This article analyses processes of international policy transfer and diffusion in an understudied aspect of security sector reform: prisons. It looks at how Latin American countries, especially Brazil, have responded to a growing security crisis of capacity, effectiveness and violence within their prison systems by adopting, adapting and even resisting reform models available globally in three reform areas: prison administration (state-run versus forms of privatisation and public-private partnerships), control (the technologies of super-max versus the intelligence- and relationship-centred approach of dynamic security), and governmentality (the ethos underpinning state and societal treatment of offenders as subjects and objects of penal discipline). It also examines how Brazil has produced its own home-grown models of penal governance—prisons run by civil society in partnership with the state—which challenge some of the current dominant tropes in prison reform. The globalisation of neoliberal modes of gov...