Three decades ago, the state of São Paulo, Brazil’s most populous, adopted a public security model based on ostensive policing, with zero tolerance for suspected criminals and, consequently, an ever-higher number of arrests.
This strategy saw incarceration levels in São Paulo — which already tend to be the highest in the country — skyrocket. The state now houses 30 percent of all prisoners in Brazil, despite being home to 22 percent of the population. If it were a city, São Paulo’s prison population would be bigger than 97 percent of the country’s municipalities.
With unsanitary and massively overcrowded facilities, prisons brought together people from different groups — who were often enemies outside the prison walls — and soon became a powder keg ready to explode.
The birth of a giant
In 1992, a prisoner-led rebellion asking for better living conditions in the now-closed Carandiru prison was violently quashed by armed policemen. They stormed the prison and killed 111 inmates, shooting the unarmed men at random. At the time, there were 7,000 inmates in Carandiru, which had a capacity for 3,250 prisoners — an average of 2.2 prisoners per available spot. It was the deadliest case of prison violence in Brazil’s recent history.
The creation of the First Command of the Capital, or PCC, was a direct consequence of the Carandiru massacre. This criminal organization, born inside prisons and led by inmates, has today spread across Brazil and throughout neighboring countries. It is now considered the most powerful criminal gang in South America — controlling the main drug trafficking routes in the region.
In the first years of the PCC’s existence, as the organization established itself, the number of homicides in the city of São Paulo broke records. Gangs of mostly young, black men fought each other to dominate the quebradas, the low-income suburban neighborhoods which a group of drug dealers can usually control according to their own rules.
The 1990s became known in São Paulo as an “urban war era,” in which the outskirts of the state capital turned into battlegrounds between rival groups of drug dealers and thieves in search of territorial domination. Other people, mainly former or current security officers, joined...
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