Criminal Leviathans:

What happens when state repression strengthens the very criminal groups it aims to constrain? Under mass incarceration, sophisticated prison gangs have learned not only to organize inmate populations, but to project power onto the street, challenging state authority in ways both direct and oblique. From Brazil to El Salvador, prison gangs have transformed the state’s disciplinary institutions into headquarters for building drug empires, organizing street crime, and orchestrating terror attacks capable of bringing the state to heel. At the same time, they govern—providing basic order and physical safety for millions of low-income residents across vast informal peripheries neglected by governments. These "criminal leviathans" have pacified some of Latin America's most violent cities, including Medellín and São Paulo, funding robust governance out of illicit drug profits inaccessible to the state. The fruit of decades of resorting to repressive strategies to address underlying social problems, these criminal shadow-governments simultaneously defy and undergird the neoliberal state, in the process creating a stubborn specter of non-state authority and destabilizing the foundations of democratic politics. 

 Drawing on ethnographic observations and quantitative data from case studies in Brazil, El Salvador, Colombia, Criminal Leviathans lays bare the dynamics that fuel the rise of prison gangs, the misguided state policies that facilitate their growth, and the possibilities for reform. In tracing the ways that criminals govern—both their own illicit organizations and civilian populations in which they are embedded—Benjamin Lessing also raises fundamental questions about the inherent vulnerabilities of state authority and the future of mass incarceration at a moment when the deterrent capacities of the carceral state have been exhausted.

Read published work from and related to this book project:

• "Criminal Governance in Latin America: Prevalence and Correlates", (with Andres Uribe, Noah Schouela, and Elayne Stecher), Perspectives on Politics, FirstView: August 12, 2025. 

• "Gang rule: Understanding and Countering Criminal Governance", (with Chris Blattman, Gustavo Duncan, and Santiago Tobón) , The Review of Economic Studies,  92(3), May 2025, 1497–1531,

• "Conceptualizing Criminal Governance", Perspectives on Politics, Published Online July 2020.

• “Legitimacy in Criminal Governance: Managing a Drug Empire from Behind Bars” (with Graham Denyer Willis), American Political Science Review, Published Online February, 2019.

• “Counterproductive Punishment: How Prison Gangs Undermine State Authority”, Rationality and Society, August 2017, pp.257-297.

•  “The Danger of Dungeons: Prison Gangs and Incarcerated Militant Groups” in Small Arms Survey 2010: Gangs, Groups, and Guns. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

• "Inside out: The challenge of prison-based criminal organizations”   Brookings, Washington D.C., November 2016.