Discourses on Youth, Violence, and Crime in Cape Verde

Cape Verde’s economy has grown steadily during the last two decades, with an annual growth rate of around 5 to 10 percent. The solid growth of its GNP, a consequence of the opening of the economy initiated a couple of years before Cape Verde’s political transition from a one-party state to a multiparty representational democracy in 1991, has improved the life of many islanders, but it has also increased the disparity of incomes (see Zoettl Reference Zoettl2014). The increasing spatial segregation of the urban population of Mindelo and, especially, the capital city of Praia epitomizes this social disequilibrium (see Lima Reference Lima, Silva, de Pina and Monteiro2012). Notwithstanding a general improvement of a number of social indicators (literacy rate, access to basic and higher education, public health, etc.), unemployment remains high and poverty rates even increased, despite all the economic growth, over the course of the 1990s (European Commission 2005).

As a consequence, emigration, a traditional strategy of social mobility (it is estimated that around half a million Cape Verdeans live abroad) continues to be an aspiration for many, particularly young islanders. Cape Verde is a young country, not only politically, but also with regard to its demographic structure: the average age is well below thirty and half of the population is younger than twenty years old (INE 2010:18). While educational opportunities have improved significantly (Praia and Mindelo are home to a number of universities today), a severely limited labor market makes many young Cape Verdeans struggle with their present and future. Youth unemployment is especially high in the urban centers. ^{Footnote 3} In a country with a nearly complete lack of natural resources (apart from its beauty), its biggest resource—its youth—has thus become also one of its prime areas of concern.

As scholars have noted, public discourse in Cape Verde frequently refers to the “crisis of youth” (Martins & Fortes Reference Martins and Fortes2011:17). ^{Footnote 4} The archipelago’s young population, as Martins and Fortes observe, “has turned into a symptom as much as an agent of social and moral panic, charged with being lazy and irresponsible, and contributing to the spread of new ‘social evils’ within the traditionally harmonious Cape Verdean society” (2011:17). Youth violence associated with urban gangs (whose members are called “thugs” on the island of Santiago, alluding to the U.S. background of some of the earliest gang leaders) has become one of the topics of the day in Praia and Mindelo. While politicians, media, and citizens alike offer a variety of explanations and possible remedies for the rise in youth offending, there are very few empirical studies that allow for more than a superficial understanding of the situation (but see, for instance, Bordonaro Reference Bordonaro2012b; Cardoso Reference Cardoso, Pureza, Roque and Cardoso2012; Lima Reference Lima, Silva, de Pina and Monteiro2012).

As a result, the state’s internal security policies since the mid-2000s resemble a shot in the dark, primarily resting on and executed by the country’s hastily modernized security forces, and based on an overall strategy of what is designated locally as “zero tolerance” (tolerância zero). The local media generally subscribe to and reinforce public discourses on law and order, denouncing state institutions for their alleged laxness, or alternatively, praising the police and the judiciary for their “crackdown” on juvenile offenders, as exemplified by the following clipping from a newspaper report:

Popular crime theories, however, only partly corroborate such discourses on “zero tolerance.” In a “Study on Crime in Cape Verde” (“Estudo sobre a criminalidade em Cabo Verde”) undertaken by the Cape Verdean Drug Repression Commission (Comissão de Coordenação de Combate à Droga, CCCD) in cooperation with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), law enforcement officers and “Cape Verdean society” were asked for their opinions on, among other topics, “crime, its causes and prevention.” Of the 1,185 officers interviewed, the majority identified the main causes as the “use of drugs,” “unemployment,” “lack of education,” “lack of severe punishment of delinquents” and “family problems” (UNODC 2007a:15). The opinion of the officers coincides, by and large, with that of the general population—of which 62 percent in São Vicente and 72 percent in Praia stated that they considered it to be “very likely” or “likely” that their home would be broken into within the next twelve months (UNODC 2007b:61). Like the officers, the majority cited “unemployment,” the “use of drugs,” “lack of education” and “family problems” as the main causes of crime, and also named “poverty” as an important factor (2007b:64).

In what follows, I will investigate two of the above cited theories on the causes of crime and the discourses pertaining to it—“family problems” and “use of drugs”—as well as the relevance of a perceived “lack of severe punishment, ” and compare these supposed causal factors with the experiences and narratives of imprisoned juvenile gang members from Praia and Mindelo. These findings are based mainly on research undertaken during two fieldwork periods of three months each in 2012–13 and 2013–14. Research was carried out in low-income neighborhoods of Praia (Achada de Santo António area) and Mindelo (Ribeira Bote area) and in the prisons of Praia (São Martinho) and Mindelo (Ribeirinha). Research included twenty interviews with gang members (of which one was female) aged sixteen to just under thirty in Praia (5) and Mindelo (15), and a large number of informal interviews with youths from marginalized neighborhoods in both cities. The majority of inmates interviewed were referred to me by their friends, either from the bairro (neighborhood) or from within prison, which made it easier to establish a relation of trust. Interviews were conducted in English (with gang members who had been deported from the U.S.), Portuguese (with those who were fluent in this language), or else Cape Verdean Creole. Prison interviews were loosely structured and concentrated on the life history of the interviewee, the process of entering the gang and the dynamics of gang life (see Zoettl Reference Zoettl2015), and the inmate’s experiences with state institutions, particularly the judiciary and the police. ^{Footnote 5}

Access to both prisons was authorized by the Ministry of Justice through the director general of the prison administration. While I was not able to carry out my fieldwork in São Martinho prison without hindrance (see Zoettl Reference Zoettl2014), I was granted unrestricted access to the prisoners of Ribeirinha. Most comments of prisoners that are quoted below therefore came from young offenders from the island of São Vicente. However, the research I had carried out in the streets of Praia (and the informal interviews conducted there) reinforced what I learned from the young inmates of Mindelo.

Broken Homes: Youth, Family, and the State

When one is talking about “youth delinquency” and “youth violence,” it is always worth emphasizing that young people themselves suffer various types of violence while they are growing up. In the case of Cape Verde, the sociologist Katia Cardoso describes a “hierarchization of the visibility and of the severity of violence” that urban gang members inflict and sustain, with the acts perpetrated by the so-called thugs receiving much “stronger social reprobation than other manifestations of violence, namely those within the family.” As Cardoso points out, incidents of family violence frequently victimize “the same youths who are members of groups of thugs and agents of mugging [kasubódi]” (2012:37).

Indeed, the prevalence of domestic violence in Cape Verdean households has been the subject of a number of studies (see, e.g., Fernandes & Fonseca Reference Fernandes and da Silveira Fonseca2012; Rosabal Reference Rosabal2010; Silva Reference Silva2009). In a study of the Cape Verdean Institute for Minors, street children named “members of the family” as the predominant agents of the violence they suffered (ICM 2005:37), and family violence in particular was cited as one of the reasons that children make the decision to live on the streets of Mindelo (Bordonaro Reference Bordonaro2012a:417). A recent UNICEF report (2011) on children and adolescents in Cape Verde highlights the problem of sexual abuse and exploitation.

In public discourse, it is primarily a supposed lack of parental supervision and an unstable family background in general that are blamed for the inclination of adolescents to “go astray.” In a 2008 study on “youth and conflict with the law” commissioned by the Ministry of Justice, for instance, the authors remark that

Indeed, a number of my interviewees in the prisons of Mindelo and Praia came from what are frequently called, in Portuguese, “destructured” or “dysfunctional” families (famílias desestruturadas/disfuncionais)—that is, “broken homes,” or families that do not correspond to the model of the “proper” or “intact” nuclear family. Some of my interviewees grew up in the absence of either their biological mother or father; others spent most of their adolescence in the families of relatives such as grandmothers, grandfathers, and aunts. One prisoner, sentenced to eleven years for homicide, reported that he had “never spent more than three hours with [his] mom, out there.” Three had lived on the street at some point, and one had been sexually abused at the age of ten. Other inmates spoke of parents who had apparently lost control over their children. One interviewee said that even at age eleven, “my father was afraid of me.”

The above interviewee was imprisoned at the age of sixteen and sentenced to a six-year term, for two incidents of “mugging,” as he reported. Since he was only sixteen, his life experience seemed remarkable and made him look back on his own childhood as if it were something of a distant past, claiming, for instance, that “it was an unhappy childhood. Disturbed. I was a very disturbed child. Nobody ever took any pains to understand me. And so I led my life the way I pleased . . .”. Nevertheless, other interviewees did grow up with their biological mother or father (or both), or did not experience their upbringing in the homes of relatives as problematic or traumatic in any way. The majority also enjoyed the support of their families in prison, being visited by close family members and receiving meals (in Ribeirinha) or small amounts of money that allowed them to pay for basic necessities that the prison did not provide. Family support was indeed the only regular support they received, apart from the limited moral and financial aid given by imprisoned fellow gang members to their newly arrived colleagues. According to one inmate,

Bourdieu has reminded us that “family” is one of those many concepts that are seemingly descriptive of a given social reality while actually being part of its very construction. When talking about families one should be careful not to forget that “family” as a concept does not necessarily correspond to “family” as an empirical fact. Families are what Bourdieu (1998:67) has called a “realized social fiction”: they exist as normative models that tell us how things “ought” to be from a particular point of view, but not necessarily how they are.

The Cape Verdean discourse on “destructured” or broken families epitomizes such a prescriptive model, projected onto an empirical reality to which it hardly corresponds. In their study of low-income families in the city of Mindelo, Martins and Fortes note that family has become “more and more an object of strong political and moral rhetoric which evokes ‘destructured’ families in contrast with an idealized patriarchal and nuclear family” (2011:25)—despite the fact that none of the families they came upon in their empirical research actually corresponded to this model. Still, young people regularly referred to their families as a “solid part of their lives, something they depend on and which they value and respect more than anything else” (2011:17).

When making a connection between youth offending and family, it is thus important to differentiate between individual cases, in which children and adolescents have indeed grown up in (or abandoned) families that did not provide a positive environment for their personal development, and normative (and often Eurocentric or colonial) notions of “ideal” family structures. A number of inmates of Ribeirinha and São Martinho—whose family composition proved to be quite varied—had indeed suffered domestic violence. However, the violence suffered at home was generally part of a biography marked by frequent episodes of physical violence in very different spheres of life. A correlation, let alone causal relationship, between family composition and youth offending could not be verified.

Martins and Fortes suggest that the Cape Verdean discourses on “the crisis of the family” point instead to the crisis of a model of society “which goes back to colonial times and which provokes increasing social disparities, causing aspirations and opportunities of the disadvantaged strata of the population to drift substantially apart” (2011:14). Lima, similarly, notes that the notion of “broken homes” represents an attempt to “transfer the culpability [for urban violence and youth delinquency] from the state to the family” (2012:145). While, within such discourses, an adolescent offender’s parents are blamed for their offspring’s deviant behavior, the state and society at large are conceptualized primarily as victims of juvenile misbehavior, leaving other possible links (such as structural disadvantages or a lack of supportive institutions) out of consideration.

Drugs Use and Drug Traffic

Along with the supposed failures of the family, another widespread discourse for explaining the prevalence of youth offending in Cape Verde focuses on individual behaviors. Within the last two decades, roughly coinciding with the period of strongest economic growth, Cape Verde is known to have developed into one of the main hubs of international drug trafficking from Latin America to Europe. However, as UNODOC reports, “part of the drug that passes through Cape Verde stays in the country and is used for internal consumption, mainly among male youths” (2012:6–7). The same UNODC report notes “a tendency to mitigate the real situation of the country” by government officials (2012:4). Recent seizures of large quantities of cocaine (more than 500 kg in November 2014 in São Vicente, more than 1 ton in territorial waters in January 2015) demonstrate the magnitude of the problem (see A Semana 2014a; A Nação 2015).

Many of the juvenile gang members I interviewed in Praia and Mindelo had been using drugs before imprisonment, and some even continued to do so in prison. Interviewees who were using drugs before being sentenced confirmed that in Praia and Mindelo access to hard drugs, including crack (which, after cannabis, is the most widely used illegal drug in Cape Verde; see UNODC 2008:51), was fairly straightforward, and prices relatively “modest.” ^{Footnote 6} Their addiction usually started in early adolescence, and none of the inmates I talked to had ever received any kind of treatment. The following conversation with an inmate from São Vicente provides a sense of the dominance of drugs in their lives as adolescents:

It is important to note, however, that what has been said in relation to the varied family backgrounds of inmates proved to be equally true in relation to their use of illegal drugs. Only some of the inmates had been addicted to drugs in their pre-prison lives, while others either did not consume illegal drugs at all or else used them in a manner that did not affect their daily activities or their financial situation. Those who revealed themselves as former drug addicts told different stories about their past. Some had resorted to kasubódi (muggings) to finance their addiction, others did not. Some had started to use drugs before joining a gang, others afterward. Some who had resorted to criminal activities to finance their drug use had done so after joining a gang but not before. Others were part of a gang but never participated in any nonlegal undertakings apart from the (at times deadly) “war” between hostile gangs (see Zoettl Reference Zoettl2015).

While drug consumption was thus a factor in youth offending in some cases, it would be wrong to assume a causal relationship between drug use and youth offending or gang membership in general. Such a relationship, however, is frequently suggested in Cape Verdean public discourses. To give an example, a study of the Commission for the Coordination of Combat of Drugs (CCCD) on the “prevalence of consumption of psychoactive substances within the general population (CCCD 2013) revealed, among other data, that within the fifteen to twenty-four age group, 6.9 percent of the sample had used illegal psychoactive substances at one point of their lives, mostly padjinha (cannabis). When the report was presented to the public, though, the media and government officials focused extensively on these relatively modest numbers (compared to, for instance, 41.5% in Denmark and 12.6% in Portugal). ^{Footnote 7} And while the CCCD had not actually collected any data on crime or youth offending, the then minister of justice was quoted as being “concerned” about drug use “especially among youths,” and its “direct and clear” connection to criminality, since drug users without money “resort to crime” to buy drugs (Agência Lusa 2013). The secretary general of the CCCD, in turn, was quoted as saying that, taking into account the fact that drugs were mainly consumed at home (though the study actually states “on the street/in the open” as the predominant places of consumption), “parents must assume their responsibilities in relation to their children, to avoid them having access to and starting to consume psychoactive substances” (A Semana 2013).

The latter quotation demonstrates how discourses on drugs and “broken” families often go together. On the one hand, it is generally admitted that the international drug trade (and other large-scale criminal activities like money laundering, arms trafficking, etc.) have had, and are having, a strong impact on Cape Verdean economy and society. Recent occurrences, like the attempted murder of the former chief public prosecutor in September 2014, the murder of the mother of an official of the criminal investigation department (polícia judiciária) in the same month, and the attempted murder of the son of the acting prime minister in December 2014, suggest that well-financed criminal groups may have come to represent a serious threat to the country’s democratic institutions. ^{Footnote 8} On the other hand, when it comes to youth offending, public discourses tend to overlook the connections among the international trade in drugs, local consumption of (readily available) hard drugs among youths, and the mushrooming of urban gangs (some of whose leaders are reported to work as contract killers for the international drug trade). Political and media discourses in particular often choose to single out for responsibility those who are the “end users” of a by-product of the wholesale trade that has started to get a grip on Cape Verde’s society and institutions.

First Encounters: Youth, Violence, and the State

While family problems and drug use (as well as unemployment, lack of education, and lax criminal prosecution) are frequently cited as causes for the rise in crime, and particularly the increase in youth offending, other dynamics often pass unnoticed. In what follows, I will point to another “tradition” that, in contrast with the supposedly traditional morabeza (gentleness) of Cape Verdean society, forms part of what I consider deep-rooted dynamics of violence in the country, and of which youth offending is only one facet: the violence of the police. This is not to argue that the acts of some law enforcement officers should be considered the main cause of gang violence in Praia or Mindelo, let alone the sole reason for an adolescent’s decision to join an urban youth gang. Nor is pointing to the actions of police officers an attempt to transfer the responsibility for youth offending from the individual adolescents to collective entities like “the state” or “the police.” Without denying the importance and validity of a multitude of other factors for explaining the country’s elevated crime rate, I wish here to give voice to less dominant discourses (those of young offenders) which, being grounded on first-hand empirical knowledge of crime and criminal careers, may contribute to a more differentiated view of the causes of gang-related violence.

While drug use and family issues were sometimes, but not always, part of the inmates’ life stories, the biographies of interviewees did reveal some other common elements (that is, apart from their belonging to a marginalized strata of population). These were related either to the internal dynamics of gang life (see Zoettl Reference Zoettl2015) or, as I outline below, to early encounters with the country’s law enforcement authorities, which shaped the way the juvenile offenders conceptualized their relation with the state and society at large—and hence their own actions. The following account from an inmate who was imprisoned at the age of sixteen describes his first arrest, when he was still under the age of criminal responsibility:

Reports of police violence in Cape Verde are commonplace (see, for instance, Bordonaro Reference Bordonaro2012b; UNODC 2012; USDOS 2013, 2015; CNDHC 2010). Recently the U.N. Human Rights Council expressed concern that “police brutality against juveniles, as a form of extrajudicial punishment, may be common” (UNHRC 2013:5). My conversations with gang members suggested that the “strategy” of some police officers, when dealing with adolescent lawbreakers under the age of criminal responsibility, consisted of an ad hoc application of physical punishment behind the walls of the police station. A great many of the prisoners and ex-prisoners I interviewed in Praia and Mindelo confirmed having received some kind of physical abuse during the time they were detained by the National or Judicial Police. ^{Footnote 9} However, such extrajudicial corporal punishment of offenders doesn’t generate a lot of heat within Cape Verdean society. To the contrary, it is apparently “sanctioned by the society,” according to the same U.N. paper (2013:5). According to Bordonaro,

Extrajudicial punishment by police or prison officers has been reported to be widespread also in other Lusophone African countries such as Angola (see Carvalho Reference Carvalho2010) and Mozambique. Bertelsen (Reference Bertelsen2011) and Machava (Reference Machava2011) point to the colonial “tradition” of corporal punishment in Mozambique, where the “rigid politics of punishment as institutional mechanisms of state violence and social control” during the rule of Frelimo “reproduced colonial methods of punishment in different ways” (Machava Reference Machava2011:595). The claim quoted above—that thugs are “not people”—also matches Bertelson’s observation that Mozambican prisoners represent “the ‘other’ of sociality” (2011:625). The precise way in which youth offenders and gang members are conceptualized by Cape Verdean society in general, and police officers in particular, is a question that still demands (empirical) investigation. I suggest, however, that trust in “on-the-spot” correctional measures is not only based on notions that deny youth offenders the status of fully fledged members of society (and consequently, full citizens and holders of basic civil rights), but also on a general view of youth offending that sees adolescents in conflict with the law as lifetime delinquents who are beyond redemption. While this, of course, is not a position expressed publicly in Cape Verde, such ideas can be detected between the lines in many private and public statements. In 2013, for example, the newspaper Notícias do Norte reported on the case of a fifteen-year-old who was arrested for his involvement in a burglary in the city of Mindelo.

The fatalistic understanding of delinquency is evident in this statement. The journalist and the judge (if cited correctly) seem to agree that the future of the arrested adolescent will be, in all likelihood, behind prison bars. His admission to prison, as the newspaper reported, is “imminent” because of the crimes he will eventually “come to commit” once reaching the age of full criminal responsibility. ^{Footnote 10} Within this discourse, the possibility that the adolescent might not commit another crime appeared to be ruled out a priori. To the contrary, the newspaper report seems to express the wish that the offender will complete his sixteenth year sooner rather than later—so that he can be judged according to adult criminal law and sent to prison before long.

This tacit notion of juvenile offenders’ careers that can only be dealt with effectively by (potentially life-long) imprisonment invokes Foucault’s deliberations on the (nineteenth-century) conceptualization of the delinquent as “the strange manifestation of an overall phenomenon of criminality” (1979:253). Foucault’s critique of the prison system, which “cannot fail to produce delinquents” (1979:266), is well known, as is his analysis of the “ensemble whose three terms (police-prison-delinquency) support one another and form a circuit that is never interrupted. Police surveillance provides the prison with offenders, which the prison transforms into delinquents, the targets and auxiliaries of police supervisions, which regularly send back a certain number of them to prison” (1979:282). I would like to suggest, however, that the practice of extrajudicial punishment of youth offenders in Cape Verde exemplifies the potential role of the police not only in “providing” offenders for penal custody, but also in the making of delinquent careers. The following testimony from two other juvenile prisoners demonstrates not only the extent to which the logics of extrajudicial retribution have already been internalized by youth offenders, but also how the experience of having suffered “unfair” police violence may lay the foundations for a life behind bars:

According to Cape Verdean law, acts like the ones described by the first intervewee are considered torture, a criminal offense subject to two to six years of imprisonment (CPC: Art. 162.2). To its adolescent victims, however, police violence is not conceptualized within any kind of official legal discourse but in terms of more comprehensive notions of justice and justness. The majority of the prisoners of Praia and Mindelo had internalized the dynamics and logics of violence that exist, more or less openly, in many spheres of Cape Verdean society (see Zoettl Reference Zoettl2014). Although many complained about the “sharpness” (that is, length) of their prison sentences, and sometimes about the physical and symbolical violence suffered within prison (a complaint heard much more frequently in São Martinho than in Ribeirinha), most of them considered their prison sentences, in one way or another, “just” in relation to the crimes they had committed. However, many of them expressed the feeling that in situations of conflict with law enforcement authorities before their eventual imprisonment, they had been treated neither according to the law nor according to their own notions of justice, honor, and respect. What they remembered from their earliest encounters with Cape Verdean state power, as represented by the officers of the National and Judicial Police, was the impression of being treated as suspects not for a deed they had actually committed but for the milieu they belonged to. Their vague feeling of being stigmatized by Cape Verdean society, the state, and its agents points, again, to Foucault’s very definition of the delinquent as someone who “is to be distinguished from the offender by the fact that it is not so much his act as his life that is relevant in characterizing him” (1979:251). One interviewee, for instance, recounted a time during carnival when he was detained at police headquarters, with no specific charge, simply because, as the officer said, “I am a danger to society.” Another prisoner affirmed that “if they catch you once committing delinquency, afterwards, for example, you walk on the streets, they come and arrest you. They use torture, a lot of things. They had some iron bars. They say it is them who command in São Vicente. . . .”

Prison Is for Young People!

The politics of securitization adopted by the Cape Verdean state to combat the wave of urban violence that has flooded the country during the last decade has by and large failed in terms of its objectives. Neither the real nor the perceived crime risk in the country’s urban centers has been reduced by the expansion of the security forces or the imprisonment of juveniles (see, e.g., Afrosondagem 2012; MAHOT 2011). The tightening of juvenile penal law and the introduction of special security forces (like the Brigada Anti Crime in 2007) have not proved effective in diminishing the influx of young citizens to the countless gangs that operate in the regional capitals of the archipelago. As one of the inmates of Ribeirinha prison stated somewhat boastfully,

It is unlikely that a politics of securitization based mainly on a strategy of crime repression, to the neglect of other means of (social) intervention, will make the “kids” change their mind. As I have noted elsewhere (Zoettl Reference Zoettl2015), imprisonment, though often anticipated by those still on the “streets” of the urban periphery, does not seem to be a fate that the great majority of gang members from Praia and Mindelo worry about. But the painful “lessons” occasionally taught by security forces to juvenile offenders are never forgotten, and constitute memories unlikely to instill respect for the country’s legal order. On the contrary, for those who have little to lose in economic terms, the personal attributes of honor, dignity, and justice are all the more important, and “to pay back” (in the words of one inmate) an individual police officer or society at large may easily come to be regarded as the appropriate way of upholding one’s self-respect.

Bordonaro (2012b:106) has suggested that the Cape Verdean thugs “do not represent a social anomaly,” a “historical or social discontinuity, a cultural aberration, or an anomaly in the ‘functioning of the Cape Verdean society’, but a paroxysmal expression of elements that are characteristic of the country’s culture.” Contrary to notions of “lifetime delinquents” which dominate Cape Verdean discourses on internal security and youth violence, one of the most frequently voiced hopes of the inmates of Ribeirinha and São Martinho was to belong to society and to lead a “normal” life. “When I was a child, I wanted to be a police officer,” one prisoner told me, “a crazy dream of mine. Today my dream is to be happy. To be happy, one day, within society.” “When I get out here I want to work,” said another. “Do an honest job. Start a family.” And a third even praised the unexpected opportunities offered by imprisonment.

Sadly enough, this same prisoner who praised the opportunity for vocational training behind bars also mentioned in the course of the interview that none of the announced courses had actually taken place. But while dreaming of the life of a “normal” citizen after their release from prison, most inmates were also conscious of the difficulties of (re)-integrating into society; one even admitted that he would most likely revert to small-scale drug dealing in order to support his mother and his sick brother. Neither the fear of returning to prison nor the actual privations of prison life seemed to affect the inmates’ visualization of the future. To the contrary, more than a few had seemingly internalized the idea of lifetime marginalization, tacitly submitting to their “state of being” as delinquents. Tightened penal laws, the prospect of longer sentences, and the action of special security forces had made hardly any impression. “Prison doesn’t worry me too much,” I was told. “From prison one day one is released. And if not, one stays.” It seems clear that rather than institutionalizing the marginalization of more and more of the country’s youth and segregating them behind bars, Cape Verde will need to develop strategies of inclusion capable of persuading the large number of young citizens who currently live on the fringes of society that their country is truly interested in making them part of the island nation’s development.