Drawing on 28 years of police experience in Brazil, the author argues that the criminal justice system functions less as genuine justice and more as a modern sacrificial ritual that provides public catharsis by using offenders as scapegoats.

Economic critiques (Becker and Rothbard) both conclude that prison fails—either as costly waste or as injustice that leaves victims uncompensated—yet societies continue demanding “more cages” because of a deep psychological need for exemplary punishment.

True resolution requires shifting to victim-centered restitution (repaying what was taken, possibly through supervised work), which could satisfy both economic efficiency and the social need for accountability while actually addressing the harm done to victims.

The year was 2016. I was deputy commander of a Military Police battalion in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods of the capital of Pará—one of the poorest and most violent states in Brazil. At 3:40 in the morning, the radio broke into an intense exchange of dispatches, unusual for a Wednesday. The operations center gives me the picture: a sequestro relâmpago in progress, the “lightning kidnapping”: criminals take over the victim’s car at a traffic light and force cash withdrawals from ATMs. I head to the scene. It looked like a movie—negotiators, press, ambulances. The negotiation ran past sunrise, and at six o’clock the two kidnappers surrendered without hurting anyone. Both were 19 years old.

That same afternoon—to absolutely nobody’s surprise—they were already out. At the custody hearing, a procedure whose underlying goal, in practice, is to decarcerate (an ideology deeply rooted in the Brazilian judiciary), the judge basically asks whether the detainee was mistreated by the officers. No victim or police officer is heard. The accused walk free. Next case. The victims’ money, the trauma, the cost society paid to arrest the criminals safely? None of it matters.

That closed one more successful episode for the state: the police showed efficiency, the judge proved worthy of the robe, the press got its footage, the criminals gained notoriety with organized crime. The victims—that middle-aged couple coming home from their daughter’s birthday party—never received so much as a visit from a state psychologist.

I spent 28 years watching episodes of this macabre series called crime in Brazil. What I was watching has a name. I found it, years later, in the work of a French anthropologist. Before we get to him, though, two economists tried to solve this puzzle, without success.

Two Tests, One Failing Grade

Gary Becker, in his 1968 essay “Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach,” treated the criminal as a rational agent and asked what the “optimal” amount of crime for a........

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