Brazil teen prisoners despair amid crowding, violence

Leaning through the bars of his cramped cell, Ivan Dias sees no way out of Brazil's juvenile detention system.

The country has the most overcrowded and violent youth prisons in Latin America and they are feeding a rise in the adult prison population.
Dias said he learned nearly everything he knows about crime since he was first jailed four years ago as a 14-year-old in a system which, by law, is meant to educate and train inmates.
Four years, six sentences and several jailhouse rebellions later, he is locked up with two others in the securest part of a youth prison in the capital Brasilia. He is there for trafficking cocaine.
Hip hop music pounds from an exercise yard where inmates from a rival gang want to kill him. Dias and others are in the secure wing for their own protection.
“This place is pure violence,” said Dias, who has dreams to work at a telephone company if he can stay out of jail and stay alive. The odds are stacked against him.

The national youth prison system handles about 30,000 teen-agers a year, according to U.N. estimates. Over 80 percent of youth inmates offend again. More than half go on to Brazil's adult prison system, according to Brazil's federal human rights secretariat.
Many will die on the streets of Brasilia's satellite towns where unemployment is over 20 percent and the gun death rate one of the highest in the world.
In a country where most people are poor and more than one in 10 a teen-ager, Brazil's youth prisons have become holding tanks for tens of thousands of young people who fail to get an education and end up on the wrong side of towering wealth divisions.

Will to change
Brazilian television viewers have grown used to dramatic images of helicopters hovering over burning youth detention centers as riot police herd up the predominantly black inmates after murders and even beheadings.
Brazil's Sao Paulo state centers, which have 40 percent of detainees, have had 28 rebellions and three deaths so far this year, according to United Nations figures.
Detainees in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro undergo beatings as outnumbered guards, faced with near impossible situations, try to maintain discipline, human rights groups say.
The poorly funded youth prisons could become a 2006 election issue. Sao Paulo's opposition Gov. Geraldo Alckmin and President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva have blamed one other for problems. Alckmin could run against Lula next year.
That might hasten reforms to a system which has some of the world's best juvenile rights legislation and some of the world's worst conditions, analysts say.

Brasilia's youth detention center has 360 inmates, nearly twice the number it was built for. The 12- to 18-year-old inmates are meant to get three hours of school a day. Brazil's human rights secretariat says overcrowding can cut that to four hours a week.
Inmates spend most of their time in poorly ventilated cells. The toilet is a hole in the ground. Disease and illness spread quickly as up to four are forced to sleep on the floor, or as inmates call it, in the “favela” or slum.
Rebellions usually happen on Mother's Day, when teen-agers demand to be let out to see their families.
After the center's last riot in May 2004, youths passed through a tunnel of guards beating them with sticks, two inmates have said. Center director Iolete Macedo denies the claim.
“You can put a teen-ager in the best center in the world and it won't do anything unless he himself has the will and the incentive to change,” says Macedo, who is pressing state authorities to finish a new center to ease overcrowding.

Education not repression
Most teen prisoners go on to an adult prison system which has had 20 rebellions this year and has 70,000 more inmates than it has space for — equal to the entire British prison population.
Most Brazilians abhor violence in youth centers but support the punitive system to deter crime.
Ironically, it is 18- to 25-year-olds who commit most violent crimes in Brazil. Teen-agers are three times less likely to commit offenses than their U.S. counterparts.
In neighboring countries like Colombia teen-agers are usually only locked up after serious crimes like murder. That prevents overcrowding that is the principal problem in Brazil, where over half of teen-agers are jailed for robbery, theft or drug trafficking.
In Argentina, a center is overcrowded if it is built for 40 inmates and has 100, said U.N. official Mario Volpi. Sao Paulo centers have up to six times too many inmates, some housing over 1,000.

“These places just make people worse,” said Volpi, a policy coordinator for the United Nations Children Fund.
Brazilian states like Rio Grande do Sul have cut re-offense rates as low as 10 percent through education, training and not locking up offenders for petty crime.
In the Brasilia center, 18-year-old Dias has one more chance to get out and stay out before he enters adult prison.

“People who want to turn their lives around can't because of the gangs and the wars,” said Dias, his shaved head bowed.

Andrew Hay
6 July 2005

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