Where the Sun Rises Square - by David C Thompson (Paperback)

About the Book

"Brazil's prison population, estimated at 90,000 in 1990, has exploded to over 800,000, the third highest in the world behind the US and China. Systematically targeting poor, Black communities, Brazil's prisons have become infamous for their overcrowding and mismanagement. And yet, this landscape of punishment is built on top of a set of progressive laws that center reform as the primary aim and concern of incarceration. Every morning, when black, windowless vans carry the newly incarcerated to their destinations, they pass through prison gates emblazoned with the words, "Resocialize to Conquer the Future." Through long-term fieldwork within the prisons of Rio de Janeiro, David Thompson investigates the legal and moral impulse to "resocialize" as it animates the prison system of Brazil. Following incarcerated people, psychologists, attorneys, and missionaries, he draws attention to the forms of prison life and governance that reform and resocialization bring forth, from parole applications and psycho-social evaluations to prison escapes. He argues these institutions are driven by a set of unfulfilled promises: the image of a reformed, future self; the insistence that a more "humane" prison is possible; the promise of Brazilian democracy itself; and the stalled project of Black emancipation. Across these domains, Thompson charts how imprisonment forces its captives to constantly navigate between the hope of reform and the weaponization of this hope against them"--

Book Synopsis

Brazil's prison population, estimated at 90,000 in 1990, has exploded to over 650,000, the third highest in the world behind the US and China. Systematically targeting poor, Black communities, Brazil's prisons have become infamous for their overcrowding and mismanagement. And yet, this landscape of punishment is built on top of a set of progressive laws that center reform as the primary aim and concern of incarceration. Every morning, when black, windowless vans carry the newly incarcerated to their destinations, they pass through prison gates emblazoned with the words, "Resocialize to Conquer the Future."

Through long-term fieldwork within the prisons of Rio de Janeiro, David Thompson investigates the legal and moral impulse to "resocialize" as it animates the prison system of Brazil. Following incarcerated people, psychologists, attorneys, and missionaries, he draws attention to the forms of prison life and governance that reform and resocialization bring forth, from parole applications and psycho-social evaluations to prison escapes. He argues these institutions are driven by a set of unfulfilled promises: the image of a reformed, future self; the insistence that a more "humane" prison is possible; the promise of Brazilian democracy itself; and the stalled project of Black emancipation. Across these domains, Thompson charts how imprisonment forces its captives to constantly navigate between the hope of reform and the weaponization of this hope against them.

Review Quotes

"David Thompson's deep and multifaceted empirical work inside the resocialization mechanisms of Brazilian prisons in an era of mass incarceration is a remarkable contribution to the still way too thin comparative sociology of penal regimes globally. The book's insights are especially pertinent and timely for countries like the US where mass incarceration is often blamed on an abandonment of rehabilitation and reform is pegged to a revival of progressive penology. As Thompson's historically informed ethnography documents Brazil's long institutional commitment to resocialization (their term for rehabilitation) as a purpose of prison remained unrevised during its period of extraordinary population growth and racial concentration. Today it operates as much to legitimate and facilitate that enduring status quo as it does serve to rebuke the current state of prisons or inspire many surprising stories of desistance." --Jonathan Simon, University of California, Berkeley

"Where the Sun Rises Square is a path-breaking examination of the racialized, gendered violence of the carceral present. Thompson's moving ethnographic portrait of overcrowded Brazilian prisons invites readers to sit with the mundane, life-defining ways that resocialization as a promise deferred unfolds through legal minutia, maternal gestures and Evangelical asceticism to produce a punitive impossibility for hundreds of thousands of young Black Brazilians." --Darren Byler, Simon Fraser University

"An outstanding and highly original ethnography of prison life and logics. Incisive and rich, this is the most novel scholarly work to document the intricacies, bureaucracy, containment, evasion and gendered nature of a prison system amidst exponential expansion. So many of its details are fascinating, troubling, and revisionary, and it reframes a growing conversation on incarceration in Brazil and Latin America. The scholarship is profoundly thoughtful and rigorous, yet is also patient and invested in ensuring a careful representation. Brilliant, moving, and beautiful." --Graham Denyer Willis, University of Cambridge

About the Author

David C. Thompson is an anthropologist and prison researcher based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.