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III. Juvenile Detention in Rio de Janeiro

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.  Almost without exception, the facilities we saw did not meet basic standards of health or hygiene.  Complaints of 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 sentence for abusive conduct.⁸

Returning in May 2005, despite DEGASE’s protests to the contrary, we found that little has changed.  As this report documents, conditions in several detention centers have worsened, with critical shortages in staffing, food, and clothing, continued physical abuse, and appalling squalor.

Brazil’s national juvenile justice law, the Statute of the Child and the Adolescent, celebrates its fifteenth anniversary in July 2005.  The statute is a model law on paper and in some respects exceeds the guarantees contained in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, an international treaty governing children’s rights to which Brazil is a party.

In Rio de Janeiro, the state juvenile justice system serves approximately 2,000 youths, some 900 of whom are awaiting trial or serving periods of detention.⁹  For those youths, the statute remains a hollow promise.

Youth and Crime

Contrary to popular perception, few violent offenses are committed by youths under the age of eighteen in Brazil.  In 2001, for example, youths under age eighteen were identified as responsible for approximately 2.2 percent of homicides and 1.6 percent of robberies by threat or force (roubo), according to data from the state public security secretariat.¹⁰

More recent data from the state public security secretariat and the juvenile court show similarly low rates for violent offenses committed by juveniles.  Youths under eighteen were known to be responsible for less than 1 percent of homicides in each of 2003 and 2004 and between 1.5 and 3.6 percent of robberies by threat or force in 2003.¹¹  Direct comparisons of these data are difficult—juvenile court records show the number of youths that have been found guilty of particular acts, while the public security secretariat data are based on crime reports.  In addition, the categories used in each set of data may differ slightly.  Nevertheless, these more recent data broadly support the conclusion that the overwhelming majority of violent crime is perpetrated by adults rather than by youths under the age of eighteen.

Contrary to another common misperception, those serving sentences in juvenile detention facilities are not exclusively held for murder, robbery, and other violent offenses, as the chart below shows.  Many are held for nonviolent drug offenses; others are detained for violating conditions of a sentence.¹²  One girl in Santos Dumont was held for desacato (the offense of insulting a public official) and resisting arrest.¹³

These data suggest that detention in Rio de Janeiro is not always used as a measure of last resort, as required by international law and Brazil’s Statute of the Child.  Under the statute, in fact, youths may only be detained for offenses involving violence or serious threats of violence, repeat serious offenses, or for the “repeated and unjustified failure” to comply with conditions of a sentence.¹⁴