The Primeiro Comando do Capital (PCC) is a São Paulo prison gang thatsince the 1990s has expanded into the most powerful criminal network inBrazil. Karina Biondi’s rich ethnography of the PCC is uniquely informedby her insider-outsider status. Prior to his acquittal, Biondi’s husband wasincarcerated in a PCC-dominated prison for several years. During the periodof Biondi’s intense and intimate visits with her husband and her extensivefieldwork in prisons and on the streets of São Paulo, the PCC effectively controlledmore than 90 percent of São Paulo’s 147 prison facilities.

Available for the first time in English, Biondi’s riveting portrait of thePCC illuminates how the organisation operates inside and outside of prison,creatively elaborating on a decentered, non-hierarchical, and far-reachingcommand system. This system challenges both the police forces againstwhich the PCC has declared war and the methods and analytic concepts traditionallyemployed by social scientists concerned with crime, incarceration,and policing. Biondi posits that the PCC embodies a “politics of transcendence,”a group identity that is braided together with, but also autonomousfrom, its decentralized parts. Biondi also situates the PCC in relation toredemocratization and rampant socioeconomic inequality in Brazil, as wellas to counter-state movements, crime, and punishment in the Americas.

Karina Biondi holds a doctorate in social anthropology from the Federal University of São Carlos in São Paulo.

Editor and translator John F. Collins is associate professor of anthropology at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the author of Revolt of the Saints: Memory and Redemption in the Twilight of Brazilian Racial Democracy.