The policy challenges of informal prisoner governance

YesInformal prisoner governance in Latin American penal institutions raises a number of dilemmas for policy. The responses must encompass decarceration and diversion policies, and an approach to prison security that emphasises co-production and co-governance rather than coercive control

Heart, Head and Hands: Inter-Cultural, Experiential and Applied Gender Learning in a Peace Studies Department

Yes“Gender Day” is an obligatory annual learning event for all first-year undergraduate and Masters students in the Department of Peace Studies (University of Bradford, England), designed as a foundational experience for a multicultural student body to develop gender analytical skills. The curriculum uses three carefully sequenced elements. The first session, based on peer-facilitated small-group discussion of participants’ lived knowledge of gender norms, engages the “heart” - emotion and personal experience. The second, a lecture on academic concepts around sex, gender and sexuality and their inter-relationship, engages the “head”. The third, a workshop demonstrating the practical techniques of applying gender analysis to a policy or intellectual problem in politics, international relations, and peace/conflict studies, engages their “hands”. This article analyzes why and how Gender Day was devised and argues that its positive gender-mainstreaming impact on students and the Department results from the pedagogical philosophy underpinning its three, integrated elements and the opportunity offered by a heterogeneous student cohor

Gendering Drug Policy

Ye

Brazil’s Maria da Penha domestic violence police patrols: A second-response innovation in preventing re-victimization

yesThis article examines an innovative domestic violence intervention: some 300 ‘second-response’ police patrols set up since 2015 by military police forces and municipal guards in cities around Brazil. They enforce court-issued protection orders by paying repeat visits to women at high risk, referring them to support services, and ensuring abusers stay away. Drawing on interviews with officers who founded or now lead these patrols, and on local-level police data and studies, the article analyses their origins and modus operandi, and evaluates their impacts on victims, abusers, the community, and internal police force culture. Available evidence shows that victims enrolled in these programmes are much less likely to suffer repeated assault or feminicide than those who are not. The article examines how this intervention fits with the other elements of local protection networks and compares these patrols to second-response police interventions developed elsewher

Non governmental organisations and the rule of law: The experience of Latin America

YesThe rule of law, that is, the fair, competent, effective, and predictable application of laws that enhance, rather than undermine, social accountability and fundamental human rights, is a core function of the state, and forms part of its social contract with the citizenry. However, ensuring that a government upholds the rule of law requires a number of checks and balances. Some of this accountability and enforcement function lies with the other branches of government: oversight of the executive by the legislative branch through its committees and reports, and by the judiciary, which has its own proactive powers and can be petitioned by citizens and their representatives. But this republican structure can still be unresponsive or resistant to scrutiny, particularly when elites across the branches of government are indifferent to, or collude in, maintaining chronic problems in the justice system. Active non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are therefore recognised as a crucial component in the effective application of the rule of law due to their independence from government and their often-different perspective on the impact of unevenly applied and unjust laws and law enforcement through direct contact with the victims of arbitrary treatment. This chapter explores ways in which NGOs (both international and local) can contribute to strengthening rule of law through a case study of how the Open Society Institute and its Justice Initiative (OSJI) and a network of Brazilian NGOs developed a campaign to reduce the excessive use of pre-trial detention. It demonstrates how NGOs can fulfil important watchdog functions and are able to change laws, policies and practices that significantly improve the rule of law by working strategically with one another, with international partners and with sympathetic state actors

Presidents, producers and politics: law-and-order policy in Brazil from Cardoso to Dilma

YesThis article analyses the governance tools available to three Brazilian presidents – Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff – to direct and enact policy in the area of law-and-order, that is, to prevent crime, improve policing and develop effective penal responses. It examines the commonalities and the differences in the ways that each approached their key roles as president: communicating with the public on the issues, using the agencies of the federal bureaucracy, managing intergovernmental relations with the subnational units (states and municipalities), and managing their multiparty coalition and relations with Congress. In particular, it highlights the way in which Brazil’s highly fragmented and porous party system, which underpins the country’s coalitional presidentialist form of governance, has also encouraged the entry into legislative arenas of direct representatives of criminal justice professionals (police) and indirect representatives of private security actors. This has resulted in increasing producer capture of law-and-order policy within both the federal bureaucracy and legislative arenas at all levels of government. In the crisis of the Dilma presidency, to which they contributed, they were able to move from being veto-players to agenda-setters on law-and-order policy, intent on reversing the direction set by these presidents

Prisoner capture: welfare, lawfare and warfare in Latin America’s overcrowded prisons

YesThis chapter focuses on the forms of legality and illegality produced by, and within, prison systems in Latin America where prison populations have risen five-fold, leading to a serious structural crisis in the criminal justice system. The chapter develops the concept of “prisoner capture”, a double-sided phenomenon of illegality in the state’s practices of detention, on the one hand, and informal, or parallel, governance exercised by those that it detained, on the other. State authorities held tens of thousands of people in extended and legally unjustifiable pretrial detention, and frequently denied convicted prisoners their legal rights, including timely release. This officially sanctioned form of kidnapping created such overcrowding and under-investment in prisons that national, constitutional, and international minimum norms on detention standards were routinely, systematically and grossly violated. These multiple illegalities on the part of the state in turn encouraged the emergence of prisoner self-defence and self-governance organizations. This resulted in “prisoner capture” of a different kind, when inmates took over the day-to-day ordering of prison life. In turn, this produced a parallel normative and pseudo-legal world in which inmates adjudicated on and disciplined other inmates in the absence of state officials within the prison walls. The chapter further examines what the study of Latin American prisons and penal practices can add to the field of socio-legal studies in the region and the implications of this phenomenon of prison capture for the dominant socio-legal literature on prisons and imprisonment

‘Whose prisoners are these anyway?’ Church, state and society partnerships and co-production of offender ‘resocialisation’ in Brazil

YesThis chapter examines an innovative experience in prison management pioneered in the 1990s in São Paulo state, Brazil, whereby small, decentralised prison units were co-managed by community-based NGOs and the state prison authorities. These Resocialisation Centres (Centros de Ressocialização - CRs) were human rights compliant, run at half the cost of mainstream prisons, and emphasised rebuilding humane relationships between prisoners, and prisoners and their families. The CRs were inspired by Catholic volunteers completely taking over local jails, which came to be known as APACs. The chapter contrasts the APAC and CR ethos and practice. The former insisted on Christian faith, voluntarism and a sceptical view of the state as a penal actor. The latter preferred a secular approach, semi-professionalised NGOs, and formal partnerships that see the state as potentially capable of meeting its human rights and democratic legal commitments to those it incarcerates. The CR model of co-production of offender rehabilitation and desistance thus enables the local community to assist the state’s ‘moral performance’ within its penal institutions. The CR experiment is analysed in relation to competing models of prison governance (including forms of semi-privatization), and competition between criminal justice, civil society and religious actors for ‘ownership’ of the offender

Bancada da Bala: the growing influence of the security sector in Brazilian politics

Ye

the history of the european oil and gas industry 1600s 2000s

n/