019.

Taking advantage, therefore, of satellite communication systems, the monitoring

What makes this tether different from the shackles of slaves?

4.1 It’s a Signal Blockage

Ceará State Electronic Monitoring Cell, July 2017.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 71

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique René Lévy

University of São Paulo Marcos César Alvarez

6 Out of Control�� 123

2.2 The Jailer of Oneself

2.4 The Marked Body

3.1 Epistemological Progeny: Psychotechnology

3.2 Science Fiction and Neoliberal Penality

3.3 Martial Traces: Geopositioning as a Technology of War

4.1 It’s a Signal Blockage

4.3 Silicon and Rubble

i nstrumentalized as a way of rendering visible the prison killing and transforming it

5.1 Eclectic Discourses and the PCC Attacks

5.3 The Trade Show