Inhumane, Ineffective, Intolerable: Brazil’s Prison System

Since its transition from dictatorship to democracy in the mid 1980s, Brazil has undergone an extraordinary transformation, becoming the political and economic leader of Latin America.But despite Brazil’s rise as a world power, willing on occasion to challenge the hegemony of the United States, a dark stain of human rights violations can still be found in the country’s prison system. Soaring crime rates and increasing public hostility toward anyone suspected of being a criminal has led to steadily increasing incarceration rates, which the Brazilian penitentiary system has been unequipped to handle.

The result is some of the hemisphere’s harshest prison conditions, described by the BBC in 2004 as being “medieval,”1 and frequently condemned by human rights experts from both the UN and NGOs such as Amnesty International. Although the federal government has acknowledged this problem’s existence for more than a decade, it has failed to produce any meaningful remedy for the system. The situation is undoubtedly a complex one, dealing with the intersection of judicial, penitentiary, and crime prevention components.

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This analysis was prepared by COHA Research Associate Katherine Haas

Thursday, August 26, 2010 | Research Memorandum 10.1