Brazil’s Operation Car Wash exposed one of the largest corruption scandals in world history. The investigation uncovered a multibillion-dollar bribery scheme and implicated at least sixteen Latin American presidents. For the first time in Brazilian history, powerful political and economic elites joined the predominantly young, Black, working-class men who constitute most of the country’s 900,000-person prison population, the third largest in the world. But what began as a movement to criminalize elites ended up intensifying punishment for the racialized poor. How did this happen?

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Car Wash Legacies examines this paradox by focusing on the lawyers who mobilized and resisted these changes. Based on over a year of fieldwork in two Brazilian cities, the project draws on over 100 in-depth interviews with elite legal professionals, approximately 100 hours of on-site observation, and extensive document analysis.

I show that Car Wash prosecutors developed an anti-elite crime project over the course of their careers and sought to institutionalize them through legislative reform. By spearheading bills influenced by global anticorruption norms and American criminal law, they promoted innovations such as plea bargaining that expanded punitive capacity while weakening procedural safeguards for all criminalized populations. In contrast, progressive defense attorneys mobilized European legal doctrine, critical criminology, and the memory of the dictatorship to resist these reforms.

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Tracing the historical formation of these competing legal projects since the 1988 post-dictatorship Constitution, Car Wash Legacies situates contemporary disputes within broader trajectories of legal globalization. The research follows these struggles across multiple sites—including congressional hearings, media debates, academic production, courtrooms, and informal negotiations with politicians—to show how penal ideas travel and change. I show how the interplay of alliances, rivalries, and unequal resources available within the penal field interacted with the historical characteristics of a carceral state that has always punished the racialized poor to produce the unexpected outcome of an investigation that initially promised to “democratize punishment.”

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In a global context marked by widespread outrage at the social harms produced by economic and political elites, Car Wash Legacies demonstrates how efforts to expand punitive power against the powerful may ultimately reinforce existing inequalities, particularly in Global South contexts shaped by enduring colonial legacies of racial and economic domination.