Overcrowded, unsafe, and wracked by sickening levels of violence, Brazil’s prisons were described by a report published last week as a “human rights disaster”. To make matters worse, many inmates have not yet been convicted but must endure months in appalling conditions while they wait for their case to be heard.   

By James Young
Belo Horizonte

If, as Dostoyevsky put it, the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons, then Brazil would appear to be in a sorry state indeed.

Last week the Human Rights Watch NGO released a report entitled “The State Let Evil Take Over” that described the shocking conditions inside the Curado prison complex (previously known as the Anibal Bruno prison) in Recife, the capital of the north-eastern state of Pernambuco, as well as penitentiaries in Itamaracá, about 45 kilometres away.

“During visits to Pernambuco’s prisons in 2015, a researcher from Human Rights Watch entered a windowless cell without beds, in which 37 men slept on sheets on the floor. Another, which had six cement bunks for 60 men, lacked even enough floor space. A tangle of makeshift hammocks made it difficult to cross the room, and one man was sleeping sitting up, tying himself to the bars of the door so that he wouldn’t slump over onto other men. In that cell, the stench of sweat, faeces and mould was overpowering,” said the report, which was accompanied by a disturbing video, available on YouTube.

The study painted a gruelling portrait of overcrowding (Curado, which was built to house around 2,000 prisoners, is home to about 7,000), lack of sanitation, disease, sexual and physical violence, and described how criminal gangs controlled large parts of the institutions.

Perhaps most chillingly of all, Human Rights Watch revealed that a large number of the prisoners were pre-trial detainees – in other words, they had been incarcerated while awaiting trial for the crimes of which they had been accused.

Custody hearings, where the accused appears before a judge soon after being arrested, are, says the report, “required under international law but have not — until recently — been provided to detainees in Pernambuco or most other states in Brazil.” According to the organization, “nearly 60 percent of the nearly 32,000 people held in Pernambuco’s prisons have not been convicted of a crime.”

An earlier Human Rights Watch study told how when judges held custody hearings in the state of Maranhão between October 2014 and March 2015, around 60 percent of those arrested were released on the grounds that pre-trial detention was not warranted, compared to 10% when no such hearings took place and judges based their decision solely on police reports. At least in this area there are some signs of progress – Pernambuco began providing custody hearings in August this year.

But that alone is unlikely to save Brazil’s prison system, the horror stories surrounding which are almost too many to mention. There were a reported 62 murders in the Pedrinhas jail in Maranhão in 2013, and in January 2014 a video emerged from the prison showing the decapitated heads and bodies of victims of a gang feud.

There were also reports of the visiting wives, girlfriends and female relatives of prisoners being raped by the leaders of the criminal factions that effectively run large parts of the institution. In May this year the director of the prison, Cláudio Barcelos, was arrested, accused of taking bribes to facilitate escapes.

“The tragedy of Pedrinhas could have been foreseen and could be repeated, at any moment, in other prison complexes with the same problems,” said Lucia Nader, of the Brazilian NGO Conectas, in January 2014.

Prison riots, which often end in fatalities, are alarmingly frequent. A 2013 outbreak of gang warfare in Pedrinhas, which has a long history of violent uprisings, ended with nine fatalities, and a riot in January this year in Curado resulted in three deaths.

Earlier this month a rebellion in the Penitenciária de Teófilo Otoni in Minas Gerais left three prisoners dead while fourteen escaped, and another riot in Governador Valadares in the same state in June saw two deaths. The Minas Gerais government says there is a shortfall of 26,000 places in the state’s prison system.

Nor are precarious safety conditions the sole preserve of the country’s adult prisons. In September five breakouts in the space of eight days from the Fundação CASA young offender institutions in São Paulo saw a total of 117 inmates escape.

And even those outside the prisons cannot take their safety for granted – a few weeks ago 33-year-old Recife resident Ricardo Alves da Silva was brushing his teeth in the garden of his house near the Curado complex when he was shot and killed by a gunshot that came from inside the prison.

According to this Vice article by From Brazil contributor Ben Tavener, Brazil has the world’s fourth-biggest incarcerated population after the United States, China and Russia, with numbers growing by 161 percent from 2000 to 2014 to reach 607,000 prisoners in June last year. At the same time the country’s prison system is designed to hold a maximum of only 376,000.

In such overcrowded conditions, where floor space to sleep on, let alone beds, is often lacking, rehabilitation facilities are usually either limited or non-existent, contributing, along with the pervasive atmosphere of criminality within jails and the social conditions inmates are likely to face upon release, to an estimated recidivism rate of 70%.

Yet the crisis in Brazil’s prison system attracts considerably less political and media outrage than might be expected. President Dilma Rousseff discussed the issue during the 2014 presidential debates, saying that she believed Brazil had to change its entire prison strategy, and that rehabilitating prisoners was absolutely essential. In September a law was introduced that makes the provision of high school level education in prisons a legal requirement.

But at the same time, the powerful “Bullet Caucus” in the Brazilian parliament is pushing for a tougher stance on crime, including lowering the age of criminal responsibility from 18 to 16, which, according to an article by Stephanie Nolen in The Globe and Mail, would add an extra 32,000 people to the prison population in its first year.

It is not all bad news for those who find themselves on the wrong side of Brazilian law, however – provided they have the means to extricate themselves from their situation. Last week 28-year-old business administrator Juliana Cristina da Silva knocked down and killed José Airton and Raimundo Barbosa, city workers who had been painting a cycle lane in the Zona Norte region of São Paulo, while almost three times over the legal alcohol limit. She then fled the scene and was only stopped by witnesses 3 km away.

Following a night at a police station she was released on R$15,000 (U$3,850/£2,500) bail the next day, and will now spend the undoubtedly lengthy wait for her trial at liberty. It was the latest in a long, long list of similar cases in Brazil.

The sentencing of drunk driving fatalities is a controversial issue around the world, and there are obviously differences in the legal status of Juliana’s crime (which is considered homicídio culposo, or manslaughter) and the offences committed by, or the charges awaiting, many of the prisoners in jails like Pedrinhas or Curado.

But at the same time, the right to bail and quickly granted provisional freedom of the former, compared with the denial of human rights and barbarous conditions doled out to the latter, provided a jarring reminder of the sense of inequality that often seems to surrounds the Brazilian justice system.

As an article in Carta Capital magazine entitled “Justice is Rich and White” argues, while such a system appears to automatically assume that the lower-class prisoners in the ruined cells of its overcrowded jails are marginais and bandidos (“thugs and criminals”) when denying them pre-trial hearings and even the most basic living standards, a better-off Brazilian such as Juliana is treated rather like “a good girl who made a mistake”.

That, perhaps, should not come as too much of a surprise, for in doing so Brazil’s penal system merely reflects the divisions that run across the country’s society like deep, jagged scars.

Brazil’s brutal inequality is so ubiquitous that those who live here simply stop noticing it. An unexpected message from abroad serves as a reminder of the topic that is so rarely discussed here, in society, the media, or the current election.

I’ve been living in Brazil for over four years now, which has been incredible in almost every way, including the ways in which I’ve adapted to the local culture. But there’s the bits I don’t like, too. More than anything else, I hate the way I’ve become desensitized to shocking, brutal, and stultifying levels of inequality. I’ve become accustomed to it, as if it were or ever should be normal.

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This, most foreigners in Brazil learn quickly enough, is actually one of the required characteristics of being authentically “Brazilian.” True locals understand that extreme inequality is just a fact of life here, and it is bad taste to bring it up or transgress established class boundaries, so much so that an extreme preoccupation with the topic, or wanting to get to know Brazil outside elite circles, are sometimes considered “gringo” things to do. The more I find myself  becoming “local” in this sense (and in this sense only), the more uncomfortable I become.

Recently, a flash of realization came, as they almost never do, via a WhatsApp message, sent to my cell phone from a Brazilian friend visiting my home country for the first time.

From New York:

“Wow, I’m really impressed with the social equality here. Congratulations.”

And then: “Blacks are part of society. They aren’t excluded like they are in Brazil.”

For all intents and metaphorical purposes, these messages caused my head to explode.

I was born and raised in the United States, a country which has many, many, very obvious problems – probably more than Brazil – which are mostly irrelevant here. Apart from our famous propensity to bomb countries, killing hundreds of thousands for no discernible positive outcome, social injustice has always been a major problem of ours. We have one of the worst inequality levels among the world’s developed countries, and it’s clear to me we have a fairly serious race problem, especially when it comes to treatment of our black citizens.

Moreover, on the equality issue, our problem is getting worse, so much so that Obama spoke recently of the need to combat “dangerous and growing inequality.” 

Maybe not every Brazilian would immediately see things they way my friend did when arriving in the US or Europe. But the fact that a resident of Brazil can feel that New York, of all places, is a beacon of social harmony was a shocking reminder of how deep and problematic Brazil’s inequality is.

But of course it shouldn’t have been shocking. When I arrived here, I was constantly taken aback by elements of a culture that often seemed from another time. Two separate doors for apartments (one for the family, one for the help). Upper middle class youth who had never washed their own clothes or bathroom (let alone held down a job before graduating university), and who could casually drop classist or racist remarks – of the kind that would get you permanently expelled from polite society many places elsewhere – as if it were nothing.

But much of this had become normal for me, as I imagine it had long ago for most Brazilians.

Of course, it’s easy enough for me to deal with this violent prejudice, as a white man who arrived from the US and Europe, locations that much of São Paulo’s upper middle class look up to, but where they themselves, ironically, may be considered crude, reactionary, or racist, and with very bad taste.

You could argue, sometimes correctly, that people like me benefit from this prejudice at times, even if we would rather not. But for the Brazilian friends and colleagues who were unlucky enough to be born with African or indigenous features, or to working-class parents, it’s common to be shouted down when they complain of this class system, as if they were either dangerous Bolsheviks or lazy, self-interested quota jumpers.

It is absolutely true that Brazil is one of the few countries in the world to have improved income inequality in the last decade. But, in the pursuit of both social justice and increasing economic productivity, the country still has a very long way to go. If you look at how the election is unfolding, however, you would think that what the country needs is mostly some technocratic fixes, or a candidate who is less tarred by corruption allegations than the others. If you look at the media, you would think that the social advances made since 2003 were already revolutionary and frightening enough, or that there wasn’t much to talk about. Of course, if you pick up any major newspaper here, you may come to the conclusion that they are written by the white upper middle class for the white upper middle class, because they are.

Around the ‘rolezinhos‘ which took place early this year, there was a debate as to whether Brazil is an ‘apartheid‘ society. I think that’s the wrong word, as there is no state sanction for the divisions. Another friend suggested we may have a “caste” system, which I think is closer to being accurate.  It is at least accurate insofar that the following statement is accurate: For a daughter or son of the ‘middle class,’ the idea of showing up at Sunday family lunch and introducing a member of the working class as boyfriend or girlfriend is basically unheard of. Indeed, I’ve met people from both classes who admit they’ve never had a real, substantive conversation with a member of the other class.

But why don’t we talk about this? Because it’s too obvious.

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It depends where you’re from.

An article by Simon Romero at the New York Times offers an insight into the way we foreigners tend to see Brazil differently, and the way Brazil’s story is repeatedly told differently outside the country.

Rather than concentrating on who was right or wrong – of course, we don’t know – Romero’s piece concentrated on the circumstances that led to the collision:

Two Brazils also met head-on: one in which a small elite live with almost unfathomable wealth, and another in which millions eke out an existence on the margins of that abundance.

To put it simply, we gringos tend to see this all the time, and this is not exactly what Brazilians constantly see, if I am to judge by comparing English and Portuguese-language media coverage, or by how unwelcome our observations on the subject tend to be here. Much to the annoyance of many locals, many of those of us who grew up outside Brazil tend to view the country through the prism of social inequality.

I may be wrong. but I have a hard time seeing an article with this focus come out in the Brazilian press without being considered quite radical.

Of course Romero is right that some class dynamics led to the collision. Why did Wanderson need to be on a high-speed freeway to pick up milk? It’s remarkable to see the way that highways are often thrown across communities here, without offering residents any safe way to get around them.

And as for Thor, would he have been driving differently if he wasn’t in a million-dollar car? Who knows. But it appears that due to the number of violations he’d already racked up, he shouldn’t have been driving at all.

It’s worth checking out the whole piece to see truly the remarkable way Eike and Thor acted in public after a man lost his life. Do they know how that looks, given the circumstances?

Of course, it is natural that foreigners will tell the story of Brazil differently than Brazilians do. The inverse is also true. As jarring as Brazilian class divisions are to North Americans or Western Europeans, there are countless things we don’t focus on so much in our own societies that are just as striking to Brazilians, the Japanese, or Nigerians.

It’s not obvious for those of us from the US, for example, what it sometimes can be like to be a foreigner in our country. For the amount of power Washington has around the world, it tends to shock foreigners how little we know about much of it. And on inequality, we are not really too much better than Brazil.

Who is right? Is Brazil too used to some problems, or are we foreigners self-righteous, naive and sanctimonious? Maybe neither, maybe both.

But it seems clear that when we tell the story of Brazil outside the country, it will make sense to focus on what is noticeably different for us. And despite all the progress made, one of Brazil’s most obvious characteristics is still inequality.

Links (or, a list of times we foreigners took the equality angle):

New York Times: At War With São Paulo’s Establishment, Black Paint in Hand
Los Angeles Times: Brazil’s poor seem left behind in growth spurt
Financial Times: Sway of the wealthy remains strong in Brazil’s cities
New York Times: Slum Dwellers Are Defying Brazil’s Grand Design for Olympics
Financial Times: 2010 census shows Brazil’s inequalities remain

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