Abstract
This chapter includes another block of ethnographic research as it analyzes some of the institutional configurations of EM programs in Brazil, underlying the relations 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 amplification of the penal system itself. The chapter’s first section draws upon a participant observation conducted at Ceará State Electronic Monitoring Cell. It describes the shift’s response to an incoming alert, provoked by a monitored convict who supposedly had violated his decreed motion profile. The episode underscores some of the technology’s characters, especially concerning its political as well as its sociotechnical opacity. The second section concentrates on the deployment of EM in São Paulo state, notably amongst prisoners serving their sentence under a semi-open regime. Based on data gathered during participant observations in semi-open prison units, with monitored convicts leaving in the morning for their respective workplaces while returning in the evening to spend the night indoors, the section provides ample material concerning the strategical synergies between EM and physical incarceration. Following on, statistical data are discussed to corroborate the simultaneous increase in both the quantity of convicts serving an EM regime and São Paulo’s total prison population. Finally, the last section analyzes the evolution of the EM program in Maranhão as a supposed panacea for the state prison crisis. Once again quantitative data are mobilized, proving the stable overpopulation of the state’s prisons, in spite of various EM programs having been implemented throughout the past few years.
What makes this tether different from the shackles of slaves? –(Thaiane)
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Notes
- 1.
Ceará State Electronic Monitoring Cell (Célula de Monitoramento Eletrônico do Ceará). Record extracted from field research carried out on 3 July 2017.
- 2.
Supervisor of the Ceará State Electronic Monitoring Cell.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).
- 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 purposeful 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.
- 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 kee** 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).
- 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.
- 15.
Interview held on 31 August 2015.
- 16.
Interview held on 14 October 2015.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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**, 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 termination, broadly corresponding to the Middle Ages in part and the classical age. Absolute monarchy. 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).
- 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 step** 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 dominant 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).
- 24.
It should be noted that in the Brazilian prison system there are no public phones, depriving prisoners 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).
- 25.
Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública. Available at: http://www.forumseguranca.org.br/produtos/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).
- 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).
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Campello, R.U. (2023). Diagrammatic Compositions. In: Short Circuit. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21859-0_4
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