Does Outlaw Love Lead to Prison Time? Paths of Women Convicted of Drug Trafficking in Brazil

• Author: Ludmila Ribeiro,Natália Martino
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X221115681
• Published date: 01 September 2022
• Date: 01 September 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X221115681

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 246, Vol. 49 No. 5, September 2022, 200–216

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X221115681

© 2022 Latin American Perspectives

200

Does Outlaw Love Lead to Prison Time?

Paths of Women Convicted of Drug Trafficking in Brazil

by

Ludmila Ribeiro and Natália Martino

Translated by

Heather Hayes

The results of a multimethod study carried out in the largest female penitentiary in the

state of Minas Gerais challenge the premise, often mentioned in the Brazilian literature,

that women arrested for drug trafficking have been led to criminality by male influence.

They indicate that, while present in the narratives provided by incarcerated women, male

influence is not the main reason for their involvement in drug trafficking. Gender, pov-

erty, structural racism, and the selectivity of the criminal justice system are intertwined

in the incarceration of women for drug trafficking in this Brazilian prison.

Os resultados de um estudo multimétodo realizado na maior penitenciária feminina do

estado de Minas Gerais desafiam a premissa, muitas vezes mencionada na literatura

brasileira, de que mulheres presas por tráfico de drogas têm sido levadas à criminalidade

por influência masculina. Indicam que, embora presente nas narrativas fornecidas pelas

mulheres encarceradas, a influência masculina não é o principal motivo de seu envolvim-

ento no tráfico de drogas. Gênero, pobreza, racismo estrutural e a seletividade do sistema

de justiça criminal se entrelaçam no encarceramento de mulheres por tráfico de drogas

neste presídio brasileiro.

Keywords: Female imprisonment, Drug trafficking, Brazil, Outlaw love,

Intersectionality

Female imprisonment has increased exponentially in Brazil in recent

decades, making the country fourth in the world in terms of incarceration rates:

48 of every 100,000 women are behind bars (Infopen, 2017). Studies are urgently

needed to better understand this phenomenon, with a special focus on women

arrested for drug trafficking given that they make up 64.5 percent of the incar-

cerated female population whereas men arrested for drug trafficking make up

only 30 percent of incarcerated men (Infopen, 2017). This article aims to uncover

the backgrounds of women who have been convicted of drug trafficking and

are doing time in the largest female prison in Minas Gerais. The literature relat-

ing to female imprisonment is limited compared with studies of male impris-

onment (Lemgruber, 1999; Soares, 2002), but interest in it is growing (Lourenço

Ludmila Ribeiro is an associate professor of sociology at the Universidade Federal de Minas

Gerais, and Natália Martino is a doctoral student in political science at that university. Both are

researchers at the university’s Center for Crime and Public Safety Studies. Heather Hayes is a

translator living in Quito, Ecuador.

1115681LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X221115681Ribeiro and Martino/WOMEN AND DRUG TRAFFICKING IN BRAZIL

research-article2022

Ribeiro and Martino/WOMEN AND DRUG TRAFFICKING IN BRAZIL 201

and Alvarez, 2018), especially with regard to how women end up involved in

the criminal world (Diniz, 2015). These studies mostly revolve around the idea

that women become involved in crime through the influence of their romantic

partners (Queiroz, 2015; Varella, 2017). This narrative of amor bandido (outlaw

love) (Pimentel, 2008) is repeated by those working in the criminal justice sys-

tem to explain the growing rates of female imprisonment for drug trafficking

(Ribeiro and Lopes, 2019).

But is it true? This is the question that this article seeks to answer. We draw

information from the literature on intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989) to unveil

how gender, poverty, structural racism, and criminal justice selectivity are

intertwined in the incarceration of women for drug trafficking (Gonzalez and

Hasenbalg, 1982; Crenshaw, 1989; Davis, 2016; Gonzalez, 2019; Nascimento,

2019). Then, we test the hypothesis that intersectionality and not outlaw love

could be a determining factor in women's getting involved in illegality with

data collected at the Complexo Penitenciário Feminino Estevão Pinto (formerly

the Penitenciária Industrial Estevão Pinto and hereafter the PIEP). The results

reflect that male influence, while present in the narratives provided by incar-

cerated women, is not the main reason for their involvement in drug traffick-

ing. Instead, it is gender inequality that can only be understood if socioeconomic

and racial issues are taken into account.

FEMALE CRIMINALITY: A CENTURY OF GENDER-BASED

EXPLANATIONS

The idea of intersectionality was developed by Crenshaw (1989), who identi-

fied a tension between identity movements and dominant conceptions of ine-

qualities based on social class, suggesting that gender and race marginalized

certain groups and argued that these conceptions would have to be emptied of

meaning to be overcome. For her, the problem for identity movements was not

the difficulty of transcending differences but the impossibility of admitting

intragroup heterogeneity and therefore that gender, race, and social class were

markers of identity that had to be considered together rather than separately.

The attempt to bring this analysis into areas of scientific production is nothing

new, but challenges continue. Angela Davis’s (1981) Women, Race & Class pro-

posed intersectionality in the United States, and in Brazil Leila Gonzalez had

been leading such discussions since the late 1970s (see Gonzalez, 2019). From

these works, we have extracted insights on why a specific group of women—

young, black, and poor—is increasingly populating Brazilian prisons.

Gonzalez (2019) describes the historical construction of the black woman,

made into a slave and a maid, subjected to the duties of guaranteeing white

women’s leisure and white men's sexual lust, which was satisfied by ongoing

rape. For Nascimento (2019), this colonial past persists. After slavery, it was the

black women who ended up offering their domestic service work on the streets

of big cities (Franklin, 2016). Therefore what we see today as “modern” is a

legacy of the slave past, since it is the black domestic workers who give white

women the opportunity to enter the labor market (Hirata, 2015).