Extralegal Agency and the Search for Safety in Northeast Brazil

Abstract

This article – based on fieldwork conducted in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil – examines how those people most affected by carceral expansion pursue safety in an everyday marked by existential threat. Through a focus on a neglected sector of this population, namely adult women, I show how carceral encounters specifically – and informal, illegal and not-yet-(il)legal exchanges more generally – intersect with familial logics and imperatives to engender a capacity for action that I call ‘extralegal agency’. Extralegal agency is central to a practice of safety that represents an alternative to the dominant model of carceral security. An extralegal agency approach to analysing interconnected prison/urban fields, which decentres masculinized criminal organizations and resists romanticizing the rule of law, enables a disruption of dominant discourses of and about the carceral state.

Evasion

“…Networks and flows thus become a defining feature of these institutions, as legal documents (Godoi 2017a), contraband phones (Godoi 2017b) and pathogens (Rodrigues and Khoury 2022) pass through them. Ties of kinship (Moore 2020; Padovani 2013) and other forms of solidarity, including collectives known as factions (Biondi 2016), also embed Brazil's prisons in a set of spatial relations that exceed their borders. Anthropologists and others have searched for concepts that might rethink these institutions through such processes.…”

“…These moments speak to each other, bringing to light an enduring negotiation between the concessions offered by the state and the opportunities forcibly seized from it. Evasion, as one tactic within a broader repertoire of “extralegal agency” (Moore 2020), constitutes both a condition of survival and an insurgent form of safety for Brazilian Black feminine subjects, one distinct from the forces of state security and masculine criminal collectives, even as it is caught between them. It is a safety predicated on movement, one that charts a path through Brazil's project of incarceration while remaining out of sync with it.…”

“…I once joked that she seemed to know everyone in the favela even though she had only arrived a few months ago. This was because she, like other feminine subjects in the neighborhood, went out of her way to befriend people, to learn how to navigate the community, and to present herself as a member of it rather than a threat (Moore 2020). This work only became clear for me when Diana, who sometimes engaged in sex work, ended up in a fight with a client inside the apartment, and was expelled by the others for almost two weeks as a result.…”

“…I take this breakdown as a site with which to rethink Brazil's project of incarceration and the forms of life that emerge for its “carceral subjects”—the growing population, largely poor and Black, whose lives and families are shaped by intimate contact with the criminal justice system (Moore 2020; Richards‐Calathes 2021). 4 My claim is that evasion produces another mode of inhabiting the project, scrambling the temporal coherence of a sentence and the spatial logic of confinement.…”

Apresentação do Dossiê

“…Na mesma senda, a relação entre a proliferação de facções e a expansão do arquipélago carcerário no Norte-Nordeste brasileiro tem sido mais apontada que etnografada, assim como as relações entre cadeias e quebradas, ainda que com uma agenda já iniciada (Moore, 2020). Nos últimos anos, como mostram artigos deste dossiê, há transformações na gestão carcerária, como a militarização no Amazonas e no Ceará, que não podem ser desconsideradas.…”