Why the hell of Carandiru had to erupt

Roy King has witnessed the inhuman conditions of the Brazilian prison where rioting inmates were killed this week. He spoke to Anne McHardy.

This week's events in the House of Detention at Carandiru in Sio Paulo, where the military police put down an insurrection in which thousands, many of them visiting families, were said to have been held hostage by prisoners, have once again brought the parlous state of Brazil's prisons to international attention.

It is not the first time that Carandiru has been in the news. In 1992, it became one of the most infamous prisons in the world when a similar riot was put down by the shock troops of the military police, who killed 111 prisoners in the process. On that occasion many of the prisoners had surrendered, were stripped naked, and had wounds consistent with extra-judicial executions. This time the death toll was only a dozen - low by Brazilian standards, but hardly a model of riot control.

Professor Roy King, of the Centre for Comparative Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Wales, Bangor, has visited Carandiru several times. In a report for Amnesty International, for which he was an expert adviser, he described the prison as "a huge monstrosity that can have no place in a civilised criminal justice system". Brazilian minister for human rights, Jose Gregori, who is now minister of justice, agreed and declared his intention to close the prison, but, as often happens in Brazil, actions fell short of intentions.

"The prison is run by tiny numbers of staff, fewer than one to a hundred prisoners, and it is grossly overcrowded," says King. "When I visited, there were more than 7,000 prisoners in a prison designed for just over 2,000. In my view, even a prison of 2,000 is too large, and the design of the pavilions is such that it would take at least a tenfold increase in staff to provide adequate supervision. It is possible to go into the yards of some pavilions and see hundreds of prisoners supervised by one member of staff. In such circumstances, control is inevitably ceded to prisoners and corruption is rife.

"It is, for example, the norm that a new prisoner buys his prison place by paying the guards and/or powerful prisoners. There are some rooms that have reasonable facilities. On the other hand, there are cells with literally nothing at all - although the worst rat-infested punishment cells with open sewers have now been taken out of commission for repairs."

One of the groups thought to exercise control in the prison is the Primeiro Commando da Capital. Apccording to Amnesty International, the Sio Paulo state prosecution service recommended bringing criminal charges against two senior officials in 1999 for failing to act despite having full knowledge of these gang activities.

"Inevitably," says King, "it is the most vulnerable prisoners who get the worst conditions. The top floor of one pavilion houses the "yellow people", so called because they never see the light of day outside their cells. If they did come out, they would be on the receiving end of violence within the prison community.

"There are frequent allegations of torture, and even allegations that prisoners have to bribe their way through the system. It is said that prisoners must sometimes pay bribes to get from police cells to a prison after they have been convicted (generally the conditions are much worse in police stations than in prisons) and to be released at the end of their sentences. It is said that some prisoners languish in prison after their sentence is completed for want of being able to bribe the right people."

Many of these problems are also found in juvenile detention centres in Brazil. One which King saw on his Amnesty visit was Immigrantes in Sio Paulo. Destroyed in a riot in late 1999 in which four boys died, it housed nearly 1,650 adolescents in a facility designed for 364. "At night, the children slept cheek by jowl on mattresses which had been cut to fit every inch of floor space," says King. "I should say as clearly as possible that I have never seen children kept in such appalling conditions."

However, King stresses that the Brazilian authorities are keen to improve the situation, that there are some examples of good practice and that the country should be capable of funding a system with reasonable facilities.

Much attention is being focused on a prison building programme. King does not see this as the answer, but he says that at least Brazil is avoiding the kind of Supermax system favoured in countries such as the United States.

Supermax are purpose-built prisons for the "worst of the worst" where prisoners are kept in total lock-down. King has studied the US system and published a report on it for the Economic and Social Research Council last year in response to suggestions that the United Kingdom should adopt it. He believes it drives inmates to worse behaviour, violates their human rights and, even in the US, is a disproportionate response to the scale of violence encountered.

He found that Supermax inmates had virtually no contact for "years and years". They had almost no community time, education or work. Food was passed through hatches and to come out, even for telephone calls, prisoners were cuffed and put in leg irons. Some wore spit masks over their faces. Some were allowed out for one hour in each 24 hours to exercise in what were described as "dog runs", and had no physical or intellectual contact.

King, who began his career in criminology conducting research into the care of mentally ill children in institutions, has long been interested in the US system. In 1984, he wrote a report on Oak Park Heights in Minnesota, which managed to combine maximum security with human rights.

Oak Park Heights is now changing in line with US trends, with 60 of its 350 beds built to enable lock-down, but inmates and prison officers are still obliged, as a matter of policy, to talk to each other. "If you are talking, it is more difficult to nurse grievances," says King.

The first western academic to have access to the Gulag Archipelago after the fall of the Soviet Union, King now uses his wide international experience to advise governments and non-governmental organisations.

He believes Brazil's main problem is the lack of a mechanism for translating the federal government's high-minded statements on human rights into action on the ground.

One possible way forward is through a collaborative project between the federal and state authorities in Brazil and the prison service in the UK, which King has proposed and to which Martin Narey, director general of HM prison service in Britain, has agreed in outline.

The project is under discussion in Brazil, although, as ever, funding remains an issue. The aim would be for a working group of prison governors to formulate new policies and procedures and a system of internal audit and external inspection. Without such systems, argues King, much-needed investment in new prisons or increases in staffing are unlikely to be very effective.