Children in northern Brazil are routinely beaten by police and detained in abusive conditions, Human Rights Watch charged in a new report released today.

The release comes on the 100th day of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's administration. Children face violence at the hands of other youths, are unnecessarily confined to their cells for lengthy periods of time, and often do not receive the schooling to which the Brazilian constitution entitles them, Human Rights Watch said.

Brazil is a federation of states, much like the United States, and each state controls its own juvenile detention system. But the federal government has a key role in enforcing the national juvenile justice law. And the federal government can condition its funding of state juvenile detention systems on their compliance with human rights norms.

Human Rights Watch's 63-page report, Cruel Confinement: Abuses Against Detained Children in Northern Brazil, is based on interviews with 44 detained youth, as well as dozens of additional interviews with government officials, lawyers, social workers, and representatives of nongovernmental organizations.

Human Rights Watch inspected a total of 17 detention facilities, including four girls' detention center, in the states of Amapá, Amazonas, Maranhão, Rondônia, and Pará. Police beatings during and after arrest are common, the report found. Such abuses often occur at police stations, where Brazilian law allows children to be held for up to five days while they await transfer to a juvenile detention facility. In rural areas, where police routinely violate the five-day limit on detention in police lockups, children are at greater risk of police abuse.