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Knowledge Production, Framing and Criminal Justice Reform in Latin America*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2007

FIONA MACAULAY
FIONA MACAULAY
Affiliation:
Fiona Macaulay is Senior Lecturer in Development Studies at the Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford.
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Abstract

This commentary surveys some of the trends and gaps in current research on criminal justice reform in Latin America – with a focus on Brazil, and on two specific areas: police and prison/penal reform. It explores two principal themes: the uneven and thin production of knowledge about criminal justice issues; and the impact this has on policy reforms and on the ways in which these are framed and interpreted in terms of their relative success and failure. Overall it argues that we still know very little about criminal justice institutions and the actors within them. We also need many more finely-grained analyses of the dynamics of reform efforts and of the policy environments in which these take place in order to understand how and why reform initiatives are often derailed or subverted, and, more rarely, flourish and can be embedded and replicated.

Resumen: Este comentario inspecciona algunas de las tendencias y brechas en la investigación actual sobre la reforma de la justicia criminal en Latinoamérica, enfocándose en Brasil y en dos áreas específicas: la reforma policíaca, y la reforma del sistema penal y penitenciario. Explora dos temas principales: la producción desigual y pequeña del conocimiento sobre los temas relacionados con la justicia criminal; y el impacto que esto tiene sobre las reformas y en las formas en las que éstas son enmarcadas e interpretadas en términos de su relativo éxito o fracaso. Sobre todo, señala que aún sabemos muy poco sobre las instituciones de justicia criminal y de los actores a su interior. También necesitamos análisis más finos de los esfuerzos de la reforma y de los ambientes políticos en los que se lleva a cabo, para entender cómo y por qué las iniciativas reformistas con frecuencia se descarrilan o subvierten y, por otro lado y con menos frecuencia, también florecen y pueden ser incorporadas y replicadas.

Palabras clave: producción de conocimiento, justicia criminal, reforma policíaca y del sistema carcelario, políticas públicas, Brasil.

Resumo: Este comentário levanta algumas das tendências e lacunas em pesquisas correntes sobre a reforma da justiça criminal na América Latina, com foco no Brasil, em duas áreas específicas: a polícia e a reforma penal/carcerária. Dois temas principais são explorados: a desigual e deficiente produção de conhecimento sobre questões da justiça criminal; os impactos disso sobre as reformas das diretrizes e sobre as maneiras nas quais estas são emolduradas e interpretadas em termos de seu êxito e fracasso relativos. Sobretudo é argumentado que ainda sabemos muito pouco sobre instituições de justiça criminal e os atores delas participantes. Também precisamos de muito mais análises meticulosas estudando as dinâmicas das tentativas de reformas e dos meios em que elas foram formuladas, para poder entender como e por quê iniciativas de reformas são freqüentemente desviadas ou subvertidas, ou, mais raramente, prosperam para serem fixadas e reiteradas.

Palavras-chave: produção de conhecimento, justiça criminal, reforma policial e carcerária, formação de diretrizes, Brasil

Keywords

knowledge productioncriminal justicepolice and prison reformpolicy formationBrazil
Type
Commentary
Information
Journal of Latin American Studies , Volume 39 , Issue 3 , August 2007 , pp. 627 - 651
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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References

1  The PCC was responsible for further violence in July and August 2006. A similar attack on police installations was ordered by imprisoned leaders of the Comando Vermelho criminal network in Rio de Janeiro in late December 2006, aimed at intimidating the incoming state government.

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4  World Bank, Crime, Violence and Economic Development in Brazil: Elements for Effective Public Policy (Washington D.C., 2006).

5  Although the Brazilian business sector is alarmed by these costs, the legacy of corporatism has prevented it from pressurising the federal government with a united front. That said, business associations in both Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo have supported local initiatives to reduce crime and violence, supporting the work of Viva Rio and the Instituto São Paulo Contra a Violência. See Paulo Mesquita ‘Public-Private Partnerships for Police Reform in Brazil’, in John Bailey and Lucía Dammert (eds.), Public Security and Police Reform in the Americas (Pittsburgh PA, 2006), pp. 44–57.

6  This commentary focuses on criminal justice institutions, rather than on the etiology of crime and violence per se, on which there is a distinct, and growing, literature.

7  Brazil pioneered women's police stations; over 300 of these are now in operation and the model has been copied in Peru, Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia, Nicaragua and Ecuador. See Cecilia MacDowell Santos, Women's Police Stations: Gender Violence and Justice in São Paulo, Brazil (Basingstoke, 2005). It was also the first to set up independent police ombudsman's offices (ouvidorias). See Julita Lemgruber, Leonarda Musumeci and Ignacio Cano, Quem vigia os vigias? Um estudo sobre controle externo da polícia no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 2003).

8  Thomas Carothers, Promoting the Rule of Law Abroad: The Problem of Knowledge (Washington D.C., 2003), p. 13; Linn Hammergren, ‘International Assistance to Latin American Justice Programs: Towards an Agenda for Reforming the Reformers’, in Erik Jensen and Thomas Heller (eds.), Beyond Common Knowledge: Empirical Approaches to the Rule of Law (Stanford, 2002), pp. 290–335.

9  Luis Salas, ‘From Law and Development to Rule of Law: New and Old Issues in Justice Reform in Latin America’, in Pilar Domingo and Rachel Sieder (eds.), Rule of Law in Latin America: The International Promotion of Judicial Reform (London, 2001), pp. 17–46.

10  Available literature is by journalists: Carlos Amorim, CV, PCC: A irmandade do crime (São Paulo, 2003); Márcio Christino, Por dentro do crime: corrupção, tráfico, PCC (São Paulo, 2003); and Percival de Souza, O sindicato do crime: PCC e outros grupos (São Paulo, 2006). In addition the progressive magazine Caros Amigos had been conducting a long piece of investigative journalism, which it rushed onto the newsstands when the riot broke out (Edição Extra, 10 (28), May 2006). It sold out in days.

11  It began in 1993, inside the Casa de Custódia in Taubaté, São Paulo, as an inmates' union to demand better conditions of detention following the Carandiru massacre.

12  Personal communication from a human rights team from Brazil, USA and UK investigating the PCC episode.

13  Estimates of membership ranged from eight to 80 per cent of prisoners in São Paulo state.

14  On the neglect of Latin America's judiciary branch see Jorge Correa Sutil, ‘Judicial Reforms in Latin America: Good News for the Underprivileged?’ in Juan E. Méndez, Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro and Guillermo O'Donnell (eds.) (Un)Rule of Law and the Underprivileged in Latin America (South Bend, 1999), pp. 255–77.

15  Irwin Stotzky, Transitions to Democracy in Latin America: The Role of the Judiciary (Boulder, 1993); Osiel, Mark, ‘Dialogue with Dictators: Judicial resistance to Authoritarianism in Brazil and Argentina’, Law and Social Inquiry, vol. 20, no. 2 (1995), pp. 481–560CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16  Salas, ‘From Law and Development to Rule of Law’.

17  Pilar Domingo and Rachel Sieder (eds.), Rule of Law in Latin America: The International Promotion of Judicial Reform (London, 2001); Linn Hammergren ‘Fifteen Years of Judicial Reform in Latin America: Where we are and why we haven't made more progress?’ (unpublished ms 2002); Inter-American Development Bank, Justice Reform in Latin America: The Role of the Inter-American Development Bank Report WP 2/03 (Washington D.C., 2003).

18  Linn Hammergren, The Politics of Justice and Justice Reform in Latin America: The Peruvian Case in Comparative Perspective (Boulder, 1998); Julio B. J. Maier, Kai Ambos and Jan Woischnik, Las reformas procesales penales en América Latina (Buenos Aires, 2000).

19  Zaverucha, Jorge, ‘Fragile Democracy: The Militarization of Public Security in Brazil’, Latin American Perspectives, vol. 27, no. 3 (2000), pp. 8–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pereira, Anthony W. and Davis, Diane E, ‘New Patterns of Militarized Violence and Coercion in the Americas’, Latin American Perspectives vol. 27, no. 2 (2000), pp. 3–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20  Call, Charles, ‘Democratisation, War, and State-building: Constructing the Rule of Law in El Salvador’, Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 35, no. 4 (2003), pp. 827CrossRefGoogle Scholar–62; Margaret Popkin, Peace without Justice: Obstacles to Building the Rule of Law in El Salvador (University Park, 2000); Glebbeek, Marie-Louise, ‘Police Reform and the Peace Process in Guatemala: The Fifth Promotion of the National Civilian Police’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, vol. 20, no. 4 (2001), pp. 409–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; William Stanley, ‘International Tutelage and Domestic Political Will: Building a New Civilian Police Force in El Salvador’ in Otwin Marenin (ed.), Policing Change, Changing Police: International Perspectives (New York, 1996), pp. 37–77, and ‘Building New Police Forces in El Salvador and Guatemala: Learning and Counter-learning’, in Tor Tanke Holm and Espen Barth Eide (eds.), Peacebuilding and Police Reform (London, 2000), pp. 113–34.

21  Costa, Gino and Neild, Rachel, ‘Police reform in Peru’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, vol. 38, no. 2 (2005), pp. 216–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22  Paul Chevigny, Edge of the Knife: Police Violence in the Americas (New York, 1995).

23  The pioneering study of military police killings of civilians in São Paulo from 1970–1992 was Caco Barcellos, Rota 66: A historia da polícia que mata (São Paulo, 1992). Via painstaking analysis of court and hospital records of civilians, Barcellos revealed that 65 per cent of those killed in police ‘shoot-outs’ had no prior criminal record, a methodology later reproduced in Rio de Janeiro – see Ignacio Cano, Letalidade da ação policial no Rio de Janeiro: a atuação da justiça militar (Rio de Janeiro, 1999). Similar documentation was produced by the human rights groups-turned-think-tank Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (CELS) in Argentina, led by Gustavo Palmieri, and Centro de Estudios para el Desarrollo (CED) in Chile.

24  According to data available from the police ombudsman's offices in both cities.

25  Méndez, Pinheiro and O'Donnell (Un)Rule of Law.

26  Brinks, Daniel, ‘Informal Institutions and the Rule of Law: The Judicial Response to State Killings in Buenos Aires and São Paulo in the 1990s’, Comparative Politics, vol. 36, no. 1 (2003), pp. 1–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kees Koonings and Dirk Kruijt (eds.), Armed Actors: Organised Violence and State Failure in Latin America (London, 2004) and Fractured Cities: Social Exclusion, Urban Violence and Contested Spaces in Latin America (London, 2006).

27  A key early study is Elizabeth Leeds, ‘Cocaine and Parallel Politics in the Brazilian Urban Periphery: Constraints on Local-level Democratization’, Latin American Research Review, vol. 31, no. 3 (1996), pp. 47–85. See also Enrique Desmond Arias, Drugs and Democracy in Rio de Janeiro: Trafficking, Social Networks and Public Security (Chapel Hill, 2006).

28  Laura Kalmanowiecki, ‘Police, Politics and Repression in Modern Argentina’, in Carlos A. Aguirre and Robert Buffington (eds.), Reconstructing Criminality in Latin America (Wilmington Del., 2000), pp. 195–217; Ruth Stanley, ‘The Remilitarization of Internal Security in Argentina’, in Stanley (ed.), Gewalt und Konflikt in einer Globalisierten Welt (Wiesbaden, 2001), pp. 125–50; Mercedes Hinton, The State on the Streets: Police and Politics in Argentina and Brazil (Boulder, 2006).

29  However, Davis, Diane has suggested that politics, not drugs, has shaped the recent police reform agenda in Mexico: ‘Undermining the Rule of Law: Democratization and the Dark Side of Police Reform in Mexico’, Latin American Politics and Society, vol. 48, no. 1 (2006), pp. 55–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30  John Bailey and Jorge Chabat (eds.), Transnational Crime and Public Security: Challenges to Mexico and the United States (San Diego, 2002).

31  The University of Utrecht's School of Human Rights has a developing research group on policing and human rights in Latin America, with some focus on the region's smaller and less ‘problematic’ police forces.

32  The Carabineros are estimated to have committed round one third of the regime's gross human rights violations. See Claudio Fuentes, Contesting the Iron Fist: Advocacy Networks and Police Violence in Democratic Argentina and Chile (New York, 2004), also research by Lucía Dammert at FLACSO and Hugo Frühling at the Centro de Estudios de Seguridad Ciudadano (CESC) at the Universidad de Chile.

33  See Call, ‘Democratisation, War, and State-building’ and Popkin, Peace without Justice on El Salvador; Costa, Gino, ‘Two Steps Forward, One and a Half Steps Back: Police Reform in Peru 2001–2004’, Civil Wars, vol. 8, no. 2 (2006), pp. 215–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34  Colombia has three metropolitan police forces, in Medellín, Bogotá and Calí.

35  An exception is Christopher Birkbeck and Luis Gerardo Gabaldon's work on police use of force and penal policy carried out at the Universidad de los Andes.

36  Nagle, Luz Estella, ‘The Cinderella of Government: Judicial Reform in Latin America’, California Western International Law Journal, vol. 30, no. 2 (2000), pp. 345–80.Google Scholar

37  This article does not address the question of the prosecution service, which is a key institution and interface between the police and courts. The literature on this body is relatively sophisticated in Brazil, given the institution's acquisition of greatly enhanced powers and autonomy in the 1988 Constitution. However, the Ministério Público is far more zealous in its pursuit of misdemeanours by public officials and institutions than it is in pursuing criminal justice system reform because its intermediary role and autonomy bring it into competition with the other criminal justice institutions with regard to both policy debates and power over criminal justice data and alleged offenders.

38  Ungar, Mark, ‘Prisons and Politics in Contemporary Latin America’, Human Rights Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 4 (2003), pp. 909–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Assisted by the Ford Foundation, Ungar has tried to bring together a regional epistemic/policy community.

39  Amnesty International, No One Sleeps Here Safely: Human Rights Violations Against Detainees (London, 1999); Human Rights Watch, Behind Bars in Brazil (New York, 1998). Amnesty International remains ambivalent about researching and campaigning on prisons qua system, rather than individual prisoners' rights.

40  See, for example, United Nations, Report of the Special Rapporteur [on Torture] Sir Nigel Rodley submitted pursuant to Commission on Human Rights Resolution 2000/3 Addendum. Visit to Brazil, 30 March 2001. Geneva, United Nations Human Rights Commission.

41  Augusto Thompson, A questão penitenciária (Petropolis, 1976) and Julita Lemgruber, Cemitério dos vivos: análise sociólogico de uma prisóo de mulheres (Rio de Janeiro, 1983); both Thompson and Lemgruber headed the Rio de Janeiro prison system. Also Cláudio Fragoso, Yolanda Catão and Elisabeth Sussekind, Os direitos do preso (Rio de Janeiro, 1980): Sussekind was appointed National Secretary of Justice under President Cardoso.

42  José Ricardo Ramalho, O mundo do crime: a ordem pelo avesso (Rio de Janeiro, 1979), an ethnography of social order in the São Paulo House of Detention (Carandiru).

43  Leeds, ‘Cocaine and Parallel Politics’.

44  Ricardo Donato Salvatore and Carlos Aguirre (eds.), The Birth of the Penitentiary in Latin America: Essays on Criminology, Prison Reform, and Social Control, 1830–1940 (Austin, 1996); Fernando Salla, As prisões em São Paulo (São Paulo, 1999).

45  A similar vein of historical legal sociology has produced a number of important studies on the history of the police and of the legal profession. See Ricardo Salvatore, Carlos Aguirre and Gil Joseph (eds.), Crime and Punishment in Latin America: Law and Society since Late Colonial Times (Durham and London, 2001); Carlos Aguirre, The Criminals of Lima and their World: The Prison Experience, 1850–1935 (Durham and London, 2005); Sérgio Adorno, Os aprendizes do poder: o bacharelismo liberal na política brasileira (Rio de Janeiro, 1988) on Brazil's law academies; work by Laura Kalmanowiecki on the Argentina police; Marcos Luiz Bretas, Ordem na cidade: o exercício cotidiano da autoridade policial no Rio de Janeiro: 1907–1930 (Rio de Janeiro, 1997) and Thomas Holloway, Policing Rio de Janeiro: Repression and Resistance in a Nineteenth Century City (Stanford, 1993).

46  See for example Martha Huggins, From Slavery to Vagrancy in Brazil (New Brunswick, 1985); Lyman L. Johnson (ed.), The Problem of Order in Changing Societies: Essays on Crime and Policing in Argentina and Uruguay (Albuquerque, 1990). One such group would be the Instituto Carioca de Criminologia, founded by Nilo Batista, a criminal lawyer and former head of public security of Rio de Janeiro under Governor Brizola (1991–94).

47  In 2002 some 4,400 prisoners escaped from Brazil's jails, and more than 230 riots broke out. (Julita Lemgruber, ‘The Brazilian prison system: a brief diagnosis’, unpublished ms., 2005).

48  Draúzio Varella, Estacão Carandiru (São Paulo, 1999).

49  Hector Babenco (director) Carandiru (Brazil, 2003).

50  Colonel Ubiratan Guimarães was convicted of the deaths of 102 inmates in 2002, receiving a symbolic prison sentence of 632 years. The São Paulo appeal court overturned the conviction in 2006.

51  Rodgers, Dennis, ‘Living in the Shadow of Death: Gangs, Violence and Social Order in Nicaragua 1996–2002’, Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 38, no. 2 (2006), pp. 267–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52  The National Penitentiary Department holds no national data on deaths in custody as states do not collect or supply it. Only reform-minded prison departments, such as the São Paulo one under Dr. Nagashi Furukawa, collated, analysed and published mortality figures, which can indicate the degree of state negligence with regard to detainees' personal safety or health.

53  Victimisation surveys in Brazil have been conducted at a city level, over different time periods and with different methodologies, rendering them of limited use.

54  The other two are inflation and unemployment, according to various surveys by Latin Barometer.

55  For example, the March 2004 kidnapping and murder of a young middle-class student, Axel Blumberg, in Buenos Aires. His death brought an unprecedented 350,000 people into the streets to protest against crime and insecurity.

56  A previous Datafolha survey, in March 2004, showed 11 per cent of respondents mainly worried about ‘violence/safety’ against 49 per cent concerned with unemployment.

57  Dammert, Lucía and Malone, Mary Fran T., ‘Fear of Crime or Fear of Life? Public Insecurities in Chile’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, vol. 22, no. 1 (2003), pp. 79–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58  Teresa P. R. Caldeira, City of Walls: Crime Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo (Berkeley, 2000).

59  Martha K. Huggins (ed.), Vigilantism and the State in Modern Latin America: Essays on Extra-legal Violence (New York, 1991); Angelina Snodgrass Godoy, Popular Injustice: Violence, Community, and Law in Latin America (Stanford, 2006); Briceño-León, Roberto, Camardiel, Alberto and Avila, Olga, ‘Attitudes Toward the Right to Kill in Latin American Culture’, Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, vol. 22, no. 4 (2006), pp. 303–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60  Departamento Penitenciário Nacional, Sistema penitenciário no Brasil: dados consolidados (Brasília, 2006).

61  There is some local literature, largely from the legal perspective of judicial reform, on decarceration strategies such as non-custodial sentences and restorative justice, as well as diversion of conflicts to mediation arenas. See, for example, Rodrigo Ghiringhelli de Azevedo, Informalização da justiça e controle social: implantação dos juizados especiais criminais em Porto Alegre (São Paulo, 2000); Paulo Jorge Ribeiro and Pedro Strozemberg (eds.), Balcão de direitos: resoluções de conflitos em favelas do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro, 2001).

62  Caldeira, César, ‘A política do cárcere duro: Bangu 1’, São Paulo em Perspectiva, vol. 18, no. 1 (2004), pp. 87–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The ‘super-max’ model is based on physical containment of prisoners in isolation cells and remote management of the environment. However, this did not prevent the PCC leaders from corrupting guards. The alternative is a UK-style ‘dynamic security’ approach, based on intelligence-gathering, and on careful training and support of prison guards who work in close contact with the prisoners.

63  The first pilot study is Fiona Macaulay, ‘The Resocialization Centres in the State of São Paulo: State and Society in a New Paradigm of Offender Reintegration and Prison Administration’ in Maria Palma Wolff and Salo de Carvalho (eds.), Sistemas punitivos na América Latina: perspectiva transdisciplinar (Madrid and Rio de Janeiro, forthcoming).

64  Former New York Police Commissioner William Bratton was hired as a consultant in Mexico City, Caracas and the Brazilian state of Ceará to apply his zero tolerance ‘formula’ to crime in those locations, with mixed results.

65  In the mid 1990s, Governor Marcello Alencar instituted a highly controversial system of salary rises and prizes for police officers who shot dead suspects ‘in the line of duty’.

66  Chile might be a case in point.

67  Fiona Macaulay, ‘Private Conflicts, Public Powers: Domestic Violence Inside and Outside the Courts in Latin America’, in Alan Angell, Line Schjolden and Rachel Sieder (eds.), The Judicialization of Politics in Latin America (London, 2005).

68  Rio is also the former political and intellectual capital, a tourist hub, and – despite its reputation for crime – a rather more congenial research site than smoggy, landlocked São Paulo.

69  Alba Zaluar, an anthropologist and long-time observer of patterns of youth violence and drug trafficking in the slums, argues for such exceptionality: see Zaluar, Alba, ‘Violence in Rio de Janeiro: Styles of Leisure, Drug Use, and Trafficking’, International Social Science Journal, vol. 53, issue 169 (2001), pp. 369–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

70  Gerard Martin and Miguel Ceballos, La transformacion de Bogotá: políticas de seguridad ciudadana 1995–2003 (Bogotá and Washington D.C., 2004).

71  Lucía Dammert and Gustavo Paulsen (eds.), Ciudad y seguridad en América Latina (Santiago, 2005); Allison Rowland ‘Local responses to public insecurity in Mexico’, in John Bailey and Lucía Dammert Public Security and Police Reform in the Americas (Pittsburgh, 2005); Joseph S. Tulchin and Meg Ruthenburg (eds.), Toward a Society under Law: Citizens and their Police in Latin America (Baltimore, 2006) contains a number of case studies.

72  See, for example, David Hojman, ‘Explaining Crime in Buenos Aires: The Roles of Inequality, Unemployment, and Structural Change’, and Laura Tedesco, ‘A Comprehensive Perspective on Crime and Democratic Governability. A Response to David Hojman’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, vol. 21, no. 1 (2001), pp. 121–32.

73  Fiona Macaulay, ‘Justice-Sector and Human Rights Reform in Cardoso's Brazil’, Latin American Perspectives, vol. 34, no. 5 (forthcoming).

74  Garland, David, ‘The Limits of the Sovereign State’, British Journal of Criminology, vol. 36, no. 4 (1996), pp. 445–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

75  O'Malley, Pat, ‘Volatile and Contradictory Punishment’, Theoretical Criminology, vol. 3, no. 2 (1999), pp. 175–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76  For such a fallacious analogy see Wacquant, Loïc, ‘Towards a Dictatorship of the Poor? Notes on the penalization of poverty in Brazil’, Punishment and Society, vol. 5, no. 2 (2003), pp. 197–206CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Godoy, Angelina Snodgrass, ‘Converging on the Poles: Contemporary Punishment and Democracy in Hemispheric Perspective’, Law and Social Inquiry, vol. 30, no. 3 (2005), pp. 515–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar, also sees similarities between US and Latin American penal regimes.

77  Garland, ‘The Limits of the Sovereign State’.

78  A talented group from Brazil's policy community, with both academic and policy experience and led by Luis Eduardo Soares, set about implementing criminal reforms based on a 120 page diagnosis they had written for a think-tank close to Lula. However, after 18 months they were forced out by the withdrawal of the Minister of Justice's support for their work.

79  Thomas C. Bruneau ‘The Maras and National Security in Central America’, Strategic Insights, vol. 4, no. 5 (2005).

80  Fuentes, Contesting the Iron Fist.

81  Costa and Neild, ‘Police Reform in Peru’.

82  Hinton, The State on the Streets.

83  Huggins, Martha K., ‘The Military-Police Nexus – Legacies of Authoritarianism: Brazilian Torturers’ and Murderers' Reformulation of Memory', Latin American Perspectives, vol. 27, no. 2 (2000), pp. 57–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

84  Guaracy Mingardi, Tiras, gansos e trutas: cotidiano e reforma na polícia civil (São Paulo, 1992); Jacqueline Muniz, ‘Ser policial é, sobretudo, uma razão de ser: cultura e cotidiano da Polícia Militar do Estado do Rio de Janeiro’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, 1999).

85  Huggins' work on death squads shows how state-sponsored extra-legal units quickly take on a life and purposes of their own. See ‘Modernity and Devolution: The Making of Death Squads in Modern Brazil’, in Bruce Campbell and Arthur Brenner (eds.), Death Squads in Global Perspective: Murder With Deniability (Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 203–28.

86  Luis Jorge Werneck Vianna et al., Corpo e Alma da Magistratura Brasileira (Rio de Janeiro, 1997). The Brazilian and Chilean judiciaries finally accepted external oversight after a number of corruption scandals affecting senior judges undermined their claims to self-government. The Lula administration also used the findings of the UN Special Rapporteur on Judicial Independence to secure the reform.

87  Human rights training for criminal justice professionals was taken up enthusiastically by the Cardoso government. However, internal evaluations for Amnesty International and for the International Committee of the Red Cross showed clearly that, when disconnected from professional practice, such training was not merely ineffective but actually counter-productive. On the important issue of professionalization of police see Hugo Frühling, Joseph Tulchin and Heather Golding (eds.), Crime and Violence in Latin America:Citizen Security, Democracy and the State (Baltimore, 2003).

88  UK police officers sent on a bilateral mission to train Brazilian counterparts revealed the degree to which police bond over the apparent common professional challenges without fully appreciating the huge differences in institutional cultures and histories: Centre for Brazilian Studies, Police Reform in Brazil: Diagnoses and Policy Proposals, Conference report 23, 2002.

89  There is no published study of their work, only internal evaluations.

90  This group includes political scientist Renato Lima in SEADE (the São Paulo state government's data analysis quango), and sociologists Claudio Beato, who works with the Belo Horizonte Military Police from his university research centre, Centro de Estudos em Criminalidade e Segurança Pública (CRISP), in the Federal University of Minas Gerais, and Túlio Kahn in the research department of the Public Security Secretariat in São Paulo. Beato and Kahn have pioneered the use of Geographic Information Systems to use computerized analysis of crime ‘hot spots’ to enable the more rational intelligence-led allocation of policing resources.

91  See Luis Eduardo Soares, Meu casaco de general: quinhentos dias no front de segurança pública no Rio de Janeiro (São Paulo, 2000). Soares is an anthropologist who worked for a major think-tank in Rio de Janeiro, ISER, on violence issues before being appointed under-secretary for public security first in Rio de Janeiro and then in the national government. He was forced to resign from both posts due to a withdrawal of political support for his team's reform projects.

92  Washington Office on Latin America, ‘Sustaining Reform: Democratic Policing in Central America’, Citizen Security Monitor, October 2002; Neild, Rachel, ‘Democratic Police Reform in War-Torn Societies’, Conflict, Security and Development, vol. 1, no. 1 (2001), pp. 21–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

93  ‘What works’ became the new orthodoxy of the 1990s in Western crime control circles.

94  Revista Brasileira de Ciências Criminais (São Paulo).

95  For example, the Centro de Estudos de Segurança e Cidadania in the Candido Mendes University in Rio de Janeiro, CRISP in Minas Gerais, federal and state universities in Rio de Janeiro and human rights centres in others, such as the Pontificial Catholic Universities.

96  Revista Brasileira de Segurança Pública (São Paulo).

97  The research reports may be accessed at http://www.mj.gov.br/Senasp/pesquisas_aplicadas/anpocs/concurso.htm

98  Mark Ungar, Elusive Reform: Democracy and the Rule of Law in Latin America (Boulder, 2002).