page 143 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 143 8 Rioting Struggles in Brazil: Prison Gangs, Staf and Criminal Justice Hegemony Vitor Dieter Prison riots, criminological theories and hegemony in the Brazilian context The orderliness of prison regimes is a central theme of criminological literature and continues to have great historical importance in the feld. Yet, despite riots generating academic interest into prison (Sparks et al, 1996), riots as a phenomenon themselves have generally attracted rather less theoretical attention (Adams, 1992). This is partly refected by the view that riots are perceived as a pathology within the system, an outcome of disorder, either caused by prisoners (Fleisher and Decker, 2001) or the authorities (Boin and Rattray, 2004). However, as I will argue, that might not necessarily be the case. Instead of the order/disorder dyad that has predominated since the era of the Chicago School (Whyte, 1943), in this chapter I argue that riots can be understood as part of the hegemony of the prison apparatus – that is, an aspect that reveals its central functioning mechanisms, rather than representing an exception to it. The argument here draws upon results from three case studies in Brazil that discuss the dynamics of prison riots, their potential causes and perceived outcomes. The work of Useem and Kimball (1991, 1987) and Salla (2006; Adorno and Salla, 2007) are key references to understand prison riots and their specifcity in Brazil – one emanating from a North American right-realist perspective and the others from the Brazilian context. In their analysis of a series of riots occurring in the United States, Useem and Kimball (1991) found that a common cause of prison riots was a systemic type of crisis that stemmed from lack of adequate administrative control. In their view,