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This article situates the past decade's boom in Brazil's prison population in the context of the country's enduring system of racial domination. Prison demographics are analyzed in relation to the role that race and gender play in configuring both the regime of legality' and contemporary urban war against particular territories and bodies in Brazil. The article also pays close attention to gendered captivities of disenfranchised black women trapped as 'mules' in the underground drug economy. Ethnographic fieldwork in a SAo Paulo women's prison provides the basis for a critique of the regime of punishment that structures black lives in the neoliberal city.

This article examines the challenges of conceptualizing Black existence within the realm of what has been defined as civil society. Rather than entering the Afro-pessimism versus Afro-optimism debate, its aim is to provide ethnographic material to further an understanding of the (im)possibilities for redressing Black injury from racialized categories such as law, justice, and humanity. How might we understand mourning and grieving when the racial alterity of the Black subject positions "it" outside the domains of citizenship and humanity? This double negation-neither human nor citizen-is the basis from which the article provides a critique of the racial terror perpetrated by police-linked death squads in Sao Paulo, Brazil.