Access to the Press

Presents the full text of "Behind Bars in Brazil," published by Human Rights Watch. Discusses the mistreatment of prisoners and serious human rights violations. Provides information on overcrowding, police lockups, physical conditions, medical care, prisoner-on-prisoner abuses, police and guard abuses, work, and women inmates.

Prisons and jails in Rio de Janeiro are violent and crowded; they are governed by narco-gangs and are intensely religious spaces. Rio's penal institutions reflect the social world of the poor neighbourhoods where most of the inmates lived before their arrests. They are places where the state has a weak presence and residents organize around nonstate entities, primarily gangs or Pentecostal churches. Inside of prison, Pentecostal inmates form churches that resemble the gangs in organization and leadership structure. The gangs allow the churches to function autonomously. To gather data on the these groups, the author spent two weeks living inside a prison in Brazil and then collected ethnographic data by regularly visiting one prison and one jail in Rio de Janeiro for a year

The Primeiro Comando do Capital (PCC) is a Sao Paulo prison gang that since the 1990s has expanded into the most powerful criminal network in Brazil. Karina Biondi's rich ethnography of the PCC is uniquely informed by her insider-outsider status. Prior to his acquittal, Biondi's husband was incarcerated in a PCC-dominated prison for several years. During the period of Biondi's intense and intimate visits with her husband and her extensive fieldwork in prisons and on the streets of Sao Paulo, the PCC effectively controlled more than 90 percent of Sao Paulo's 147 prison facilities. Available for the first time in English, Biondi's riveting portrait of the PCC illuminates how the organization operates inside and outside of prison, creatively elaborating on a decentered, non-hierarchical, and far-reaching command system. This system challenges both the police forces against which the PCC has declared war and the methods and analytic concepts traditionally employed by social scientists concerned with crime, incarceration, and policing. Biondi posits that the PCC embodies a "politics of transcendence," a group identity that is braided together with, but also autonomous from, its decentralized parts. Biondi also situates the PCC in relation to redemocratization and rampant socioeconomic inequality in Brazil, as well as to counter-state movements, crime, and punishment in the Americas.

The prison system in Brazil has earned a reputation for being medieval due to serious overcrowding, violence, and the lack of legal assistance provided to prisoners. Justice Minister José Eduardo Cardozo made international headlines when he stated that he would "rather die" than spend time in a Brazilian jail. This book tells a very sad story, of an out of ordinary man who, in a heartbeat, went from being a respected high-level federal civil servant to the class that our society most abhors: a prisoner. In this work, you will read the saga of this incredible man who, because of a thoughtless attitude and a troubled divorce, had his life turned upside down and had to deal with something unimaginable: prison. You'll read everything he had to go through and when you think it's over, there's more disgrace ahead. And finally, this book also makes a critical analysis of the Brazilian judicial system, which is excessively bureaucratic and has strongly embraced the idea of mass incarceration - as if prison solved all the ills of society. But will it solve? This is what I intend to reveal to you in the next few pages.

This book brings together leading authorities from the fields of international human rights law, criminology, legal medicine, and political science with international human rights judges and UN experts to analyze the current situation of detainees in Europe, the Americas and Africa. This comprehensive volume offers a platform for reflecting on the complexity of the prison problem from a multidisciplinary perspective. The authors address detention-related issues with the aim of generating new ideas that contribute to both academic discussion and critical analysis. Academic dialogue across the globe provides insights into various national and international carceral systems and how they deal with human rights behind bars. At the same time, the critical comparison helps to identify basic needs and practices that can work in multiple settings. The contributors are respected experts and leading scholars in their fields, and each has pursued prison and human rights research over the last decades. However, this is the first time that they have come together in a multidisciplinary academic project. This book aims to stimulate diverse actors to imagine alternative ways of engaging with persons deprived of their liberty, in academia and in practice.

Brazilian authorities continuously fail to comply with international norms on minimal conditions of incarceration. Brazil's prison population has risen ten-fold since the country's return to democracy in the 1980s. Its prisons typically operate at double official capacity and with 100 prisoners for each guard on duty. At the same time, however, the average Brazilian prison is not as disorderly or its staff-inmate relations so conflictual as our established theories on prison life might predict. This monograph explores the means by which Brazilian prisons function in the absence of guards. More specifically, the means by which prison security and inmate discipline is negotiated between prison managers, gangs and the wider inmate body. While fragile and varied, this historical tradition of co-produced governance has for decades kept most prisons in better order and enabled most prisoners to better survive.