Punishment, state, and society in the global periphery: Mass incarceration, mass incorporation, and the rise of a protagonist Judiciary in Brazil

Thesis

This thesis explains the production and reproduction of mass incarceration in Brazil, the country with the world’s third-largest prison population. It challenges dominant Global North theories—such as penal populism and neoliberal penality—by analysing how mass incarceration has emerged and persisted in a peripheral, dependent state undergoing democratisation, economic growth, and social inclusion. This thesis argues that it results from two processes that intersect: the expansion of the state and the rise of a protagonist judiciary, both operating within historically specific, structurally unequal conditions. The first process traces how Brazil shifted from domestic, informal and hidden forms of punishment—prevalent in slaveholding, rural, and authoritarian periods—to official state punishment. This transformation reflects deeper changes in social control, tied to the incorporation of previously marginalised populations into state governance and control. The second process examines the central role of the judiciary in sustaining and intensifying mass incarceration. Judges were empowered and the judiciary expanded during the democratic transition, but left institutionally unreformed, thereby becoming a key actor in the penal state. Its recruitment filters—bureaucratic and class-based—reproduced a judicial class largely aligned with a punitive consensus. Those who somehow overcome these filters, without consensually adhering to the punitive normality, face institutional coercion through reassignment, disciplinary measures, and criminalisation, with the result that dissent judges are neutralised and institutional conformity ensured. Methodologically, the thesis combines sociohistorical analysis, court-file analysis, in-depth interviews, and online observation. Theoretically, it draws on Southern Criminology, Critical Realism, the political economy of punishment and agonistic perspectives to develop a historically grounded, empirically rich account of mass incarceration in Brazil. It ultimately shows how mass incarceration was not a deviation from democratic consolidation, but a constitutive element of it, shaped by the very ways state power, judicial roles, and class domination were reconfigured in post-authoritarian Brazil.

Authors: Oliveira Dal Santo, LP

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-j5y62dqqg
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: mass incarceration; global south; sentencing; penality; punishment; criminology; Brazil; Latin America; judges; political economy of punishment; punitiveness
• Subjects: Latin American studies; Sociolegal studies; Sociology; Critical criminology; Criminology; Sociology of punishment; Punishment and Society