Brazilian prisoners are too often forced to endure appalling daily living conditions in the country's prisons, jails and police lockups. Because of overcrowding, many of them sleep on the floor of their cells, sometimes in the bathroom next to the hole that serves as a toilet. In the most crowded facilities, where there is no free space even on the floor, prisoners sleep tied to the cell bars or hanging in suspended hammocks. Most penal facilities are physically deteriorated, some are severely so.

Forced to provide their own mattresses, bedding, clothing and toiletries, many prisoners are dependent on the support of their families or others outside the prison. The struggle for space, and the authorities' failure to provide basic provisions in many facilities, leads to prisoner-on-prisoner exploitation, as prisoners who lack money and family support are victimized by others.

As evidenced by centuries of innovation in prison architecture, the size and shape of a prison can have a significant impact on its functioning. Bad prison design comes in many forms, of course-there are dark and dreary buildings with little ventilation, and buildings with hidden corners that are difficult to monitor-but one simple error is in making prisons too large.133 As a general rule of thumb, the Standard Minimum Rules recommend that prisons hold no more than 500 inmates.134

Brazil's penal facilities run the gamut of sizes, shapes, and layouts. In São Paulo, the Carandiru prison complex includes Latin America's largest prison, the Casa de Detenção, which held 6,508 inmates in seven different pavilions on the daywe visited it. 135 Other prisons of over 1,000 inmates include the State Penitentiary in São Paulo; the Central Prison of Porto Alegre and the State Penitentiary of Jacuí, both in the state of Rio Grande do Sul; the Center for Internment and Reeducation, in Brasília, and the Professor Barreto Campelo prison, in Pernambuco. Most of Brazil's prisons, however, are much smaller, holding several hundred inmates, while most women's prisons hold fewer than a hundred.

The larger prisons tend to have more than a single story: several pavilions in the Casa de Detenção, for example, are five stories tall. While each of the pavilions in the Casa de Detenção is built around a central courtyard, with a self-enclosed square or rectangular

layout, it is more common in Brazil to find prisons laid out using long corridors lined on each side with cells and dormitories. A few unusual design schemes exist as well. The Raimundo Vidal Pessoa Penitentiary, in Manaus, Amazonas, is built on a radial plan, a style that was common in the early part of the century, the era from which it dates.

At the other extreme of size are the thousands of police lockups around the country, some of which have only one small cell, though others hold a hundred or more prisoners. In São Paulo, a common layout found in medium-sized police lockups is that of a covered patio flanked by two or three communal cells on each side. The smaller lockups, however, lack a patio: they simply contain four small cells on an interior hall.

The national prison law mandates that inmates be held in individual cells of at least six square meters (approximately sixty-five square feet) in size.136 In accordance with this rule, many of Brazil's prisons rely upon individual cells in all or a substantial part of their living areas. Nonetheless, except for a few prisons such as the Charqueadas High Security Prison in Rio Grande do Sul and the Nelson Hungria Penitentiary in Minas Gerais, overcrowding has overruled the designers' plans: rather than holding a single prisoner, the individual cells are used communally, by two or more inmates. Besides individual cells, most prisons alsohave larger cells or dormitories that were specifically designed for group living. Police lockups generally have small to medium-sized cells designed for five to ten inmates.

Many penal facilities, and thus many inmates' cells and dormitories, are two to five times as crowded as they were designed to be. In some facilities, the overcrowding has reached inhuman levels, with inmates jammed together in crowds. The densely packed housing areas in these places offered Human Rights Watch researchers such sights as prisoners tied to windows to lessen the demand for floor space, and prisoners forced to sleep on top of hole-in-the-floor toilets. Such overcrowding also generates filth, bad smells, and vermin, which in turn exacerbate tensions among prisoners. Inmates are responsible for keeping their living quarters clean and, obviously, some do a better job than others: the more crowded the cell, the more difficult the task.

As mentioned previously, the overcrowding is generally most acute in police lockups. Human Rights Watch inspected São Paulo's seventy-eighth police precinct, for example, and found eighty prisoners divided among four small cells. According to official capacity figures provided by the public security secretariat, this lockup was designed to hold twenty inmates, making it four times as crowded as it should have been.137 In every cell, besides prisoners squeezed together on the floor, we found five to seven prisoners hanging from ropes in the air. Even though the bathrooms were tiny, two or three prisoners in each cell slept there. The overcrowding was so extreme that it was hard to imagine that the facility could have crammed in sixteen additional inmates just a few months earlier, but that is what we were informed.

A prisoner who had passed through the overcrowded Thefts and Robberies Precinct in Minas Gerais described its physical conditions in these terms:

Everything is dirty and infested. There are little bugs there-muquirana-that live in your clothes and make your skin itch all night. It's impossible to sleep. Every Friday they have a "geral" (full search). There is a big patio there. Everyone is forced to strip naked and wait in the patio, often in the cold. They turn on a hose and wash down everything. But it doesn't keep the bugs away.138

The police lockups Human Rights Watch visited were all extremely overcrowded, but we at least found that the physical infrastructure of most of them was in good condition. Some prisons that are nearly as packed as the lockups are also physically decayed by heavy use and no repairs. The most shocking facility we saw, in combining overcrowding and rotten infrastructure, was the Central Prison of Porto Alegre, in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. With an official capacity of 600 places, it held 1,803 prisoners on the day we visited and had held up to 2,040 during the previous year.139

The prisoners' living areas were in an advanced state of decay. Not only was crumbling concrete, peeling paint, and broken flooring much in evidence, but the plumbing and electrical systems were also seriously damaged. In many cells we found that prisoners had rigged together elaborate contraptions made of plastic to drain away the water that leaked from the ceiling, which ranged from the occasional drip to, in one cell, a steady stream. A wall in one hall covered with moss evidenced a similar pipe breakage. Bare strands of electical wire ran about the ceilings and down the walls, a clear fire hazard. One gallery gave off a strong smell of sewage. As in many facilities, the toilets did not flush.

In this prison, as in others, the distribution of living space is relatively unregulated, which means that the burden of overcrowding falls disproportionately on certain prisoners. That is, some cells overflow with inmates while others are more sparsely populated. In general, prisoners who are poorer, weaker, and less powerful tend to live in correspondingly less habitable accommodations.

In all prisons, the most cramped and uncomfortable areas are the disciplinary and holding (triagem) cells, which are as likely to hold prisoners needing protection from other prisoners as they are to hold those being punished. An appalling example of this is the fifth floor of pavilion five of São Paulo's Casa de Detenção, where conditions are exceptionally miserable and subhuman. The 356 prisoners assigned to a special section of the fifth floor, all of whom desired transfer to other prisons, were living there under a status labeled "preventive measure of security." To the guards and other prisoners, however, they are known simply as the "yellow ones": the prisoners who stay locked in their cells (and thus whose skin turns yellow from lack of exposure to the sun).140

Eight prisoners were crammed into a typical single-person cell in this section, although a few cells held ten. The air in these gloomy chambers was thickwith carbon dioxide and body odor. In some cells, prisoners tied themselves to the barred windows to save space and to breathe fresh air. Broken squat toilets were located by the door of the cells without even a partition to shield them, leaving prisoners to defecate before an audience of six or eight cellmates. The walls and floors of the cells are of dark, dingy concrete whose paint wore off long ago.

One prisoner described life in the yellow section to us:141

We sleep with one guy in a hammock and the other nine on the floor. The bald guy has AIDS and asked to be transferred but was refused. We've got four foam cushions. There are days when they shut the water off. Then there's no water for the whole day. When we complain about almost anything, we get beaten. Five months ago we complained about the lack of water. It was in May. Five guards came in and took us downstairs. They stripped off our clothes and beat us with an iron pipe.

We heard few complaints about temperature extremes, but it is clear that some facilities become incredibly hot in the summer, given the combination of high ambient temperatures and crowded cells. In Rio de Janeiro, two prisoners died of heat exhaustion in police lockups in early 1998 due to these factors.142

The U.N. Standard Minimum Rules require that each inmate be assigned a "separate bed" and be provided with "separate and sufficient bedding which shall be clean when issued, kept in good order and changed often enough to ensure its cleanliness."143 Brazil's penal facilities are, to judge from the examples we visited, almost uniformly not in compliance with these requirements.

In the vast majority of men's facilities visited by Human Rights Watch, inmates sleep on foam mattresses provided by family members or purchased from other inmates.144 Many prisons and police lockups have built-in concrete beds, sometimes bunk beds, although in most such facilities the inmate population far exceeds the number of beds available, leaving many to sleep on the floor. At the Depatri police facility in São Paulo, for example, a typical cell had eleven inmates sleeping in beds and eleven on the floor. At the Thefts and Robberies Precinct in Minas Gerais, all prisoners sleep on the floor, many just on blankets.

Inmates in Brazil's penal facilities wear their own clothing: whatever they are arrested in, to begin with, and then whatever their families bring them or they buy. There is almost no provision for government-issued clothing, even for prisoners who need it, except in a few women's facilities. Overall, nonetheless, most prisoners are adequately clothed and most wear serviceable though worn shoes.

Inmates in Brazil generally receive minimally adequate food rations, though hardly lavish ones.145 Unlike some other Latin American prisons, no facility we that we visited in Brazil fails to provide food to its inmates, and in none did inmates complain of hunger. We did, however, hear allegations involving corruption and the uneven distribution of food in several prisons, as well as numerous complaints about food quality.

Prisoners at the Manaus central prison, in the state of Amazonas, described how the "sheriffs"-the powerful inmates-receive specially cooked meals from the prison kitchen that include all the best pieces of meat, while normal prisoners eat poorly. They acknowledged nonetheless that with the change of prison administration last year the food had generally improved.

Corruption and pilfering of food led authorities at São Paulo's Casa de Detenção to close its kitchen in early 1996 and instead rely on a private company to deliver prepared meals to prisoners. Before the switch was made to private catering, a significant amount of the food that was allocated to prisoners was actually sold outside of the prison.146 As in Manaus, there also used to be problems involving the unequal division of food among prisoners; the delivery of identical containers of food resolves that issue. The cost of this service is eight reais (approximately U.S. $7) per prisoner per day.

In some facilities, inmates rely on family members to bring them nearly all their food or to give them money to buy food. At Natal's main prison, for example, inmates said that about 15 percent of the prison population received most of their meals from family members. In some prisons, inmates are allowed to usehot plates or makeshift stoves to prepare food in their cells, although in others such appliances are banned.

Prisoners who can afford it supplement their diets by buying food from prisoner-run canteens. We saw several such canteens in the Natal prison, for example, stocking a wide range of items that included soft drinks, bottled water, beans, corn meal, cooking oil, cigarettes, and candy.

Most prisons lack trays and other serving utensils. Prisoners serve themselves using their own utensils, such as plastic food containers.

Kitchen facilities, like the rest of the physical plant, were often old and in disrepair. The areas where food was stored were often dirty and, according to prisoners' reports, infested with vermin.

The sanitary facilities in some men's prisons violate international standards.147 Although almost all prisoners have access to a toilet, the toilets are often broken or their drains blocked up, giving bathrooms a terrible stench. In some prisons, inmates complained of only sporadic running water. At Natal's Central Penitentiary, for example, inmates stated that the water only comes on for a half hour in the morning and a half hour in the evening.

The showers in many prisons and police lockups consist only of a pipe coming out of the wall, without hot water or a shower head. In almost every facility we visited, however, prisoners had improved this set-up, either by adding a commercial shower head or, more commonly, by rigging up an electrical wire so that the water is heated as it flows out of the pipe.

Article 15 of the Standard Minimum Rules requires that inmates keep their persons clean and imposes on prison authorities the obligation of providing inmates "such toilet articles as are necessary for health and cleanliness." Few men's penal facililies provide inmates with toiletries or other supplies, however; these too are generally supplied by family members. In Brasília, an exception in this respect, inmates are given toilet paper, soap, and toothpaste. Women's prisons also generally provide their inmates with these basic items. Inmates in São Paulo'sCasa de Detenção told us that toilet paper and cleaning supplies are generally available in the three pavilions housing prisoners who work, but that the remaining pavilions are not normally provided these supplies.