What happens when state repression strengthens the very criminal groups it aims to constrain? Under mass incarceration, sophisticated prison gangs have learned not only to organize inmate populations, but to project power onto the street, challenging state authority in both direct and oblique ways. From Brazil to El Salvador, prison gangs have transformed the state’s disciplinary institutions into headquarters for building drug empires, organizing street crime, and orchestrating terrorist attacks capable of bringing the state to heel. At the same time, they govern—providing order and physical safety for millions of low-income residents across vast informal peripheries neglected by governments.
The fruit of decades of resorting to repressive strategies to address underlying social problems, these criminal shadow-governments simultaneously defy and undergird the neoliberal state, in the process creating a stubborn specter of non-state authority and destabilizing the foundations of democratic politics.