‘Whose prisoners are these anyway?'

This chapter complements Sacha Darke in exploring the particularities and lessons that can be learned from a small group of prisons-the so-called Resocialisation Centres in Sao Paulo state, a variant of the APAC prisons in Minas Gerais state that he analyses. It examines the rise and fall from favour of the state-run CRs whose operation both challenged the dominant prison system but also aimed at its perfectability, in order to explore these issues of contested 'ownership' and the potential of the state to improve the 'moral performance' of its penal institutions. This analysis of the CRs, in contradistinction to both the mainstream prison system and its close relative, the APACs, raised questions about how 'the community', via organised civil society, in partnership with the state, can reassert some ownership of the criminal justice system, from which it is largely excluded.