PORTO ALEGRE (Brazil), April 11 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Before Brazilian prosecutors could conduct an inspection last year of the prison considered the country’s worst, its warden had to clear their visit with the jail’s de facto authorities: in-house prison gangs.
As Brazil’s incarcerated prison population has surged eight-fold in three decades to around 750,000 inmates, the world’s third-highest tally, its prison gangs have come to wield vast power that reaches far beyond the jailhouse walls.
New President Jair Bolsonaro’s vow to crack down on spiraling crime has put him on a collision course with the jail gangs.
Top security officials said they plan to isolate gang bosses, ramp up surveillance, build more lockups and deploy federal forces to beleaguered state prison systems.
Originally formed to protect inmates and advocate for better conditions, Brazil’s prison gangs are now involved in bank heists, drug trafficking and gun-running, with jailed kingpins presiding over their empires via smuggled cellphones.
Their spread has kindled a violent crime wave, turning Brazil into the world’s murder capital. With a record 64,000 people killed in 2017, the prison gangs, or “facções,” have become the country’s most pressing security concern, and a daunting foe for Bolsonaro, a far-right former army captain.
“The solution to public security in Brazil depends on lots of things, and one of those is the prison system,” said Fabiano Bordignon, Bolsonaro’s appointment as head of the National Penitentiary Department.
Bordignon, in an interview, said Brazil’s roughly 1,500 jails need about 350,000 more spaces to house prisoners. He plans to use a 1.5 billion reais ($396 million) federal prison fund to help state governments build between 10,000 and 20,000 spaces this year.
By the end of Bolsonaro’s term in 2022, Bordignon hopes to lower the deficit by up to 140,000 spaces. But with each new space costing an average of 50,000 reais, he knows he needs more money: “We’re not going to be able to solve everything in four years,” he said.
Still, authorities must “retake control” of Brazil’s jails, he added, since “in a good number of them, the state has no control.”
Nowhere is that reality starker than the Central Prison in the southern city of Porto Alegre. Inaugurated in 1959, it is Brazil’s largest lockup, and, according to a 2015 congressional report, also its worst.
When investigators from the National Council of the Public Ministry came to inspect the prison last year, its warden told them he had to first okay it with gang leaders, according to the investigators’ report.
The prison has a capacity of 1,824 people, but officials said there were nearly 5,000 inmates from at least eight different gangs stuffed into its moldy galleys – more than the entire prison population of Norway.
Internally, the prison is controlled by the facções, whose members live in rancid, densely packed cellblocks that armed guards only enter in riot gear. In one gang-controlled wing, some 300 inmates lived in a space designed for 200, with many sleeping in the corridor.
Roughly 30 percent of the jail’s population is more-or-less illiterate, and dozens of prisoners suffer from tuberculosis and syphilis, officials in the jail’s educational and medical wings said. In the exercise yard, which inmates share with rats and cockroaches, raw sewage gurgles out of broken pipes.
The gangs offer protection from rape and rival crews, but it comes at a steep price. Inmates must buy their food from their bosses, who even control inmates’ intimate visits. — NNN-AGENCIES
