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Prizon Nan Peyi Brezil Brazilian prisoners are too often...

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Prizon Nan Peyi Brezil
Brazilian prisoners are too often forced to endure appalling daily living conditions in the country's prisons, jails and police lockups.

Because of overcrowding, many of them sleep on the floor of their cells, sometimes in the bathroom next to the hole that serves as a toilet.

In the most crowded facilities, where there is no free space even on the floor, prisoners sleep tied to the cell bars or hanging in suspended hammocks.

Most penal facilities are physically deteriorated, some are severely so.

Forced to provide their own mattresses, bedding, clothing and toiletries, many prisoners are dependent on the support of their families or others outside the prison.

The struggle for space, and the authorities' failure to provide basic provisions in many facilities, leads to prisoner-on-prisoner exploitation, as prisoners who lack money and family support are victimized by others.

Basic Characteristics of Penal Facilities
As evidenced by centuries of innovation in prison architecture, the size and shape of a prison can have a significant impact on its functioning.

Bad prison design comes in many forms, of course-there are dark and dreary buildings with little ventilation, and buildings with hidden corners that are difficult to monitor-but one simple error is in making prisons too large.133 As a general rule of thumb, the Standard Minimum Rules recommend that prisons hold no more than 500 inmates.134

Brazil's penal facilities run the gamut of sizes, shapes, and layouts.

In São Paulo, the Carandiru prison complex includes Latin America's largest prison, the Casa de Detenção, which held 6,508 inmates in seven different pavilions on the daywe visited it. 135 Other prisons of over 1,000 inmates include the State Penitentiary in São Paulo; the Central Prison of Porto Alegre and the State Penitentiary of Jacuí, both in the state of Rio Grande do Sul; the Center for Internment and Reeducation, in Brasília, and the Professor Barreto Campelo prison, in Pernambuco.

Most of Brazil's prisons, however, are much smaller, holding several hundred inmates, while most women's prisons hold fewer than a hundred.

The larger prisons tend to have more than a single story: several pavilions in the Casa de Detenção, for example, are five stories tall. While each of the pavilions in the Casa de Detenção is built around a central courtyard, with a self-enclosed square or rectangular

layout, it is more common in Brazil to find prisons laid out using long corridors lined on each side with cells and dormitories.

A few unusual design schemes exist as well. The Raimundo Vidal Pessoa Penitentiary, in Manaus, Amazonas, is built on a radial plan, a style that was common in the early part of the century, the era from which it dates.

At the other extreme of size are the thousands of police lockups around the country, some of which have only one small cell, though others hold a hundred or more prisoners.

In São Paulo, a common layout found in medium-sized police lockups is that of a covered patio flanked by two or three communal cells on each side. The smaller lockups, however, lack a patio: they simply contain four small cells on an interior hall.

Living Conditions and the Impact of Overcrowding
The national prison law mandates that inmates be held in individual cells of at least six square meters (approximately sixty-five square feet) in size.136 In accordance with this rule, many of Brazil's prisons rely upon individual cells in all or a substantial part of their living areas.

Nonetheless, except for a few prisons such as the Charqueadas High Security Prison in Rio Grande do Sul and the Nelson Hungria Penitentiary in Minas Gerais, overcrowding has overruled the designers' plans: rather than holding a single prisoner, the individual cells are used communally, by two or more inmates.

Besides individual cells, most prisons alsohave larger cells or dormitories that were specifically designed for group living.

Police lockups generally have small to medium-sized cells designed for five to ten inmates.

Many penal facilities, and thus many inmates' cells and dormitories, are two to five times as crowded as they were designed to be. In some facilities, the overcrowding has reached inhuman levels, with inmates jammed together in crowds.

The densely packed housing areas in these places offered Human Rights Watch researchers such sights as prisoners tied to windows to lessen the demand for floor space, and prisoners forced to sleep on top of hole-in-the-floor toilets.

Such overcrowding also generates filth, bad smells, and vermin, which in turn exacerbate tensions among prisoners.

Inmates are responsible for keeping their living quarters clean and, obviously, some do a better job than others: the more crowded the cell, the more difficult the task.

As mentioned previously, the overcrowding is generally most acute in police lockups.

Human Rights Watch inspected São Paulo's seventy-eighth police precinct, for example, and found eighty prisoners divided among four small cells.

According to official capacity figures provided by the public security secretariat, this lockup was designed to hold twenty inmates, making it four times as crowded as it should have been.137 In every cell, besides prisoners squeezed together on the floor, we found five to seven prisoners hanging from ropes in the air. Even though the bathrooms were tiny, two or three prisoners in each cell slept there.

The overcrowding was so extreme that it was hard to imagine that the facility could have crammed in sixteen additional inmates just a few months earlier, but that is what we were informed.

A prisoner who had passed through the overcrowded Thefts and Robberies Precinct in Minas Gerais described its physical conditions in these terms:

Everything is dirty and infested.

There are little bugs there-muquirana-that live in your clothes and make your skin itch all night.

It's impossible to sleep.

Every Friday they have a "geral" (full search).

There is a big patio there.

Everyone is forced to strip naked and wait in the pa

Biento en Kreyol Ayitien:

Posted December 5 2023 at 1:39 PM

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