 I'm going to be presenting work today that's part of a book project on prison gangs in Brazil or what are known in Brazil as criminal factions. They are the prime form of organized crime in Brazil and they're one of the largest and most powerful kinds of criminal organizations in Latin America today. This is a chapter from the book called Scramble for Brazil, which talks about the expansion of these groups. They began in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, but have now kind of taken over the whole country. Both specific groups from those cities and kind of copycat criminal groups that have sprung up in response. What you see here is the time-lapse data that I collected on the spread of the PCC prison gang from São Paulo, its home state to the point now in 2020 where it has presence throughout the entire country. I'm going to tell you a little bit about that gang. It is the largest criminal organization in Brazil and one of the largest criminal organizations in the world that has 30,000 sworn members, baptized members, and on the order of 250,000 working affiliates throughout Brazil and neighboring countries. It was born as just a handful of prisoners in 1993 in São Paulo after prison guards and police stormed during a prison riot killed 111 unarmed prisoners. These guys kind of banded together in a sort of self-mutual aid group, but eventually expanded and kind of took over the prisons by providing local order. They banned rape, theft, and murder within the prisons and kind of instituted a rough social justice, and that made them very popular and they quickly took over the prison system of São Paulo, which, as you can see down below, is growing dramatically at the time as a result of mass incarceration policies. The gang was a little known outside of the prisons, but in 2001 it launched a synchronized riot in 23 prisons that drew a lot of attention. In the following years the state cracked down and put in a lot of maximum security prisons, described the gang as having been dismantled, but in 2006 they launched a second mega-rebellion this time in 100 prisons across the state and in neighboring states and they also coordinated this with bus burnings in the capital, hundreds and hundreds of bus burnings, metro bombings that basically brought São Paulo to a standstill and forced authorities to negotiate with the gang, which they did. And so that's one side of what the PCC does. But the other critical side of what the PCC does is it has established through the urban periphery of São Paulo what they call the lei do crime or the law of crime, which among other things bans unauthorized homicides. And it subjects all sort of if you want to kill somebody you need to call people from the PCC and they hold a trial, you present your evidence of the wrongdoing and if you convince the jury, who are often kind of connected through cell phones, then you can go ahead and carry out the execution, otherwise you can't. And so this kind of law of crime has contributed to, we don't really know exactly all the different causal factors, but there's a lot of evidence that this contributed, both quantitative and qualitative, that this contributed to the massive drop in homicides in São Paulo. And that drop is well documented and it is extremely large. The upper graph there shows how if you just look at homicides across Brazil, it looks like the homicide rates sort of leveled out or fell, but that's being driven almost entirely by São Paulo, by this radical drop in homicides in São Paulo, which has proven quite stable. São Paulo now has a homicide rate around 10 or 11 per 100,000, which is lower than, say, Chicago. By comparison, the story of Rio de Janeiro, which is an older story, the first prison gang in Brazil was the Comando Vermelho, which you may have heard of, it was founded in the 1970s during the military dictatorship in Brazil, when the dictatorship kind of massive sort of unintended consequences locked up some political prisoners with common criminals in the hopes of depoliticizing the political prisoners. Instead, the common criminals kind of learned some collective organization techniques and they founded this group called the Comando Vermelho. In the 80s, this group not only took over the prisons and instituted the same kind of social justice, banning rape, theft and violence inside the prison system, but eventually expanded outward to control the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and the retail drug trade that was kind of just beginning to boom there. This is a really critical point. The Comando Vermelho quickly took over the retail drug trade in Rio de Janeiro and began a kind of violent shooting war both against its rivals and with the state. This is a war that continues to this day. There was kind of a brief blip there around the time of the Olympics when the pacification program was put into place, but really over the last 20 or 30 years, we've seen sort of civil war levels of violence. These are police killings of civilians. So just the number of civilians that police kill every year, which is regularly over a thousand per year, just in the state of Rio de Janeiro, which is a state of 15 million people. So a really high level of lethality in this war. Despite all of this militarized repression of the Comando Vermelho, it retains an enormous amount of territorial control. This is a map of Rio de Janeiro and the red little dots or CVs are favelas that are still controlled by the Comando Vermelho today. The blue are police linked militias. They're coming paramilitary groups and they're kind of a new form of crime. But if you know Rio, you'll see that the most valuable sort of drug turf, the southern zone that's kind of in the middle southern part of that map, is still controlled by the Comando Vermelho. That's almost 40 years after it was founded. It still has territorial control over huge swaths of urban territory, valuable drug turf in Rio de Janeiro. And in the last 10 years, this phenomenon of what they call factions, groups like the Comando Vermelho and the PCC, prison gangs that learn to control crime on the streets from prison, have spread from Rio and São Paulo to the entire country. The PCC itself has set up branches. It's kind of like a corporate structure throughout the country. The CV has fostered a kind of network of allied factions. And you see on the right a list of dozens of these factions throughout the country. Now, to give you a sense of, to sort of document this in a more rigorous way, I've collected data on bus burning attacks, like the ones I showed you in São Paulo. And I've organized them into waves of attacks with at least three or more buses burned simultaneously in different parts of the city. This can also include prison riots, other kinds of arson. And these can go on for days or months. Sometimes it's just a handful of attacks in a single day. This phenomenon started in São Paulo in Rio. And over the years has spread in number and extent throughout the country. The total number of waves has gone up considerably, although it's dropped in the last few years, and certainly with COVID it fell. And the geographic distribution of these attacks, going from the southeast zone, the blue, where includes Rio and São Paulo, first spreading to the south, the kind of purple bars, and then in recent years to the northeast of Brazil, the red bars. The number of gangs responsible for these attacks is also grown dramatically. So in the first couple of years, you have two or three, I see on the bottom graph, two groups in the initially, just the commander of the PCC responsible for these kinds of attacks, and over the years the total number of groups responsible has grown dramatically. And these kind of attacks now form part of how these groups understand themselves and how they understand their relationship to one another. This is a letter that one of these factions in the south sent to all the other factions of Brazil. A little bit like explaining how, why it broke with the PCC in its home state of Santa Catarina. In something a little bit like the way the United States, the fledgling United States wrote a declaration of independence and sent it out to France and other nation states of Europe to justify its break with the British Empire. Here this gang claims that the PCC had no right to baptize members in its home state because it had carried out these extensive bus burning attacks in its home state, which established it as a legitimate criminal faction. And they talk about their vision of what a peaceful and harmonic coexistence of criminal factions in our beloved Brazil should be. So actually promoting norms among criminal groups at a very sophisticated level. Okay, so in my book I take a step back and I say this is all a bit puzzling because what we've been told about criminal groups and in particular about organized crime is that it's a function of state weakness. That organized crime grows strong where the state is weak or where the state is absent. And in particular we think this about criminal governance. We often say that criminal groups govern civilians when the state isn't doing its job and the gangs step in and take advantage of weaknesses in state coverage. But if we think about Brazil in the context of Latin America, it's certainly not the weakest state in Latin America and yet it has some of the strongest criminal organizations in Latin America. And if we look sub-nationally, some follow is the economic hub of the country. It's the richest state, it has the largest state budget, the largest police force per capita, more train tracks, more highways. You name it, banks, right? It's not the weakest state in Brazil and it has the strongest criminal organization. And you can see similar patterns if you look around Central America. You might even say the same of Colombia which we'll hear about in a minute. Medellin certainly not a weaker state than Cali but has much stronger criminal organizations. So if organized crime grows strong, where the state is weak, why do we see the strongest criminal organizations in these kind of relatively strong states? And the answer that I'm gonna argue for in my book is that muscular state repression itself, in particular mass incarceration and drug repression can foster criminal governance. Now in a sense, this doesn't answer the puzzle, it just sort of recasts it because if state strength and state capacity can be used, can inadvertently strengthen gangs, then why can't states figure out how to retool that capacity in ways that might curb criminal governance or curb the size and extent of criminal organizations? I mean, aren't states supposed to strive to establish a monopoly on the use of force, right? That's another conventional wisdom we've been told. So you might say, well, they don't know what they're doing, states make mistakes, this is counterproductive in many ways, backfires and that makes sense up to a certain point. But again, the Commonwealth has been around for 40 years. The PCC has been around for 30 years. You would think that states might learn over time and make adjustments. You might say, well, this is just corruption, the state's not really that strong, there's a lot of bribery going on and that's true also to a certain extent. But it's not the case that corruption is driving this process. It's not the case that mayors and governors of Rio are receiving bribes from the Commonwealth of Emilia to allow it to continue to govern the periphery nor that the governor of Sao Paulo received a bribe to allow the PCC to prohibit homicide. Nor is it really standoffishness. Again, these states are investing enormous amounts of resources in these prisons and these police forces and so on and so forth. The answer I wanna argue in my book is that criminal governance is useful to states. Indeed, I argue, it is uniquely useful because it brings order to places that states find perennially difficult to govern. Prison masses and urban peripheries. So in the book, I developed kind of an argument that says, look, we think of the state's capacity for repression, internal repression. Hobbes characterized it as a sword. It's what backs up the social covenant. And in that argument, the threat of coercion on the part of the state is sort of sheathed. The state doesn't constantly force us to do things. We stop at traffic lights, we pay our taxes as Professor Bezley argued this morning because we trust the state and so there's not an active repression. But if we think about mass incarceration and we think about drug repression, these are two areas where the state is constantly actively repressing citizens. It's holding people in prisons. It's actively patrolling and busting drug traffickers. And so there's a kind of active, unsheathed sword of the state. And that unsheathed sword, I wanna argue, does two things. On the one hand, it directly fosters resources and incentives for criminal gangs to learn to govern. Mass incarceration puts criminals together. It gives them a physical space that needs to be governed or they will live literally in a Hobesian nightmarish reality inside the prison cells. And it also gives them power on the street by threatening marginalized citizens in favelas with incarceration. And giving those people on the outside every expectation that they will come under the control of prison gangs once they are incarcerated. So in that way, the state acts as a conveyor belt for the coercive power of criminal organizations inside prison into marginalized communities. Drug repression gives those gangs who have a presence in favelas and other low income areas incentives to govern those areas because the better govern those areas the more they're able to sell drugs unless police are gonna be called in to deal with minor infractions, homicides, violence. And the more citizens are gonna be on their side when police do come in and might be willing to hide them or hide their drugs in the case of police raids. Maybe you believe my argument, maybe you don't, but this still doesn't explain persistence. And so the other piece of this argument is that at the end of the day governments, although they might not even be unconscious of it at some level are benefiting from this criminal governance in Brazil and in large parts of Latin America. Huge segments of the population live in informal urban areas often expanding or informal urban areas and that is central to the development policies over the last 30 or 40 years of many countries in the developing world. If those areas were chaotic and violent it would be very difficult for larger macro level development projects to even work. So finding criminal organizations and fostering criminal organizations with the incentives and the means to govern those urban peripheries solves a huge problem for governments. And the result is something that's non-vibrarian but it is unjust in many ways but it's stable. Okay, let me just finish with a little bit about what has actually happened in Brazil, right? So the PCC began this very, you know bold expansion throughout the country and it kind of almost in a state building way. If you, the more you study, I'm not gonna talk about the state PCC today but it's an incredible organization. They have these internal personnel roles, little real estate expansion, the Awa, Charles Tilly or something like that, real state building. And the CV in its own way built this fascinating system of allied factions in local states that it allied with and was able to confront the PCC and there's a big war between these two sides that has taken over Brazil in the last few years. But I wanna emphasize the role of the state in promoting this scramble for Brazil, this expansion, almost colonial expansion of these factions throughout the country. And part of the story is that incarceration rates went up everywhere. So at the beginning of this graph in 2003, Sao Paulo responds for almost half of all of the prisoners in Brazil but as mass incarceration increases, you can see that that share is falling and mass incarceration is spreading to other regions of Brazil. Another way to look at that is just to plot state by state incarceration rates which is a horrible tangled mess but you can clearly see that by the end of this period a large number of states now have the high or very high levels of incarceration rates as opposed to just to 10 or 20 years ago. The other key part of this story which I'll close with was the creation of a federal prison system. Now until 2006, these factions could only spread when individual members got transferred out of their home state to other states which happened on a kind of a haphazard basis. Oh, this guy is a dangerous criminal, let's transfer him way into the middle of nowhere and then in that way in the middle of nowhere which sprout up a local cell of the PCC. In 2006, the federal government decided to build a federal prison system that they thought could finally deal with this problem and what it didn't, and so Rio's police sent all 40 top members of the Commando Vermelho to this federal prison system and all top 20 members of its rival faction. This was a critical factor in helping the Commando Vermelho expand at the national level. It gave it every opportunity to meet criminal elements from around the country and build this national network of allied factions. And the director of the federal prison himself said after his term in office, the federal prison system has sadly nationalized organized crime, never in the history of the country have prisoners from the most distant quarters been united by the state itself. So you really see, and this was not a cheap project, this was a massively expensive infrastructure building kind of state building project. So I just wanna emphasize once again the importance of state resources in the growth and spread of organized crime and criminal governance. Thanks.