Brazilian experts call for change in jail sentencing

Inmates, top, watch as police officers enter the Alcacuz prison amid tension between rival gangs in Nisia Floresta, near Natal, Brazil on Saturday. (AP)

BRASILIA: Brazilian prisons have been hit by a wave of violent riots this month, resulting in the deaths of at least 137 prisoners and prompting justice experts to call for sweeping reforms of Brazil’s criminal judicial system.
The first riot occurred on Jan. 1-2 at jails in the Amazon city of Manaus, and killed 64 detainees. Another riot occurred on Jan. 6 in Boa Vista, Roiraima, killing thirty-three. On Jan. 14 a riot at a jail near Natal in Rio Grande do Norte killed 26 prisoners. A few much smaller riots occurred in other states, bringing the total number of dead so far to 137.
The majority of the killings occurred when different criminal gangs decided to attack one another inside the jails. Most of the dead were decapitated.
“The fact that so many people were killed is shocking,” said Soraia da Rosa Mendes, professor of the post-graduate program of the Institute of Public Law and at UniCeub in Brasilia, in an interview with Arab News. “But it wasn’t a surprise because of the chronic overcrowding of our jails. Last year in Brazil we had one prisoner killed a day by fellow prisoners. This is happening because of disputes over territory within jails by rival criminal gangs, and because of the sheer lack of space.”
There are approximately 600,000 people behind bars in this large country, with most being men between the ages of 18 to 30 years old. Around 40 percent of those jailed are still awaiting trial, because under Brazilian law criminal suspects can be held in jails if they are caught in the act of stealing or killing someone. Brazilian judges regularly go into jails to review the cases of those not yet tried, and in some cases agree to conditionally release those who have not yet been convicted. Even so, the jails are chronically overcrowded, with prisoners crammed into cells where they have to take turns sleeping on the beds.
Criminal syndicates have also gained control of many major prisons in Brazil, controlling the entry of contraband, drugs and even weapons into the facilities. The federal government reacted to this by moving the heads of such gangs to prisons all over the country, in an attempt to reduce the influence they have. But this has only served to spread the presence and influence of these groups to areas of the country where they never even existed. The PCC gang of Sao Paulo is one of the largest such criminal groups in the country which is involved in drug and arms trafficking.
“During the past several decades, Brazilian authorities have increasingly abdicated their responsibility to maintain order and security in prisons,” says Maria Laura Canineu, Brazil director at Human Rights Watch. “That failure violates the rights of prisoners and is a boon to gangs, who use prisons as recruiting grounds.”
Human rights activists at first criticized President Michel Temer for his slow response to this latest outbreak of prison violence. It took him four days before he said something about the massacre in the Manaus prison. His youth secretary, Bruno Julio, was quoted as saying that it was better to let the criminals kill each other, and also posted this comment on his personal Facebook page. This unguarded remark caused discomfort and he was forced to resign on Jan. 6. Temer has now been meeting with various state authorities and has promised more federal funding to help expand and build new prisons. He has also ordered the formation of a special group of 1,000 soldiers from the National Force, who will regularly be deployed across the country to go in and search jails for drugs and weapons, all with the previous authorization of the governor of each state.
But legal experts say that this is not enough to stop the cycle of violence that is plaguing Brazil. They point out that the war on drugs, started in 2006 when Congress passed a much tougher law on drug use and possession, has resulted in Brazilian jails being full of small-time drug users and sellers, who have not committed any violent crime.
“We need to rethink our prison policy, because 23 percent of those currently in jail now were convicted of non-violent crimes such as theft, robbery and fraud,” said Professor Mendes. “Judges are allowed to give alternative sentences such as community service, but not enough of them do this.”
Mendes believes that this toughening of the penal code, which she blames on Congress passing ever-tougher laws, has done little to bring the number of crimes down, with Brazilian prisons bursting with an ever-growing number of inmates.
“The call to build more prisons is just the selling of an illusion that this will solve our problem,” said Mendes. “In 2014 we had space for only 250,000 in all of our prisons across the country, yet we had 600,000 prisoners squeezed into them. And there are 327,000 outstanding arrest mandates, meaning that if all were found and arrested we would have nearly 1 million people behind bars.”
Mauricio Santoro, the head of the political science department at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, believes that the reform of Brazilian prisons is possible, but that there is a lack of political will.
“Reform of our prison systems is possible, but it is a difficult task that governments have run away from. The typical profile of a Brazilian prisoner is that of a young man, with little formal education and condemned for drug trafficking or theft,” explained Santoro in an interview. “The middle class and the elite are not in prison. Those who are jailed belong to the much more vulnerable class, without political force, who have no one to represent them and defend reforms that would benefit them. This political vacuum ended up in large part being filled by the criminal factions, especially the PCC, whose history is directly linked to mobilizations inside prisons.”
The renewed war on drugs has also made the number of women prisoners nationwide shoot up since 2006. Women are being arrested when they are used as mules by their boyfriends or husbands, who ask them to carry drugs and deliver them to customers. “There has been a 527 percent increase in the number of women prisoners over the past 15 years,” said Mendes. “There are now 37,000 women jailed in Brazil, with 64 percent of these behind bars for various drug-related offenses.”
And the large-scale arrest of young drug runners is providing fresh members to the various criminal gangs that dominate Brazilian prisons, according to Mendes. “They arrest an 18-year-old for being a drug mule and inside the prison he encounters two criminal factions. And he will enter one of these groups. So this is all money thrown into the trash,” the professor said.
That is one of the main problems of Brazilian jails, where a severe lack of space means that lesser criminals are thrown in with murderers and rapists. This mixing, of course, means that the hardcore criminals will influence many of those in for non-violent crimes and this can lead them to commit worse crimes once they are released.
“This illustrates the fragility of the Brazilian State, that it cannot even control a closed and guarded environment, like a jail,” said Santoro.