With mounting international and regional pressure to combat organised crime, Brazil has sought to strengthen its domestic security strategies. However, some experts argue that the country’s greatest vulnerability lies within its own prison system, where criminal factions are not contained, but consolidated.
“In Brazil, prisons have become instruments of cohesion for criminal groups,” noted Roberto Uchôa de Oliveira Santos, a public security specialist and former employee of the civil and federal police forces in the country, while in conversation with Brazil Reports.
“Organised crime was born inside the prison system,” where new members were recruited, low-level criminals were promoted within criminal structures and gang identities were reaffirmed, he added.
This dynamic has proven structurally resilient, continuing to reproduce despite successive reform attempts. Prisons, in fact, are training grounds for organised crime “mercenaries” where “there is no difficulty recruiting as long as young men are being put in jail,” according to Santos.
Prisons-turned-recruitment centres
Groups including the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) and Comando Vermelho (CV) – which operate in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, respectively – are not only surviving, but expanding, despite many of their leaders being locked away.
What’s more: their origins in the prison system of the 1990s have not hindered their expansion.
Brazil’s history has been marked by penitentiary violence, which has demonstrated the role of the prison system in strengthening organised crime groups within prison walls, transcending incarceration to expand outside.
Spectacles of coordinated violence such as the 2006 “May Attacks”, where 74 penitentiaries in the state of São Paulo rebelled simultaneously while carrying out attacks against military bases, police stations and civilians, illustrate these phenomena.
Brazil’s prisons continue to feel the effect of mass incarceration policies, intensified under the 2006 Brazilian Drug Law which contributed to a surge in pre-trial detentions, punitive approaches to low-level drugs offences, the deterioration of rehabilitative programmes and overcrowding.
Criminal groups’ resilience is reinforced behind bars
While a large number of leaders of the PCC and CV remain behind bars, their illicit markets and industries continue to metastasise, converting the PCC into a transnational criminal group and the CV into an adaptable criminal force.
Even when leaders are transferred to high-security prisons, both criminal groups have a particular knack for expansion, though their modi operandi are starkly distinct, Santos highlighted.
Whereas the PCC utilises more insidious forms of violence, confronting the State is not to their benefit. The group, according to the expert, controls the “homicide tax” of targets in São Paulo, whereby they regulate and even reduce violence at their own will.
This enables the group to expand under the radar, in turn a highly-profitable pursuit as “great profits come from staying low-profile.” In favelas, this system dictates the way of life, from selling internet to providing water supply – irrespective of leaders’ imprisonment.
The group’s franchise-style structure – governed by semi-autonomous command cells known as sintonías – ensures that leadership is institutionalised rather than personalised. The PCC counts an estimated 40,000 initiated (“baptised”) members, along with a wider network of associates; each sintonía controls specific industries and markets, extending the group’s reach across sectors.
The CV, by contrast, operates on a far more territorial basis with an even flatter hierarchy, in which low-level leaders enjoy considerable independence.
These structures render decapitation or kingpin strategies ineffective, and make both groups exceptionally difficult to dismantle, Santos explained.
Police raids offer little relief as well: favelas across both Rio and São Paulo are practically untouched by state presence and are largely run by sintonías.
“No rehabilitation” programmes
While rehabilitation programmes exist in law and strategies to change the prison system are in place under the National Secretariat of Penal Policies (SENAPPEN), Santos revealed that results are yet to materialise: in reality, the prospect of leaving an organised crime group remains extremely low.
With a growing number of young men in prison for crimes such as drug-dealing offences, these groups are, rather counter-intuitively, regenerating within the prison walls.
Recent trends demonstrate that those imprisoned for drug-dealing offences are even promoted within criminal structures during their time in prison.
Prisons serve as a rallying force for both the PCC and CV, especially given the level of rivalry between the two criminal groups.
Santos revealed that criminal members are often advised to declare which group they belong to on arrest, emphasizing that Brazilian prisons are predominantly “CV prisons or PCC prisons” due to previous clashes between groups causing high levels of violence within prison walls.
This unspoken segregation reinforces criminal identities while pushing rehabilitation schemes to the margins.
“Rehabilitation for young men like this does not exist,” he pointed out, revealing that those imprisoned will likely reoffend as gang members without employment or educational opportunities outside. Young men, in fact, often turn to criminal activity to overcome socio-economic disadvantages.
Rafael Velasco Brandani, National Secretary for Penal Policies, echoed this concern, warning that “the lack of investment in infrastructure is another factor that strengthens criminal factions.
“It is essential to reform the prison system to provide non-violent or minor offenders with viable alternatives to incarceration,” he stressed.
Criminal governance means high impunity
Despite a 20% decrease in homicide rates and 2025 being described as Brazil’s safest year in a decade, these figures do not fully capture the entrenched reality of criminal governance across the country.
Impunity remains widespread due to entrenched corruption within various “industries, institutions and the financial system,” driven by profit; Santos noted that the digitalisation of the financial system has allowed these groups to mushroom.
While declining homicide rates are often celebrated, they risk obscuring more subtle forms of pragmatic violence by criminal groups that go unnoticed. According to his analysis, utilitarian violence allows the PCC to instrumentalise State structures as it pleases.
The PCC, for example, bribed the police to kill one of its enemies at the biggest airport in Brazil, in broad daylight. As per the analyst, this is the most stark example of the silent coercion with which the criminal group operates.
This is consistent with the rising number of police officers implicated in organised crime, as well as the growing presence of militias – vigilante groups composed largely of current and former police who have turned to contract killing – now spreading across the country.
“The PCC, for example, has a sintonía of ties, called the ‘sintonía dos gravatas’; they pay for college and university for marginalised people to become lawyers,” the analyst singled out. He added that the PCC finances the training and education required for the policemen, judges and prosecutors who work for them.
This covert level of investment, which is seemingly benevolent for under-privileged groups, is what makes the PCC such a formidable organised crime group.
Reform challenges
These cases illustrate how deeply criminal organisations can embed themselves within institutions, and raises a critical question: can meaningful reform occur while police corruption remains so pervasive?
One possible answer lies in the APAC-style prisons emerging in Brazil. These facilities operate independently of state and police control, reducing opportunities for corruption. Instead, the non-profit model depends on incarcerated individuals to lead their own rehabilitation.
Brazil’s major criminal factions have long since evolved from prison gangs into sophisticated organisations presiding over resilient criminal economies. Unlike Mexican cartels – whose power is often performed through periodic spectacles of violence and overt narco-propaganda – the PCC and CV operate with greater subtlety.
Camouflaged, these criminal networks proliferate in Brazil, while the country’s flailing prison system inadvertently continues to facilitate the cohesion and capacities of these groups.
Without structural reforms, Brazil’s prisons will remain incubators for organised crime, with consequences far beyond national borders.
Featured image: Segundo dados da Brigada Militar, o Presídio Central de Porto Alegre conta hoje com 4.193 detentos, quando sua capacidade estrutural é para 1.905 pessoas.
Author: Bernardo Jardim Ribeiro
Source: Sul21
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