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En av de beste artiklene jeg har lest på en stund er denne i Vanity Fair, om et fengselsfotballag som ble fengselsgjeng og til slutt byens mektigste mafia.

In the background was a crime rate in São Paulo that was among the highest in the world, and the fact that even as the city was remaking itself into a center of global business it was being transformed into an archipelago of innumerable little fortresses where a large population of the fortunate lived and worked in near-total isolation from the poor. The two transformations were related. It was not only that the poor were being abandoned by government but that the very need for government was being questioned by the elites. Armored cars, private guards, helicopters, and business jets. Walls and high-voltage fences. Cheap labor, filthy rivers, and private schools. Tax evasion. Yes, and the fullness of long-distance communication. Within the limits of comfort, global capital seemed to be seeking places where laws were almost a charade, and in São Paulo it was demonstrating that the connection that mattered was neither to the street nor to the state. For better or worse the pattern was driven by trends larger than Brazil. For better or worse national policies were helpless to stop it. No insight was required to understand that crime was a symptom of poverty and alienation. But these were problems that government programs could barely address, let alone solve, and so, predictably, in the 1990s, authorities in São Paulo started cracking down and getting tough on crime. Fading states are not without power. Arrests and convictions soared, and sentences grew longer. It was a popular policy in São Paulo, where people assumed that their streets would grow safer, as if crime were a finite problem, and violence was a predilection of some certain percentage of the population.

les gjerne hele greia.