Necropolitics and prison management during the pandemic in Brazil

Abstract

In the midst of the pile of corpses produced daily by the prison system, the under-reporting strategy adopted by the branches of government has been successful in the face of the deliberate blindness of the authorities and the smiling silence of public opinion. Prisons in Brazil are necropolitical devices, where the tendency is extermination. It's letting people die. And where thousands already die, tens of thousands could die, without this meaning much more to the institutions than adding a zero to the statistics. Prison officers, who have been immensely affected by the pandemic, are also dying, which also appears to be an effect of this necropolitical project.