K. DRYBREAD University of Colorado Boulder Conjuring criminals: Sympathetic magic and bureaucratic paperwork in a Brazilian juvenile prison ABSTRACT By compiling ofﬁcial paperwork, bureaucrats in institutional settings effectively make their clients into the particular “types” of subjects best suited to preestablished institutional interventions. The efﬁcacy of such paperwork stems from bureaucrats’ unspoken—and perhaps unacknowledged—belief in sympathetic magic, or a person’s ability to transform another person or object by working on a representation of them (in this case, their institutional case ﬁle). The practice of sympathetic magic via ofﬁcial paperwork is particularly pervasive in disciplinary settings, like prisons, where institutional imperatives and cultural biases encourage professionals to substitute documentation for face-to-face interactions with their clients. How such magic works in practice becomes evident in an examination of case ﬁles belonging to adolescents incarcerated in a Brazilian juvenile prison during the ﬁrst decade of the 21st century. In this case, each document added to an incarcerated individual’s case ﬁle contributes to transforming him into an irredeemable criminal. [bureaucracy, magic, documents, documentation, crime, criminalization, prison, Brazil] Ao compendiar documentação oﬁcial, burocratas em ambientes institucionais acabam por fazer de seus clientes “tipos” particulares de sujeitos mais adequados para intervenções institucionais. A eﬁciência de tal documentação vem de crenças que não são ditas—e talvez nem reconhecidas—de tais burocratas na mágica simpatética, ou na capacidade de uma pessoa de transformar outra ou um objeto por meio de sua representação (nesse caso, sua documentação institucional). A prática da mágica simpatética via papelada oﬁcial é particularmente generalizada em ambientes disciplinares como prisões, onde imperativos institucionais e preconceitos culturais dão força aos proﬁssionais para substituir documentação pela interação pessoal com seus clientes. O modo como tal mágica ocorre na prática se torna evidente quando se examinam casos de adolescentes encarcerados numa unidade de internação brasileira durante a primeira década do século XXI. Nesse caso, cada documento acrescentado ao caso de um “adolescente infrator” contribui para transformá-lo em um criminoso irrecuperável. [burocracia, mágica, documentos, documentação, crime, criminalização, prisão, Brasil] V anildo’s eyes were drawn to the wallet. 1 It was sitting on the dashboard of a parked van: thick, dark brown, tempt- ing. The 14-year-old tried to push the wallet’s contents from his mind, but he’d noticed that the driver’s side door of the van was unlocked. After surveying the block, he circled the vehicle and made a grab for the wallet. Before he could shut the van door, a police ofﬁcer had shoved him to the ground and was frisking his pockets. Some ﬁve weeks later, Vanildo stood trial for theft. He was sentenced to 24 hours of community service and ordered to fre- quent school and to attend weekly counseling sessions with a court- appointed social worker. He didn’t comply—even after the social worker visited his home to warn his parents that their son would wind up behind bars if he continued to defy the court. The entire family scoffed at the warning. Four months later, the sentencing judge responded to Vanildo’s obvious show of contempt by sending the teen to the Center for Adolescent Social Adjustment (CASA), the local juvenile prison, for a 45-day stay. Vanildo ended up spending three years inside CASA—and committing murder. A superﬁcial account of Vanildo’s trajectory would afﬁrm the commonly held belief that kids who are imprisoned alongside more seasoned offenders inevitably become schooled in crime. During the three years he was incarcerated, nearly all of Vanildo’s cellmates were serving time for a violent offense: armed robbery, murder, or rape. One could easily assume that under their tutelage, Vanildo expanded his criminal network and honed his criminal skills to the point he could comfortably branch into new genres of crime (Bayer, Hjalmarson, and Pozen 2009). But long conversations with Vanildo and his cellmates have taught me that too strong a focus on the social experience of incarceration (Cullen, Johnson, and Nagin 2011) can exaggerate the role of peer inﬂuence on those who become more deeply involved in crime while in prison. These young men insisted to me that their peers exerted far less inﬂuence on their criminal trajectories than did the paperwork prison ofﬁcials used to chart their individual involvement with the criminal justice system. AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 49, No. 1, pp. 104–117, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. © 2022 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/amet.13065