Sharing This Walk - (Latin America in Translation/En Traducción/Em Tradução) by Karina Biondi (Paperback)

About the Book

"The Primeiro Comando do Capital (PCC) is a Säao Paulo prison gang that since the 1990s has expanded into the most powerful criminal network in Brazil. ... During the period of Biondi's ... visits ... and her extensive fieldwork in prisons and on the streets of Säao Paulo, the PCC effectively controlled more than ninety percent of Säao Paulo's 147 prison facilities"--

Book Synopsis

The Primeiro Comando do Capital (PCC) is a São Paulo prison gang that since the 1990s has expanded into the most powerful criminal network in Brazil. Karina Biondi's rich ethnography of the PCC is uniquely informed by her insider-outsider status. Prior to his acquittal, Biondi's husband was incarcerated in a PCC-dominated prison for several years. During the period of Biondi's intense and intimate visits with her husband and her extensive fieldwork in prisons and on the streets of São Paulo, the PCC effectively controlled more than 90 percent of São Paulo's 147 prison facilities.

Available for the first time in English, Biondi's riveting portrait of the PCC illuminates how the organization operates inside and outside of prison, creatively elaborating on a decentered, non-hierarchical, and far-reaching command system. This system challenges both the police forces against which the PCC has declared war and the methods and analytic concepts traditionally employed by social scientists concerned with crime, incarceration, and policing. Biondi posits that the PCC embodies a "politics of transcendence," a group identity that is braided together with, but also autonomous from, its decentralized parts. Biondi also situates the PCC in relation to redemocratization and rampant socioeconomic inequality in Brazil, as well as to counter-state movements, crime, and punishment in the Americas.

Review Quotes

"One of the most insightful works on 'inner' Brazilian society." -- Current Anthropology

"This elegant and rigorously argued book offers a compelling critique of existing depictions of prison life in Brazil and challenges entrenched understandings of 'organised crime.'" -- London School of Economics Review of Books

"This is the best kind of ethnography, in which the experience of the subjects genuinely determines the ideas developed." -- Luso-Brazilian Review

About the Author

Karina Biondi, author of Junto e Misturdado: uma etnografía do PCC, holds a doctorate in social anthropology from the Federal University of São Carlos in São Paulo.

Editor and translator John F. Collins is associate professor of anthropology at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is author of Revolt of the Saints: Memory and Redemption in the Twilight of Brazilian Racial Democracy.