There was a significant increase in female incarceration in Brazil, mainly due to – or associated with – drug trafficking. Most imprisoned women, however, are victims of vulnerable contexts (socially, economically and racially) and are inserted in the structure of trafficking in a secondary and marginal manner. Nevertheless, they appear to be a major target of criminal justice systems, with emphasis on criminal selectivity and institutional violence. This context will be addressed from the report of women seized in the act of trying to get into prisons with hidden drugs in their own bodies, when visiting their relatives. It is also intended to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of the repressive and prohibited policies adopted in Brazil in relation to drugs (as they do not curb trafficking) and, at the same time, their effectiveness (when it is transformed in tools of social control of poverty, their feminization and legitimizing a tangle of brutalities that embodies this system).