Brazilian Prisons

Brazilian prisons are notorious for their overcrowding, corruption, voilence and torture. For many years Human Rights groups have cited overcrowding as being the cause of many of the brutal riots in Brazillian prisons and report that it has now reached 'inhuman levels'.

Medical care for detainees, including those with terminal illness or severe disability, is generally inadequate or non-existent. HIV is reported to effect as many as 1 in ever 7 prisoners, with many more being infected with other sexually transmitted and/or bad hygene related diseases.

Prisoners have complained of being routinely beaten and subjected to methods of torture including the "parrot's perch" (suspension by the legs and arms from a metal bar), near- asphyxiation and electric shocks.

The high levels of overcrowding combined with low levels of staffing in some of Brazil's prisons mean that the state authorities have lost control of many areas of the prisons. These no go areas are in effect run by a small and violent groups of inmates that are a law unto themselves.

There are reported to be anywhere between 250 and 922 prison establishments of all types in Brazil depending on where you get your statistics. Often local jails are used to house long-term prisoners with some police lock-ups holding more than 150 prisoners (thus they may be counted as prisons in some statistics reports, and perhaps this explains the sizable difference in reports of numbers of prisons).

According to a 1995 prison census, there were 148,760 inmates crammed into a space meant for 65,000. Tens of thousands of prisoners are held for months and even years in police precincts, which are not equipped for stays longer than a few weeks. In some cases, prisoners share the same bed by sleeping in shifts.

The same 1995 prison census shows that nearly 45 percent of prisoners have not been sentenced, and poor recordkeeping means many are incarcerated beyond their terms. Rights groups point to a São Paulo man who served 15 years for stealing a bicycle before his records were corrected and he was freed. With a prison population of over 90,000, and including one of the largest prisons in the whole region, the Sa Paulo prison system has long been in a state of severe crisis. Amnesty International has documented this crisis, detailing the extreme overcrowding, deaths in custody, the systematic use of torture, and lack of medical and sanitation facilities, further compounded by the use of under-trained and under-paid prison staff, unable to deal with high levels of gang warfare and regular riots.