This article analyzes, from a critical criminology perspective, the structural inefficiency of state punishment in combating modern slave labor, focusing on coffee production in Minas Gerais and its integration into the global market. Through an examination of Article 149 of the Brazilian Penal Code, Federal Supreme Court jurisprudence, and International Labour Organization conventions, it highlights the gap between legal norms and punitive practice. The study argues that punishment operates selectively, targeting local producers while protecting economically powerful actors, especially multinational corporations. Analysis of reports from Minas Gerais, especially the Fazenda Laranjeiras case, shows that the persistence of labor analogous to slavery is not due to isolated enforcement failures, but to its functional role in sustaining the socioeconomic order of a peripheral State oriented toward capital transfer to central economies.
This article advances the concept of delegitimated sovereignties to reconceptualise institutionalized gangs as non-state actors that exercise durable forms of governance while being systematically denied political legitimacy. Drawing on decolonial criminology and critical sovereignty studies, it challenges U.S.-centric paradigms that reduce gangs to social pathology while obscuring the state’s role in producing the conditions from which they emerge. Through a comparative analysis of Haiti, El Salvador, Brazil, and Chicago, the article shows how gangs govern marginalized communities yet are delegitimated through the discourses of crime, terrorism, and security, enabling militarization, mass incarceration, and states of exception. Distinguishing governance from legitimacy, the framework emphasizes the relational and contested nature of local recognition and argues for a decolonial criminology that interrogates the colonial production of political legitimacy and informal sovereignty.
This article challenges the widespread assumption that Marxist analyses of punishment are theoretically fragmented. Using Garland's paradigmatic formulation as a point of departure, it argues that the supposed split between Pašukanis’s commodity‑form account and Rusche–Kirchheimer’s labour‑market analysis reflects different conceptual entry points and expository aims rather than theoretical plurality, thereby clarifying the analytical level at which the dualism arises. Through a dialectical reconstruction grounded in textual analysis, the article shows how juridical equivalence (Pašukanis) and labour‑market discipline (Rusche–Kirchheimer) are articulated moments of the same value‑form logic linking state formation, commodity relations, police power and penal development. Although primarily theoretical, the article illustrates the contemporary salience of a unified framework by examining punitive modalities—priced governance, electronic monitoring, income‑indexed fines and predictive‑policing platforms—that reproduce equivalential logics under advanced capitalism.
This paper explores the elite interests sustaining the ongoing criminalization of human subsistence. Building on the related concepts of primitive accumulation, accumulation by dispossession, pacification, and enclosure, it explores how the dual enclosure of commons and commoners support the pacification of the poor through what I call illicit subsistences. Illicit subsistences are life-sustaining activities independent from wage-labor that become criminalized to facilitate accumulation by dispossession and increase dependence on capital and the state. To elaborate on these claims, I analyze wild harvesting in the Missouri Ozarks as an illicit subsistence. I do this by examining the historical origins of game laws introduced to Missouri by urban elite recreational sportsman before turning to the contemporary expansion and modern enforcement of game laws by Missouri Department of Conservation. I particularly look at ongoing enclosures supported by the use of dogs, big data, and propaganda as policing technologies to maintain a social order which favors the recreation of sportsman over the subsistence of the poor. This paper contributes to the enclosure literature a case study of historical and ongoing accumulation by dispossession as a state-project of pacification under the banner of environmental protection in an understudied region characterized by persistent poverty.
