Twenty years ago, a police action killed 111 prisoners in a detention house in São Paulo, Brazil. This episode, known as "Carandiru Massacre", aimed at ending a prisoner’s riot. The BBC News report entitled “Brazil jail massacre: Vigil marks Carandiru anniversary” states that hundreds of people in the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo held a ceremony to mark the 20th anniversary of the prison massacre.
The riot began with a row between two prisoners over a football match they had played in their recreation time. The disagreement quickly turned into turmoil and after that into a rebellion. Fearing that the riot would spread to the rest of the complex, the police Colonel Ubiratan Guimaraes commanded the raid and the site was surrounded by riot police. In the end, 111 prisoners were killed, and many of them died attacked by dogs in the barbershop where the wounded prisoners were being taken. The riot police were accused of using extreme brutality, but the police officers involved in the killings said they were only obeying orders. The Colonel Ubiratan Guimaraes was convicted in 2001 for using excessive force and, in 2006, he was acquitted on appeal, but he was found dead in his flat months after having his conviction overturned. In 2002, Carandiru was finally closed and the buildings demolished. Until now, no-one else has been convicted over the killings.
When I read this, I was very sad because 20 years have passed and nothing was done. I mean, the police who killed those prisoners were not yet judged. I think that was a terrible event, it was a true massacre. I read one time that the police started killing everyone who was ahead of them, they fired on the prisioners and threw them in the elevator shaft. Not to mention the injured who were killed by dogs, this is inhumane. They need to pay for the wrong they did, but the justice in Brazil is very slow and not always fair.
Another problem that we find in Brazil is the overcrowded jails. Many people are put together in a small cell, in hard living conditions. In some prisons, inmates have to take turns to sleep because there is no space in the same cell for all to lie down at the same time. Furthermore, they have to make their needs with others inmates of their cell watching or they have to sleep on the toilet because of the lack of space. These are the reasons that prison riots happens often in Brazil. Nowadays, the country has more than 500,000 prisoners, and it has the fourth largest prison population in the world, but there is a deficit of almost 200,000 of vacancies in the prisons. The Brazilian law says that each prisoner has to have at least six square meters of space (in the prison), but the real situation is that each one has only 70 square centimeters.
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Reference
Brazil jail massacre: Vigil marks Carandiru anniversary. (2012, October 3). BBC News Latin America & Caribbean. Retrieved October 3, 2012 from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-19806711
Reference
Brazil jail massacre: Vigil marks Carandiru anniversary. (2012, October 3). BBC News Latin America & Caribbean. Retrieved October 3, 2012 from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-19806711
I think that Grace's chosen article and her responses to it make important points. It seems to me that too often the police and other officials are not punished for the evil that they commit. Worse, in some cases the law is used to help police and other officials commit injustices against whole societies.
ReplyDeleteAt least there was some public outrage, if not enough, and there was a court case so that people in Brazil do know that the great injustice was committed against Brazilian citizens by their own government.
I think that too many times, people also think that if someone is in prison, they must have done something wrong, but that is wrong. In many cases, people are only in prison because they have done something against a law, but in fact they have done nothing wrong: it is the law that is wrong, unjust and grossly immoral.
Thank you Grace for this very thought provoking post on a topic that matters very much not just for Brazil but for every society.
Well, jails in Thailand are completely different from Grace's topic. It says "however hard it is, Thais can step across" and many people totally agree with me. However Thai's jails has maximum-security, the traffic in drugs is available there. The prisoners can use mobile phone, order drugs, pay for drugs, or even distribute drugs to other places. It is excellent jails, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteI agree with Aor. The daily evidence is that current drug policy is a total failure. If the drugs were all legalized, there would be less drug addicts and no more drug use, a fortune would be saved on police and prisons, another fortune would be made on taxes, less people's lives and families would be destroyed by the government turning them into criminals, corruption would be reduced, and drug related crime would be greatly reduced.
DeleteEvery practical reason I can think of, and even more so the moral reasons, supports that all recreational drugs, heroin, alcohol, yaa baa, cigarettes, cocaine, marijuana, and so on, should be made legal for freely choosing adults. So why do most governments irrationally, unjustly and immorally continue to follow extremely expensive policies that they know are failures as well as immoral?