Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that evangelical Christian networks function as penal infastructure in Brazil. Through this framework of infrastructure, it demonstrates that evangelicals are increasingly entangled within the everyday governance and materiality of the nation's carceral project.

Paper long abstract:

This paper contends that evangelical Christian networks increasingly function as penal infrastructure in Brazil. Since the 1990s, the scale and scope of evangelical involvement in the criminal justice system have grown significantly. One clear result is that the capillary relationships which constitute Christian social life now mobilise and co-ordinate resources - food, paint, electricity, water, clothing, and healthcare - within the prison system. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the prison system of Rio de Janeiro from 2014-18, I argue that evangelical networks constitute penal infrastructure to the extent that 1) they gather, co-ordinate and invest resources into various aspects of prison life and governance; 2) they come to support or even substitute the basic processes of punishment; and 3) their labor shifts from emergency responses to more durable support systems. This shift towards infrastructure is ongoing and uneven, marked by conflict and critiqued by evangelicals themselves, as well as other actors within the prison system. Nevertheless, it continues to reshape the Brazilian project of incarceration. The paper also makes a broader claim for thinking with and through infrastructure as a point of entry into questions of religion and punishment in Latin America.