Social dinamics about the mass encarceration in Sao Paulo

The prison population in the State of São Paulo, Brazil, has marked increased over the past 15 years. If by mid-1990 there were around 50 prisons currently are 150 prisons, mostly in small towns, concentrating 30% of all prisoners in the country. This paper is based on works of participant observation and interviews with significant prison everyday life actors. It covers the changes in the dynamics of small cities who received prison units, especially the moral conflicts between residents and prisoners’ relatives who come to cities to join them or visit them. The prison expansion is characterized by a policy of decentralization and mass incarceration, though focused on crimes against property and drugs, young men from urban peripheries of large cities. Shared between prisons officers and the inmates, management of prisoners occurs in a peculiar way, allowing the identification of different positions occupied by inmates. Such sharing is given in general plan of relationships, ranging from conflict controlling even the actions of "correctional treatment", as is the case of educational policy, which education monitors take part of a socially differentiated group that constantly negotiates the execution of their work with both prison mangers and prisoners organization. At the same time, the constant movement of prisoners and their family through prisons to urban neighborhoods led to the dissemination of conduct codes by these spaces. The conclusions points to the recognition of new personages in the prisons’ dynamics:  such education monitors, such inmates relatives, these personages assume to performe "prison treatment" tasks , delegated formally or informally, also assuming the performance of rules and moralities that govern life in prisons nowadays.