Crime in Latin America:

By developing a culturally sensitive life-course criminology, Crime in Latin America (CRIMLA) aims to understand the role of family, employment, culture and the state in criminal trajectories and careers in Latin America. Combining criminological theory, with institutional, cultural, and narrative studies, the objective is to develop research and theorizing from the Global South.

CRIMLA will expand generate unique theorisation, by doing 300 repeated qualitative life-story interviews with incarcerated women and men in six Latin American countries: Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Honduras.

Crime in Latin America (CRIMLA) is funded by the Research Council of Norway Grant for scientific renewal and development in research that can help to advance the international research front.

CRIMLA, headed by professor in criminology Sveinung Sandberg, explores the overall research question ‘What is the best way to theorize and understand the criminal careers and life-course trajectories of Latin American offenders?’

Fieldwork in Brazil and Latin America is led by David R. Goyes.

Brazil and Colombia

Brazil and Colombia) have traits that set them apart from the rest in the continent. Brazil and Colombia are ‘high-crime societies in South America’ (Sandberg, 2021, p. 4). By 2019, Brazil had the highest numbers of inmates in prison in Latin America and Colombia was third on that category (Nuñovero Cisneros, 2019). Throughout the past decades, Brazil and Colombia have had similar levels of prison overcrowding (Carranza, 2012). High levels of criminality, high imprisonment rates and prison overpopulation make Brazilian and Colombian inmates comparable because: (1) the system that captured them tends to absorb significant segments of the countries’ populations, and (2) the material conditions of residence in prison are similar.

Brazil

State strenght: After the military coup finished in 1985, the country reconstructed its democratic structures and gained sovereignty of its territory (de Carvalho et al., 2020). However, with the arrival of Jair Bolsonaro in 2019, the state entered in a process of fragmentation where paramilitary groups started taking control of significant portions of its territory (Crespo, 2019).

Employment rates: In the early 1990s, Brazil had a low unemployment rate (6, 3%) with a temporary peak in 2010 (10.2%) but a normalisation in 2014 (6.4%). Nevertheless, since 2016, when right-wing presidents rule the country, the rate of unemployment has rocketed to a historic 13.67% in 2020.

Colombia

State strenght: Colombia has been considered a failed state during most of its history. Although fragmentation, security and economic growth indexes report a more optimistic scenario, the improvement has occurred only in some regions of the country (Alonso Niño et al., 2020). Paramilitary forces (Higginbottom, 2005), guerrilla groups (Agulera Peña, 2014; McClanahan et al., 2019; Offstein, 2003), and civil society independent from the state have controlled significant portions of Colombia during the past decades (MacManus & Ward, 2015). The peace agreements between the government and the paramilitaries in 2005 (for an analysis see Counter, 2018) and between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia in 2016 (see Goyes, 2015) somewhat transformed the fragmentation of the state. Nevertheless, current inmates had their life trajectories affected by the lack of territorial state sovereignty.

Employment rate: Colombia has had a high unemployment rate historically: by the early 1990s it was 10.12% reaching a historic high in 20.52% in 2000, but a diminution since the arrival of right-wing former president Alvaro Uribe (8.30% in 2015). The recent revival of paramilitary forces in Colombia, added to the pandemic played a role in the increase of unemployment to 15.44% in 2020

Publications

Music (forthcoming)