Short Circuit: Electronic Monitoring and the Crisis of the Brazilian Prison System

162 Pages·2023·3.131 MB·English

by  Ricardo Urquizas Campello

Ricardo Urquizas Campello
Short
Circuit
Electronic Monitoring and the Crisis
of the Brazilian Prison System
Short Circuit

Ricardo Urquizas Campello
Short Circuit
Electronic Monitoring and the Crisis
of the Brazilian Prison System
Ricardo Urquizas Campello
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.
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