2025-26 Abstract: 

In Latin America, mano dura crackdowns typically backfire spectacularly, driving consolidation, expansion, and violent reactions by drug cartels, prison gangs, and other criminal networks. Yet without other options, desperate leaders voice dangerous infatuation with Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele’s authoritarian crackdown suspending civil rights and incarcerating 1.7% of the population. Even if this achieves short-term security at the expense of democratic rule of law, it is likely unworkable in other contexts. The need for alternative approaches could not be more acute.  

As such, the unprecedented expansion of a Focused Deterrence policing initiative in Brazil’s Rio Grande do Sul (RS), after initially successful piloting, could be a watershed moment for Latin America. By deploying coercive force strategically, to punish gang leaders for violence occurring in the areas they control, the project promises to reorient gangs’ tactics and even preferences and culture toward less destructive behavior. Together with my Brazilian collaborators, and building on contacts with the governor and Security Secretary, I propose to study and evaluate this exciting initiative from two angles, that of the state agencies working together to strategically coordinate their actions, and that of the criminal groups whose incentives the state is trying to shape. Drawing on local researchers and officials with direct access to both the corridors of power and the state’s prison system---where most of its gang leaders reside---this project will produce a body of in-depth qualitative interviews with both state and criminal actors, providing a unique assessment of this important public policy innovation. 

2019-20 Abstract:

This book project explores a paradox of mass-incarceration societies: Prison, the state’s main tool for punishing crime, has become a headquarters for organizing crime, with dire consequences. For example, in May 2006, São Paulo’s Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) prison gang launched hundreds of terror attacks on the streets and simultaneous rebellions in 90 prisons, holding the city hostage and forcing significant government concessions. Paradoxically, the same gang imposed a homicide ban in slums that cut homicide rates by 75%. Since then, PCC-type gangs have spread throughout Brazil, and Central America’s prison-based gangs have also produced extreme peaks and troughs of violence. What are the consequences when states depend on criminal organizations to govern sprawling prison systems and underserved peripheries?  

My CISSR project exploits the spread of sophisticated prison gangs to every state in Brazil, analyzing real-time changes in street-level crime, violence, and governance. As a 2018 CISSR Fellow, I established connections with Brazilian scholars whose graduate advisees are developing ethnographic research sites in different communities. In eight slums across two states, I piloted a novel “replicated ethnographic observation” methodology: each researcher completes a standardized report for their site, characterizing local prison-gang governance and the processes of gang takeover. As a returning fellow, I will replicate this methodology in 4-6 additional states. This project will produce the first systematic data on prison-based criminal governance in slum areas; strengthen an international network of gang and slum researchers; and provide a model for cross-disciplinary research into sensitive issues like gang governance. 

2018-19 Abstract: Inside Out: Prison Gangs’ Criminal Governance as a Threat to State Authority 

In 2006, a prison gang held the world’s third-largest city hostage. São Paulo’s Primeiro Comando da Capital launched simultaneous rebellions in 90 prisons and hundreds of synchronized terror attacks on the streets, bringing the city to a standstill and forcing significant concessions from officials. Paradoxically, the same gang imposed a ban on unauthorized homicides throughout the urban periphery, producing a drastic decline in violence. Though extreme, the case is not exceptional: From El Salvador to Chicago, prison gangs have learned to project power beyond prison walls, organizing street-level crime, altering patterns of violence, and using that control as a bargaining chip with states. What happens when prisons—the core of the state’s coercive apparatus—become headquarters for criminal organizations? What are the policy implications when prison gangs come to govern marginalized populations more effectively than weak or absent states ever did?  

I propose a systematic assessment of the degree, variation, and impact of prison-based criminal governance on peripheral communities and the illicit markets they house. Through field visits to six Brazilian states, focus groups and interviews with residents, and training of local collaborators for ongoing research, I will produce novel observations of criminal governance across varied contexts. This will help answer critical questions: When and how did prison gangs establish control? What areas of daily life do they impinge on? How do residents feel about gang governance? What are the consequences for states that come to depend on gangs to govern not only sprawling prison systems but under-served and violent urban peripheries?  

Bio:

Benjamin Lessing is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He studies armed conflict and governance by criminal groups that do not seek formal state power, such as drug cartels, prison gangs, and paramilitaries. His first book, Making Peace in Drug Wars (Cambridge, 2018; published in Spanish as Violencia y Paz en la Guerra Contra las Drogas by Ediciones Uniandes, 2020 with the support of CISSR), shows how state crackdowns triggered armed conflict between drug cartels and the state in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, and how smarter policies can quell it. His second book, Criminal Leviathans: How Gangs Govern from Behind Bars, forthcoming at Cambridge, shows how mass incarceration and drug repression in Brazil, El Salvador, Colombia, and even the U.S. have fostered sophisticated  criminal shadow-governments in prisons and urban peripheries, that simultaneously defy and undergird the modern carceral state. In 2022 he organized and co-edited a tri-lingual Special Dossier on Criminal Governance in Latin America, at the Brazilian peer-reviewed journal Dilemas. He has written and consulted for UNODC, the Brookings Institute, the Small Arms Survey, and others. Lessing holds a PhD in Political Science and an MA in Economics from UC Berkeley, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanfaord. Prior to his graduate training, Lessing lived in Rio de Janeiro for five years as a Fulbright scholar and researcher for NGOs including Amnesty International, Oxfam, Justiça Global, and Viva Rio.