Evasion: prison escapes and the predicament of incarceration in Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

This article examines Brazil’s project of incarceration through the figure of evasion—the act of escaping prison custody, often temporarily. Evasion traces a path across the borders of captivity and freedom, as people routinely flee confinement, only to return of their own accord. This path offers a site to rethink Brazil’s project of incarceration and the forms of life that emerge for those people, largely Black, whose lives are marked by intimate and constant contact with the criminal justice system. I position both prisons and evasion as part of an ongoing history of, and tension between, Black fugitive life and emancipation in Brazil and the Americas. I argue that while evasion offers no clear exit from the punitive edge of the law, it produces another mode of inhabiting the time and territory of incarceration. Escapes open a set of possibilities through which those imprisoned in Rio de Janeiro fracture the formal logic of a sentence as a linear, “progressive” process, thereby producing other rhythms of confinement. With a focus on two incarcerated Black travestis, I outline some of these evasive movements and demonstrate the fault lines that they reveal—both within the prison system’s own claims to legitimacy and in the concepts that we bring to bear on incarceration.