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I. Summary

At the end of the day, were the kids tortured or not?  Why is it that every time we talk about a concrete case, we discuss everything, but nobody ever ends up knowing if it happened or not?  Why is it that, in practice, the accuser always becomes the accused?  Why can’t a case ever be brought to a conclusion?  Why do bureaucratic questions suddenly become paramount right then?  Why do we need to go through an immense and unbearable set of procedures that leaves us with a profound sense of futility?¹
—Questions posed by Eliana Rocha, counselor, State Council for the Defense of the Child and Adolescent, to Sérgio Novo, director general,  Department of Socio-Educational Action, at a council meeting on November 10, 2004.

When Human Rights Watch last visited Rio de Janeiro’s five juvenile detention centers, in July and August 2003, we found a system that was decaying, filthy, and dangerously overcrowded.  The facilities we saw did not meet basic standards of health or hygiene.  Complaints of beatings and other ill-treatment were routinely ignored by the state’s Department of Socio-Educational Action (Departamento Geral de Ações Sócio-Educativas, DEGASE), the authority responsible for the state’s juvenile detention centers.  The system lacked effective oversight; in particular, administrative sanctions against guards were rare, and none of the officials we spoke with knew of any case in which a guard had received a criminal conviction for abusive conduct.

DEGASE officials were quick to denounce our report, released in December 2004, claiming that it contained outdated information and reflected the practices of the prior administration.  DEGASE director general Sérgio Novo described the report as “an injustice,” telling the respected daily Folha de S. Paulo, “They show a reality that is completely different from what we have today.”²

Despite DEGASE’s protests to the contrary, we found on our return in May 2005 that little has changed in Rio de Janeiro’s detention centers.  As this report documents, beatings and other physical abuse continue.  Living conditions in several detention centers have worsened.  Critical shortages in staffing, food, and clothing in these detention centers mean that youths are exposed to the risk of cruel and degrading treatment on a daily basis.

The Educandário Santo Expedito is a case in point.  Well over its official capacity when we first inspected it in July 2003, it was even more overcrowded when we returned in May 2005.  On both occasions, youths were crowded into cellblocks in a single building.  The living quarters in other buildings were destroyed in a November 2002 fire and were not repaired until late 2004.  Although they have now been repaired, they are not currently used to house youths.  The only notable improvement was the new coat of yellow paint on the barred doors leading into each cellblock, covering the peeling, dingy blue we saw on our first inspection.  “Purely cosmetic,” said Tiago J., a former guard, on hearing our description of what we had seen on our return visit to Santo Expedito.³

Beatings by guards are common in all detention centers with the exception of the Educandário Santos Dumont, the girls’ detention facility.  “It’s bad [here] because they beat us,” said seventeen-year-old Roberto G., referring to Santo Expedito.  Asked who he meant and why they did this, he answered, “The guards. . . .  Any reason.   They hit us on the face, on the chest.  They use their fists and also a piece of wood.  It’s the guards who do this.” Some are worse than others, he told us.  “This happens every once in a while.  The last time was two weeks ago, on Thursday.  A guard beat me.”⁴

With the authorization of the State Secretariat for Childhood and Youth (Secretaria de Estado da Infância e da Juventude), we entered Santo Expedito and two other detention centers, the Educandário Santos Dumont and the Escola João Luiz Alves, before DEGASE officials refused to permit us to continue our investigation.  Their action was both a remarkable act of insubordination—DEGASE is an agency of the state secretariat—and a telling indication that detention authorities were concerned that their practices would not pass muster.

Despite DEGASE’s efforts to obstruct our investigation, we were able to review practices in the remaining centers, the Centro de Atendimento Intensivo-Belford Roxo (CAI-Baixada) and the Instituto Padre Severino, by examining court records and other documentary evidence and interviewing parents, released youths, detention officials, and others familiar with conditions in those centers.

The beatings and other ill-treatment that are routine in Rio de Janeiro’s detention facilities are the product of a systemic failure of accountability.  There is simply no effective independent monitoring of these institutions.  Public prosecutors have the authority to inspect juvenile detention facilities but almost never do so.  Public defenders have attempted to fill this role, but some twenty judicial districts lack public defenders, meaning that some youths in those districts go without any legal representation at all.

Judicial inspections focus on administrative details—the number of youths, the number of staff, the quantity of laundry detergent in each facility—but show little inclination to examine reports of abuse by guards.  DEGASE’s inspector general’s office lacks the independence to carry out its mission.

In this report, Human Rights Watch’s eighteenth on juvenile justice and conditions of detention for children around the world, we assess the treatment of children according to international law, as set forth in the Convention on the Rights of the Child and other international human rights instruments.⁵

We use the word “child” in this report to refer to anyone under the age of eighteen.  The Convention on the Rights of the Child defines as a child “every human being below the age of eighteen years unless, under the law applicable to the child, majority is attained earlier.”⁶  This use differs from the definition of “child” in Brazil’s juvenile justice law, which makes a distinction between persons under the age of twelve (who are considered “children”) and those between twelve and seventeen years of age (“adolescents”).  For this reason, and because Brazil’s juvenile detention center may hold both adolescents and young adults between up to the age of twenty-one, this report uses the term “youth” to refer to any person between age twelve and twenty-one.⁷  We give aliases to all children and detained youths in this report to protect their privacy and safety..