‘Death Lottery’ Dramatizes Crowding in Brazil Prisons

To dramatize extreme overcrowding, inmates at a prison in the industrial center of Santo Andre have taken up a form of protest that surfaces from time to time in Brazil’s squalid penal institutions--the “death lottery,” in which a selected inmate is killed.

Marcelo di Pietro, 27, a convicted rapist and murderer, was strangled to death in late March by other inmates at the Santo Andre main prison. He and 46 other inmates had been kept in a cell built for six.

Prisoners vowed to continue with a list of a dozen inmates marked for death until authorities correct the overcrowding. The jail, which was designed for 96 prisoners, held 368 in late March. Following the transfer of 40 inmates, the Santo Andre prisoners agreed to grant authorities another month to work on the problem before resuming the “lottery”--which apparently is less a matter of chance than a group decision to kill specific inmates.

Di Pietro’s death focused new attention on the critical problems of crime and punishment in Brazil. Economic crisis and an influx of illegal drugs have sent the crime rate soaring and filled the prisons to overflowing. A report last year by the human rights group Americas Watch, titled “Prison Conditions in Brazil,” found that Brazil had 87,000 inmates crammed into 41,000 spaces.

“Violence by both guards and inmates is widespread,” the report concluded. “Torture to obtain confessions is common, and guards reportedly beat prisoners often. Inmates assault and rape other inmates, and, as a form of protest against prison conditions, sometimes even murder them.”

Death lottery killings gained notoriety in 1985. In the course of two months, 17 inmates in prisons around the city of Belo Horizonte were killed by their cellmates, who were complaining of overcrowding, bad food, lack of medical care, bureaucratic delays and violent treatment at the hands of guards.

Jail conditions became a national scandal in February, 1989, when 18 prisoners were crushed to death in a Sao Paulo police lockup after guards had crammed 51 men into an isolation cell that measured 9 feet by 4 feet.

The situation remains critical in Sao Paulo state, where Secretary of Public Security Antonio Claudio Mariz de Oliveira admitted that 130 prisoners should be removed from the Santo Andre prison immediately, but said there is no place to put them.

“We do not have a short-term solution for this grave problem,” Mariz de Oliveira said, “as the situation in Santo Andre is exactly the same as in the other prisons of Sao Paulo.”

Di Prieto, the victim of the slaying in March, appeared to have been killed in the manner used in previous death lottery slayings. One inmate jumped on his chest to stun him and another strangled him.

The participants often target rapists. “Among the victims of these rapists might be our daughters, our wives, our mothers,” one prisoner told the newspaper Estado de Sao Paulo.

The Santo Andre inmates say they have a list of 12 other prisoners who are “condemned” and say the killings will resume if the overcrowding is not solved.

An inmate’s letter published in March in the Sao Paulo press described mistreatment at the hands of guards, including beatings as well as thefts from food packages brought by family members. One major complaint is that the bureaucracy moves too slowly, so that prisoners are kept in jail beyond their scheduled release dates.

Di Prieto, who maintained his innocence of the three rapes and murders that had landed him in the Santo Andre prison, knew he had been chosen to die. “Do not miss my wake, or I will be very sad,” he wrote to his girlfriend just before he died. “A kiss from this man who has but few hours to live.”