Author Description

Prisons and jails in Rio de Janeiro are violent and crowded; they are governed by narco-gangs and are intensely religious spaces. Rio's penal institutions reflect the social world of the poor neighbourhoods where most of the inmates lived before their arrests. They are places where the state has a weak presence and residents organize around nonstate entities, primarily gangs or Pentecostal churches. Inside of prison, Pentecostal inmates form churches that resemble the gangs in organization and leadership structure. The gangs allow the churches to function autonomously. To gather data on the these groups, the author spent two weeks living inside a prison in Brazil and then collected ethnographic data by regularly visiting one prison and one jail in Rio de Janeiro for a year.