Forensic Genetics and Mass Incarceration: Widening the Net of the DNA Databases in Brazil

Over the past decades, genetic profiling technologies have had substantial impacts on criminal justice systems worldwide, driving a broad research agenda around their social, political, and bioethical consequences. By analyzing the Brazilian forensic DNA database, this chapter shifts the investigative gaze of this field of study, mainly focused on the US-Western Europe axis, toward the country with the highest incarceration rates in absolute terms in the so-called Global South. Against a background marked by the over-representation of black and marginalized populations in the prison system, the radical precariousness of correctional facilities, and the widespread use of police violence as an instrument for producing criminal evidence, forensic DNA databases were officially presented in Brazil as a strategy for the “techno-scientific modernization” of the country’s criminal justice system. Drawing on interviews with both forensic geneticists and prisoners, official documents, and statistical information on the Banco Nacional de Perfis Genéticos (National Database of Genetic Profiles), I demonstrate the specific ways in which forensic genetics articulates with the historical inequalities and institutional violence that guide and qualify the ordinary functioning of the Brazilian criminal justice system.