Pedro Mendes Loureiro (CLAS, Cambridge): The prison consensus: incarceration, investment, and inequality in Brazil
| Dates: | 4 December 2024 |
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| Times: | 17:00 - 18:30 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Speaker: | Pedro Mendes Loureiro |
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Part of the University of Manchester's Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies' research seminar series:
Wed 4 December 2024, 5pm (UK time). This event will be in person, in Samuel Alexander Building, room A214. It can be followed online here: https://zoom.us/j/95860231166
Abstract: 30 years ago Brazil had incarceration rates comparable to Scandinavia’s. It now has the third-highest prison population in the world. The country has seen periods of economic growth and crisis, of rising and falling poverty and inequality, and governments from the centre-left to the far right, but the growth of the carceral infrastructure and its detained population has continued unabated. Brazil has been known for long-standing and marked inequalities, structured (at least) by race, class, gender, and geography, but it is only very recently that the carceral system has become a central institution in their dynamics. I will present preliminary results of a three-year project, conducted with Graham Denyer Willis, Bruna Angotti, and Luiz Fernando Toledo, that asks: How and where has the carceral system expanded in Brazil? What are the political processes that have enabled this? How has this been legitimated? And who profits from this? We argue that Brazil has become locked into a ‘prison consensus’. The carceral system is decried as a failure by agents of all political persuasions, but its growing heft entrenches a range of material interests, while its continual expansion is proposed as a solution to the very problems it creates, from dehumanising conditions for inmates to the proliferation of organised criminal groups that straddle its walls.
Dr Pedro Mendes Loureiro is Associate Professor of Latin American Studies, CLAS and POLIS, University of Cambridge
Speaker
Pedro Mendes Loureiro
Role: Associate Professor of Latin American Studies
Organisation: CLAS and POLIS
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
A214
Samuel Alexander Building
Manchester
