Conviviality and Survival

Co-Producing Brazilian Prison Order

Sacha Darke

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319922096
• eBook ISBN: 9783319922102
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Brazilian authorities continuously fail to comply with international norms on minimal conditions of incarceration. Brazil's prison population has risen ten-fold since the country's return to democracy in the 1980s. Its prisons typically operate at double official capacity and with 100 prisoners for each guard on duty. At the same time, however, the average Brazilian prison is not as disorderly or its staff-inmate relations so conflictual as our established theories on prison life might predict. This monograph explores the means by which Brazilian prisons function in the absence of guards. More specifically, the means by which prison security and inmate discipline is negotiated between prison managers, gangs and the wider inmate body. While fragile and varied, this historical tradition of co-produced governance has for decades kept most prisons in better order and enabled most prisoners to better survive.

© The Author(s) 2018

Sacha DarkeConviviality and SurvivalPalgrave Studies in Prisons and Penologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92210-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Self-Governing Prison Communities

Sacha Darke¹

(1)

University of Westminster, London, UK

Sacha Darke

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Things were clearly going wrong in pavilhão cinco (pavilion five or cell block five) of Carandiru. When Jocimar, who headed the cell block faxina (literally, cleaning, in Brazilian prison slang also meaning cleaning team or, as in the context here, cell block housekeepers), was confronted by the head of security, Luis, over rumours members of his team were abusing their position and collecting drugs debts and protection money directly from prisoners’ families, the best explanation he could provide was that it was not possible for him to control everything that happened under his command. By refusing to take responsibility for a matter that went to the heart of inmate relations at the men’s prison ¹ —“só pode se dirigir a um familiar do outro se convidado a fazê-lo” (“never approach another prisoner’s family/acquaintance unless he asks you”) (Varella 2008: 128)—Jocimar must have known he was treading on thin ground. Luis had every right to warn him of the consequences of not restoring order as quickly as possible. A few evenings later the status quo in the cell block was completely shattered, when the six guards on duty were taken hostage by the occupants of one of the cells set aside for members of the faxina on the second floor. ² Landing staff had been held hostage many times before, but what was unusual this time was that the inmates assaulted one of the officers in a bid to hasten their transfer out of the prison. Luis resisted demands from other guards to allow them to retaliate to such a clear breach of trust by beating up the hostage takers once they had reached the apparent safety of the police van and released their captives. Fortunately for the outraged prison officers, any informal agreements they had with prisoners not to reagir (react) in hostage situations did not apply to the police that transported them.

Luis was faced with a dilemma. Transferring Jocimar was the easy part. Having overseen the extortion of prisoners’ families and the humiliation of guards, Jocimar was also guilty of failing to enforce codes relating to inmate solidarity and dealings with prison staff. He would not be missed on the galerias (galleries or wings ³ ). Removing the other 200 inmates that made up the current cell block hierarchy would be far more risky and certainly controversial. Running a leaderless cell block of 1500 inmates was not an option with the handful of guards Luis had at his disposal; and a cell block faxina seen to be put in place by the prison management would never gain the confidence of other inmates. In a successful Machiavellian manoeuvre, Luis approached Pirulão, a powerful prisoner he knew he could trust on pain of exposing him to other inmates as a previous police informant and now prison snitch. Within a few days, Pirulão had gathered a group of more than 300 disgruntled prisoners. Shortly after lockdown they removed the old cell block faxina xadrez (literally, chess here meaning shared cell) by xadrez, ⁴ masked and armed with sticks and knives, before beating them and handing them over to officers to distribute them to the masmorra (dungeon or segregation unit) in cell block four.

I return to the significance of this episode, narrated by Drauzio Varella (2008) in the book Estação Carandiru (Carandiru Station), in a moment. Varella worked voluntarily as a doctor at the prison for more than 10 years, from 1989 to 2001. Estação Carandiru was originally published in 1999. It was later adapted for the award-winning film Carandiru (Babenco and Kramer 2003).

Managing in Prison

When I visited the by then deactivated and part demolished Carandiru prison, in the Brazilian city of São Paulo, with my brother-in-law in April 2005, I had just submitted a doctoral thesis and was in search of a new research project. Carandiru made international headlines on 2 October 1992, when 300 shock troops, many armed with machine guns, entered cell block nine in response to a dispute among rival groups of prisoners. Within 30 minutes, at least 111 prisoners were dead or mortally injured (Veja, 14 October 1992). ⁵ Most prisoners died at the hands of the equally infamous military police unit Rondas Ostensivas Tobias de Aguiar (ROTA) (Folha de São Paulo, 21 June 2001), whose 700 officers were responsible for a large proportion of the 1470 citizens killed by São Paulo state police that year (Caldeira 2000), and continued to be responsible for up to one in five police killings in the state in the 2000s and into the 2010s (Veja São Paulo, 11 August 2010; Folha de São Paulo, 28 January 2012). As the police entered the cell block, television reporters read out the names and death records of their commanders, including Captain Wanderley Mascarenhas, five of whose 34 previous victims had died at the same prison 10 years earlier (Ramos 2003). Guards, prisoners and police that witnessed the killings give varying descriptions of the source of the dispute that led to the tragic police incursion, from unpaid debts, the results of a game of football, an accusation of sleeping with a sex offender, to someone’s space being taken on a washing line. What is clear is that the faxina running the cell block failed to prevent what had started out as a relatively minor, everyday dispute from escalating out of control. Varella depicts the riot as an illogical, chaotic affair, and is quick to point out that cell block nine was populated by first time prisoners, who not surprisingly were renowned for being undisciplined and volatile. They also made the mistake of allowing the guards on duty to leave the cell block rather than take them as hostages (Mendes 2009; Varella 2012). Tragically, and in complete contrast to the inexperience demonstrated by these prisoners, Varella (2008) laments, ROTA’s response was unleashed with military precision. ⁶

Aware inmates across the prison were in fear of their lives, the officer in charge of the neighbouring cell block eight convinced its 1700 prisoners to return with their weapons to their cells, with the promise he would leave the keys to the cells in the hands of the cell block faxina in case the shock troops did not stop at cell block nine (Varella 2012). Explanations for why the police took control of cell block nine with such deadly force also vary, from public expectation (ROTA, for instance, could count on the support of the majority of the São Paulo public, despite their reputation for summary executions), prisoners threatening to attack officers with knives covered in HIV contaminated blood, to a systematic attempt to rid the cell block of its inmate hierarchy. What is broadly agreed is that most of the killings occurred on the faxina-occupied second floor, and that by the time ROTA reached this floor prisoners had, like those in cell block eight, discarded their weapons and fled to the nearest cells. Survivors claim officers fired their machine guns into many cells, in some cases through the service hatches (e.g. Ramos 2003; Rap and Zeni 2002). The police forensics team that examined the crime scene concluded a number of prisoners had also been shot while kneeling or lying down. Of the 397 bullets that reached their target, 126 were to the head (Justiça Global 2001; see also Pereira 2015; Willys 2015). Carandiru did not recover from the controversy surrounding the operation and was eventually deactivated in September 2002. Two months later three cell blocks, including cell blocks eight and nine, were imploded live on television. The remaining cell blocks were demolished just a short while after I was there in 2005. Paradoxically, the final victims of the Carandiru massacre, as the event came to be known, were the governor ⁷ of the prison, José Ismael Pedrosa, and the head of the São Paulo state military police, who commanded the operation, Ubiratan Guimarães. Pedrosa was assassinated in 2005 on the orders of the Primeiro Comando da Capital (First Command of the Capital: PCC), a gang formed in the aftermath of the massacre with the explicit aim to protect prisoners from such a tragedy being repeated. Today the PCC operates in over 90% of São Paulo prisons and is Latin America’s largest criminal organisation. Guimarães was sentenced to 632 years imprisonment in 2001, only to escape punishment by being elected onto the São Paulo state legislature before winning an appeal against his conviction in 2006. Seven months later he was shot dead in as yet unexplained circumstances.

On the day of my visit I was aware of the massacre, but not the depth inmates participated in governing the prison. Nor did I have any idea of the symbolic significance the prison would have on my next 10 years of research, or the effect visiting it would have on my understanding of what it was about Brazilian prisons I would be drawn to study. Although 15 years have passed since Carandiru last received a prisoner, not only was it the largest ever prison in Latin America, at times holding as many as 9000 prisoners, but it also remains the most written about and filmed prison in Brazil. Equally important for the purposes of this book, first-hand accounts of the prison teach us as much about the daily lives of its inmates and staff as they do about prison conditions.

As I sifted through a pile of rubble just inside the outer wall of the prison compound that contained the remains of cell blocks eight and nine (see Fig. 1.1), I remained in my comfort zone. A law graduate versed in the language of human rights and prison abolition, I contemplated the degrading treatment Carandiru’s prisoners must have experienced. The security guard on duty at a gap in the wall we had entered hesitated to allow us to go any further into the compound, but as Brazilians are fond of saying, sempre tem um jeito (there is always a way) or a gente pode dar um jeito (we can find a way). This was the first of many occasions when the word jeito, or the diminutive jeitinho, would come to the aid of my research and analysis. It is a word I find increasingly important to understanding the flexible and clientelistic characteristics of everyday political and social interactions in Brazil.

Fig. 1.1

The remains of cell blocks eight and nine of the deactivated Carandiru prison, São Paulo, Brazil. In the background, cell block five to the viewer’s left, cell block two to the viewer’s right. Photograph taken by the author 8 April 2005

When the security guard eventually agreed to let us in, we walked through the compound to what I later discovered to have been cell block four. Wary of the security guard getting into trouble if anyone else showed up, we spent a few frantic minutes taking photographs of the yard, corridors and cells, before crossing over the ruins of cell block six to take more photographs in cell block two. On the way into and back out of the prison compound we passed by cell block five, scene of the breakdown of governance at the prison described above, and then in the early stages of preparation for the filming of the part fact, part fictional television series...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Self-Governing Prison Communities
• 2. Law and Repression
• 3. The Northern Massacres
• 4. Surviving through the Convívio
• 5. Managing without Guards
• 6. Prison Gangs
• 7. Co-producing Prison Order
• Back Matter