The prison without bars

therapeutic communities and transincarceration

Abstract

In 2008, the seminar “Depois do Grande Encarceramento” (After the Great Incarceration) sought to understand and overcome the surge of imprisonment in Brazil. Almost two decades later, this editorial argues that the phenomenon now intensifying and reshaping that surge is transcarceration—the expansion of punitive logic through institutions that present themselves as alternatives to prison. Drawing on Alessandro De Giorgi, it contends that the Brazilian case differs fundamentally from that of the United States: whereas California was court-ordered to reduce its prison population in Brown v. Plata (2011), Brazil not only widens the carceral net but produces an exponential increase in electronic monitoring—from 6,027 people in 2016 to 129,810 in 2025—while shifting or expanding confinement into therapeutic communities that operate without judicial oversight, despite the deinstitutionalization initiated by Resolution 487/2023 of the National Council of Justice.