Brazilian prison gangs in the light of Foucault and Goffman

Abstract

Within the approaches to public safety, and beyond it, about the issue of incarceration, Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman are references that usually are part of the dialogue. This article is an attempt to illustrate, through the concepts of total institution and disciplinary society, as certain theories should not be used in ‘pure’ way to evoke and denote aspects of a complex reality. For this initiative, the Brazilian reality is used as a starting point to understand the institutional dynamics of prisons, revealing the existence of emerging systems, not necessarily commune with the points made by Foucault (1999) and Goffman (2001).