School of Social and Political Science

Description

The prison has been sparse in Brazilian unfreedom. Inequality, racial hierarchy and social order have long been managed by other violent and embodied means. Since the late 1980s, however, Brazilian governments have made prisons a fixture of unfreedom alongside other methods. Where around 150 prisons existed in the country then, its 1565th will open this year. Amidst this dramatic structural shift, I draw on fieldwork in and around this social and political terrain to trace how prison construction happens, why, and what the making of prisons as a material and expedient fixture of social and political reproduction suggests for the future of Brazil and other countries on the periphery of global capitalism.