Brazil Unlocks Jail Reforms

Barbarity and progress, apocalypse and hope. Carandiru and Sorocaba represent the extremes of the national drama that is Brazil’s prison system.

The Carandiru House of Detention, Latin America’s largest prison with about 7,000 inmates, was the scene of a nightmare in 1992. When rioting inmates barricaded themselves in a cellblock, police attacked. Commandos in ninja masks pulled inmates from under their bunks and executed them, shouting, “You’re going to hell!” The raiders set dogs on survivors and made them run a gauntlet naked, splashing through pools of blood. The carnage left 111 inmates dead.

A commander of the raid, Col. Ubiratan Guimaraes, was later elected to Congress. The number he used to identify himself on the ballot was a macabre reminder of the massacre at Carandiru: 111.

Guimaraes was indicted this year for the killings after his congressional term ended, but his election in 1994 suggested that crime-weary Brazilians had little sympathy for inmates. So it was logical to fear the worst in December 1997, when a standoff occurred at another Sao Paulo state facility, the Sorocaba maximum-security prison. Two dozen inmates armed with pistols and clubs took more than 700 hostages, mostly visiting women and children.

This time, however, a four-man crisis team negotiated for three days, whittling down the number of hostages and mutinous inmates. On New Year’s Eve, a specially trained squad stormed in and liberated the remaining hostages without killing anyone. About 100 such incidents have been resolved peacefully since the state negotiating team was created in 1996.

“The prison population gets the message,” said Joao Benedicto de Azevedo Marques, state director of prisons. “They know there will be no violence, but we will not back down.”

Seven years after the Carandiru massacre, Sao Paulo state continues to endure a prison crisis. It is a microcosm of the crisis in Brazil and the rest of Latin America. Correctional facilities are repositories of the accumulated woes crippling the region’s justice systems. From Brazil to Venezuela to Paraguay, potential Carandirus boil over with overcrowding, squalor, corruption, and violence on the part of both inmates and authorities.

But in Brazil, a mix of traditional and unorthodox reforms offers glimmers of progress on a gloomy horizon. Federal officials realize that a time bomb is ticking, and they are trying to defuse it. They are more than doubling the prison system’s capacity, building a record 52 new penitentiaries--21 of them in Sao Paulo state--creating an academy for guards, computerizing inmate rolls and expanding the uses of parole and probation.

“This is the start of the change of penitentiary culture,” said Sergio Seabra, chief of Brazil’s federal prison agency. “This is shock treatment.”

Smaller-scale initiatives in Sao Paulo state, with a population slightly larger than California’s and 40% of Brazil’s inmates, have demonstrated that honesty, innovation and common sense are just as important as bigger budgets.

“These are simple, obvious things we have done,” said Nagashi Furukawa, a judge who created a model jail and recently became a special advisor to Sao Paulo’s governor. “They did not cost a lot of money. It is a question of changing mentalities among the inmates, the government, the community.”

Crime, Courts Add to Need for Change

The urgent need for change stems from the Brazilian system’s size--Latin America’s largest with about 170,000 inmates--combined with skyrocketing crime and antiquated, overwhelmed courts.

In Brazilian prisons and jails, hardened killers live alongside accused purse snatchers. Lack of space forces inmates to sleep on top of hole-in-the-floor toilets or in hammocks fashioned out of blankets. Daily escapes and riots make guards so fearful that they refuse to enter cells to tend to the sick.

“Appalling” conditions are “in great part due to an absence of political will to remedy them,” Human Rights Watch concluded in a report this year. “Some of the most extreme cruelties, such as summary executions . . . can in no way be attributed to meager public resources.”

In Paraiba state, human rights researchers found an inmate who had spent almost four years behind bars awaiting trial. In Amazonas, convicts were not released upon completing sentences. In Sao Paulo, authorities shut down a hospital ward after discovering that several paraplegic inmates had died and that others were neglected except for primitive medical attention from fellow convicts.

Throughout Brazil, overcrowding of prisons turns jails and police lockups into de facto penitentiaries. Many convicts spend years in facilities intended only for short stays and staffed by the civil police, the force that handles criminal investigations.

Almost half of all inmates in Sao Paulo state languish in this explosive parallel system, which is the heart of the calamity. An ominous criminal specialty has developed: Heavily armed gangs attack jails and police stations to liberate inmates, sometimes rescuing cronies and sometimes working for hire.

“Society loses twice,” said Benedito Domingos Mariano, a state ombudsman who monitors police and jails. “With these hideous conditions, you get a petty criminal who comes out capable of something much worse. Second, the civil police are forced into functioning as jailers, diverted from investigating crime, and are constantly under pressure.”

Mariano recently visited the lockup in the Elysian Fields police district, a menacing area of downtown Sao Paulo. A heavy metal door swung open onto a scene from hell. About 160 inmates occupied a space intended for 36: four cells with a dank central patio feebly illuminated by a skylight two stories above.

The mob surged toward the bars, a mass of angry, scarred, chattering faces; they sensed the visitor had the power to help them. There were wild-eyed crack addicts, skeletal AIDS sufferers. The patio was especially crowded because it was visiting day; the inmates kept a respectful distance from conjugal visits taking place in tentlike contraptions rigged up in the cells.

Many inmates begged to be sent to a real prison. Joao Monteiro, a green-eyed marijuana dealer, was flanked by his visiting gray-haired mother weeping on one shoulder and his black-haired wife on the other. He said he should have been transferred to a prison, where he would be eligible for daytime release.

“Instead I’m locked in here,” said the anguished 39-year-old. “My son died last weekend in an accident. I couldn’t go to his funeral.”

The lockup does not have the resources and personnel to provide niceties such as furloughs, but Mariano and the precinct commander, Jorge Carrasco, promised to do what they could. In response, an inmate with close-cropped hair and a wayward eye leaned close to the bars and rasped a warning.

“We get lots of visits: judges, people who say they will help, but there is no change,” the inmate snapped. “Maybe if we had a riot like they do in other places, maybe if somebody got hurt, then you’d listen and get us out of here. We are sick of promises.”

The perennial threat of violence has spurred reforms such as the appointment of Mariano, 40, a civilian watchdog based at police headquarters who investigates law enforcement.

Eight thousand inmates have been transferred to state prisons, and thousands more will follow as new prisons open.

Also, the federal Congress recently expanded alternative punishments for convicts sentenced to four years or less to reduce the number of nonviolent offenders occupying scarce bunks. Only about 3% of offenders in Brazil are sentenced to community service or probation, compared with approximately 30% in the United States, according to Oscar Vieira, director of a U.N.-funded think tank that works with the state prison agency.

“The big obstacle is the judges, who are reluctant to use alternative sentences,” Vieira said.

One judge was not a hindrance: Furukawa. His claim to fame is the city jail in Braganca Paulista, a community of 120,000 people in an agricultural region about two hours from Sao Paulo. The jail, brightly painted in the blue and white associated with Brazil’s patron Madonna, tops the city’s tallest hill. It is utopian compared with the dungeonlike police precinct in downtown Sao Paulo.

In Model Jail, Inmates Given Responsibilities

Only two unarmed guards oversee about 220 inmates jailed for crimes ranging from drug trafficking to murder. Internal gates are manned by inmates who are entrusted with the keys. Hallways, cells and recreation areas are clean and well lighted. Convicts and the accused live in separate wings, each with busy workshops where inmates earn salaries assembling electrical components and making kitchen utensils.

Roberto Cardoso, 40, looked relaxed as he peeled onions in sunlight streaming through the barred window of the kitchen. Even if there was room in a prison, no one wants to leave Braganca Paulista, said Cardoso, who is serving a four-year sentence for small-time drug dealing.

“In other places, you are mixed in with assassins, heavyweight thugs. It’s very dangerous, and there’s nothing to do,” Cardoso said. “Here you work. It’s like mental and physical therapy. You are treated like a human being.”

Six years ago, however, the jail was a fetid, corrupt hellhole. After four inmates died in a knife fight in 1993, Furukawa proposed a plan to community leaders. The law gives judges power to improve the conditions of inmates, but they rarely exercise it.

Aided by inmates who pleaded their case at City Council hearings, the judge persuaded city leaders to form a nonprofit corporation to rescue the jail. Lawyers, teachers, psychologists and other professionals donated services and raised $40,000--a small fortune considering that it was for criminals.

Furukawa rooted out waste and fraud. He slashed exorbitant food costs in half by having meals prepared in-house rather than contracting with an outside company. He persuaded Gov. Mario Covas to let the jail spend the savings on renovating the decrepit facility, building a new wing--which helps prevent overcrowding--and offering industrial workshops.

“We got a lot of people involved,” said Furukawa, 50. “Our idea is that incarcerating the inmate should ultimately cost nothing to society. We want the jail to become self-sufficient.”

The result has been not the privatization that brings dubious results in the United States, but rather a public-private partnership. Local companies subcontract with the jail, whose inmates pay part of their wages into the coffers of the nonprofit corporation.

The inmates come from the same population as before the reforms. They are not screened or specially selected; it is the internal culture that has transformed. The prisoners are enthusiastic participants, especially a 15-man council of trustees that maintains order.

“These guys never had it so good,” said council President Walter Donizeti de Vasconcelos, 36, who is serving 24 years for armed robbery and drug crimes. “They’re in a First World facility, though they are still inmates. We worked hard to make changes. We disarmed ourselves, turning in all the knives. We had to box a few ears to make these guys get with the program.”

Furukawa and other leaders want to build an adjacent factory that would enable the jail to fund itself and would provide transitional jobs for just-released convicts. The governor brought Furukawa to Sao Paulo in May to replicate the experiment in other jails.

That will be difficult, reformers acknowledge, especially in urban areas where there is more crime and less community spirit. Bureaucracy and graft are entrenched. But some ideas, such as identifying ways to save and intelligently redirect funds, are universally applicable. And the Braganca experience suggests perhaps the most politically effective pitch for reform: a way to spend less money on incarcerating criminals.

Another thoughtful reformer is De Azevedo, 60, the state prisons chief. A dignified former prosecutor, De Azevedo works closely with Brazil’s top experts on justice reform, contributing to scholarly journals. Artwork by convicts decorates the walls of his office. He calls the ovation at a play performed recently by inmate actors at a theater here “one of the great emotional moments of my life.”

Nonetheless, critics say he must move faster. The state has not transferred more inmates from the overwhelmed local jails to prisons because officials fear new troubles in the relatively calm prisons, advocates say.

“The fact that they take the crisis seriously, while important, is insufficient given the gravity of the problem,” said James Cavallaro, the representative in Brazil of Human Rights Watch. “They are taking measures, but it’s not enough.”

A tangible improvement: the creation of the crisis response team that resolved the Sorocaba standoff in 1997.

Although the team’s existence might seem mere common sense, it must be seen in context. Authorities elsewhere resort to cowboy tactics. Police in northeastern Ceara state struck a typical deal with mutinous inmates during the “bloody Christmas” standoff in 1997. In exchange for the release of a police lieutenant among the hostages, commanders gave the desperadoes guns, ammunition, cars--which had allegedly been disabled--and half an hour’s head start.

A wild chase and gunfight ensued. Police killed seven inmates and wounded two hostages. The investigation remains open into what Human Rights Watch called “excessive use of force and at least two summary executions.”

In contrast, Sao Paulo authorities took the lessons of the Carandiru massacre seriously and hammered out a firm negotiation policy in accordance with international guidelines.

“We have basic rules,” De Azevedo said. “We don’t let anyone flee, we don’t provide vehicles or guns, we never trade hostages. . . . That’s why we haven’t had deaths.”

The leader of the four-man negotiation team is Lourival Gomes, the prison agency’s No. 2 official, who has a streetwise, hard-nosed style. The team keeps a specially equipped Chevrolet Blazer and helicopter on standby for rapid deployment. Gomes does the talking with barricaded inmates during sleepless days and nights.

“You can’t learn this from books. You have to learn from experience,” Gomes said. “You have to show the inmate you are totally calm and without fear. You have to gather intelligence. It is like a shootout of blackmail, information, disinformation. And if there is a raid, the raiders have to know the prison. If they go in blind, either they will kill someone or they themselves will die.”

The members of the team hope that they will not have to work so hard or so often as more prisons open.

The goal of Brazil’s mammoth construction drive is not just more prisons but better ones, according to federal prisons chief Seabra. The new facilities offer vocational areas, patios, infirmaries, and special cellblocks for dangerous or endangered convicts. They are designed for an average of 580 inmates.

“Above that number, you lose control,” Seabra said. “Society has to give the inmate conditions to work and make money, to improve himself, to be a good example to the rest of the inmate community and help his family.”

The new facilities could be overwhelmed, of course, if there are not more cultural and legal changes to slow down the fast-spinning circle of crime, punishment and overpopulation.

In Sao Paulo, reformers are determined to transfer to new prisons and jails the approximately 7,000 inmates now held in the Carandiru House of Detention, still a tinderbox of overcrowding, murder and misery. Reformers will have achieved a victory on the day the state fulfills their dream of demolishing the giant complex, and all the ghosts and evils it symbolizes.

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Backlog of Inmates

Of prisoners being held, percentage awaiting trial:

Argentina: 50%

Bolivia: 60

Brazil: 45

Chile: 50

Colombia: 50

Costa Rica: 30

Dominican Rep.: 90

Ecuador: 69

Guatemala: 74

Honduras: 92

Mexico: 45

Panama: 65

Paraguay: 95

Peru: 72

Uruguay: 90

Venezuela: 70

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Source: Human Rights Watch

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A Region of Reforms

PARAGUAY

Landlocked nation of 5.7 million reinstated democracy nine years ago but still suffers from instability and lawlessness. Modern penal code aims to reach out to indigenous population and reduce huge number of inmates awaiting trial.

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CHILE

15 million citizens enjoy strong economy and relatively efficient institutions. But justice system suffers from secrecy and bureaucracy. Government plans to put prosecutors in charge of police investigations and reduce pretrial detentions.

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VENEZUELA

Country of 23 million is mired in crisis despite oil riches and 40 years of democracy. Half of approximately 4,000 judges and court employees are under investigation for corruption. New criminal code is seen as progress but has caused confusion. Further reforms possible.

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ARGENTINA

Population of 36 million is among region’s most prosperous and best educated. Archaic written trials replaced by public proceedings. Federal government is channeling backlogged cases to mediation system and hopes to institute U.S.-style juries.

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About This Series

Despite reforms of the past two decades, Latin American societies remain unequal and unjust. This three-part series explores efforts to reform the justice system, which have taken on the urgency of restoring democracy in the 1980s and modernizing economies in the 1990s.

* Sunday: Police fight rising crime while battling their own traditions of brutality and dishonesty.

* Monday: Reformers rewrite criminal codes, open up secretive investigations and trials, and protect the rights of the poor and powerless.

* Today: Prison officials strive to end overcrowding and violence with large construction program and a campaign to change the mentality of authorities, inmates and the community at large.

The series will be available on the Internet at https://www.latimes.com.