Crisis went up; we cracked down; crisis don’t come down

incarceration, lethality, and the limits of prison fix in the labor crisis

Abstract

This article investigates contemporary transformations in forms of punishment, focusing on torture, lethality in prisons, punishment outside of prison, and forms of urban confinement, relating them to the crisis of labor and capitalist social reproduction. We present a summary of the formulations developed in our master's research, which focused on the implementation of the so-called citizen public security policy Pacto Pela Vida (PPV) between 2007 and 2022 by the state of Pernambuco. To develop this research, we conducted fieldwork at the Patronato Penitenciário de Pernambuco on a weekly basis over five months, in addition to monitoring visits to different prison units in the state. Our main conclusions reveal that, despite its focus on social crime prevention, the PPV produced precarious social policies, high incarceration rates, torturous conditions of imprisonment and an increase in lethal state violence. Based on these findings, we developed an analysis that combines increased disposability (denoted by prison lethality, police violence, and the degradation of life, reduced to survival) and the impossibility of resocialization through work (denoted by the low rate of formal and informal employment contracts among prison survivors) to find, on the scale of totality, the relative and absolute expulsion of living labor from the productive process, driven by the increase in the organic composition of capital as the basis of the crisis of capitalist society.