The gates opened at seven, when the queue was already huge. Everyone had to pass through the body search room. The men’s search was more superficial; the women were frisked by female employees who even looked inside their underwear and, when they were suspicious, would ask the woman to remove it and squat down to see if she had a foreign object in her vagina. No matter how tactful the friskers were, the search was always uncomfortable, especially for modest elderly women.
Until eleven o’clock, the queue would move quickly, so everyone could be out again before four o’clock, when the head count was conducted. On an average weekend, two to three thousand people would visit. When it was cold the numbers would drop, and rain would bring them down even further. At Easter, Mother’s Day and Christmas, the crowd that gathered was enormous.
On the Monday afternoon just before Christmas of 1997, I arrived at the prison to tend to the sick and there was already a small queue with blankets, folding chairs and camp beds. They were women and children who, after the previous day’s visit, hadn’t returned home: they had set up camp there, to wait until the following weekend.
Over the next few days, the queue grew; they took turns eating takeaway food, using the bathrooms in local bars and changing babies’ nappies right there, protected only by a makeshift asbestos roof that the prison administration had built over the pavement in more recent years.
That Friday after work, the prison employees went out for some beers. After midnight, as we left the bar, the queue had grown long, well past the shelter, passing the military police barracks and all the way down to the metro station.
A mulatta with a frank smile, Zilá, one of the first in line, was happy because her husband had had a takeaway container of pasta that he had cooked in his cell sent to her, much to the envy of her friends in the queue. Zilá had four children, of whom only the oldest had been conceived with their father out of prison, six years earlier. That day, in order to keep Zilá company and to be introduced to a friend of her husband’s, Fran – her thin, shy neighbour, who couldn’t have been more than twenty years old – had arrived. Although she was going along with Fran’s intentions, Zilá had warned her friend against it: ‘What I tell Fran is if you want to meet Roberval I’ll take you, but I don’t wish this life for anyone – the weariness of queuin’, the humiliation in the body search room, always being alone, missin’ your man so badly, the children askin’ when daddy’s comin’ home. A woman can only bear this life with a lot of love in her heart.’
Next to her, Fran, her face picked out of the penumbra by light from the lamp post, nodded her head, but she intended to spend the night there determined to meet Roberval, a moustached skirt-chaser who had been Zilá’s husband’s partner in his cargo-theft business.
Visitors entered the prison through small doors that opened straight onto the outside pavement, deposited their bags in front of the guard, who inspected them, and were then given a body search. It was an absurdly difficult task to search so many people; it would have taken days to do it thoroughly.
This strategic difficulty created opportunities for employees to come to an understanding with visitors and turn a blind eye to the entry of prohibited items, a risky procedure for those bringing them in and for those allowing them to pass. They were watched by their own co-workers, as one of them explained: ‘Over two hundred people were hired at the same time as me. Ten years later, there are only five or six left. With this low salary, some are contaminated by crime and led astray. Except we never know who they are. You have to be suspicious of everyone, unfortunately.’
Later, I heard that the suspicious author of the words above, in turn, also aroused suspicion among his co-workers. According to Dr Walter Hoffgen, the director general, ‘The hardest thing in a prison is identifying those who are involved with the inmates.’
Visitors who smuggled drugs into the prison ran great risks. When caught, they were taken to the closest police station, where they were charged with trafficking, for which there was no bail. One Sunday, I saw a young lady of nineteen being escorted out of the facility in tears; she had been caught smuggling in twenty grams of cocaine for her boyfriend. On another occasion, prison administration unexpectedly replaced a guard on the door and surprised a visitor bringing in thirty-two kilos of marijuana in two plastic bags. The seizure caused internal problems: ‘It left us doing cold turkey. As a result, the price of crack went up.’
The women who brought in drugs did it to get their partners or sons out of trouble or so they could support their families from behind bars.
The warders who worked on the doors were like sniffer dogs with extra-sensory perception. One of them, a large mulatto with a gentle gaze, used the following technique: ‘I search the bags, but I don’t neglect the queue. When I notice someone acting unnatural, I give them a quick look in the eye, then again. As she (I say she because it’s almost always women who bring stuff in) gets closer, my stare grows longer. By the time she puts the bags on the table, I don’t even look at them. My eyes are boring into hers. The ones who’ve got something to hide can’t hack it. They give themselves away.’
Others would hold out their hand to greet the visitor with a handshake and feel if it was cold, shaky or sweaty. Looking out of the corners of their eyes, not a single detail of the person would go unnoticed: their clothes, their hard-to-hide swagger, a tattoo, their demeanour and the slang they used: ‘If the girl walks up and says, “Hey, big boy,” I know she’s dodgy!’
A keen sense of smell was a powerful ally of those who guarded the exit: the smell of prison seeped into the inmates. It was an odour that was hard to define. It seemed to be a mixture of several: fried garlic, musty cleaning rags, sweat and a dash of disinfectant. Although it couldn’t be classified as horrible, it was unpleasant. Hot and heavy. It was so relentless that whenever the warders opened the crowded Solitary Confinement cells, they would never stand right at the entrance: ‘Don’t stand in front of the door, Doctor. The stench sticks to your clothes and doesn’t come out in the wash.’
Visit days required that the guards pay extra attention. Leaving disguised as a visitor is a traditional escape strategy. Once, an inmate changed out of his beige trousers and into a pair of jeans and left with a group of employees. The guard on the door got a little confused, as so many people worked in the Casa de Detenção.
‘What group are you from?’
‘I’m from such-and-such a group, I’m here as back-up.’
‘Did Raimundo authorise it?’
‘Of course he did!’
‘Well, con, you’re in a fix now, ‘cause there’s no one here by the name of Raimundo!’
Another prisoner, small in stature and using the same disguise, came face to face with an enormous guard, whom I once heard answer the phone identifying himself modestly as the ‘Black Prince of the Door’. His Highness thought the short inmate looked a little pale.
‘What group are you in?’
‘Group one.’
‘And your number?’
‘Number one.’
All number ones! What’s going on?’
These cases, which later become a part of the prison folklore, were punished with thirty days in Solitary, but no one got mad about them. ‘If he comes in peace, fine, it’s his right. If he hasn’t jeopardised anyone, he’s treated with respect. It’s his job to escape, and ours to not let him. He goes to Solitary for the standard time. But if he tries to use force, like one who stuck me up at the gate with a cocked revolver pointed at my head, but was caught before he could get to the corner, well, that’s another kettle of fish. Unfortunately, he was asking for it.’
Dealing with the queue required social tact. The guards had to be patient with people who were upset, help elderly and pregnant women, and be firm with the rude ones. Many knew the natural ringleaders and, through them, were able to tranquillise the others in moments of tension. It was a task for skilled professionals, who suffered from the psychological impact of their work, as the guard with th
e gentle gaze once told me: ‘My co-workers think I’m tolerant. To them I might be, but my family complains that I’ve changed. I used to be a homebody, calm, I visited my godmother every day, chatted. But after twelve hours on this job, I get home with a hot head, eat quietly and go to bed. I don’t even remember my godmother exists.’
Intimate Visits
The origins of intimate visits were nebulous. They were said to have started in the early 1980s, surreptitiously, with inmates who would improvise tents in the pavilion courtyards on visiting days. Others – mercenary types – would push two long benches together, cover them with blankets and rent the space under them to couples so they could get intimate.
At the time, the authorities turned a blind eye, convinced that those moments of privacy would appease that week’s violence. When the first complaints about minors who had become pregnant in these furtive encounters began to arise, it became evident that the situation had got out of control. Unable to put an end to the privilege already acquired, they decided to make intimate visits official: women of age were allowed in their partners’ cells, as long as they had been previously registered with ID and photographs. In this manner, in the best style of Vargas Llosa’s Pantaleón and his lady visitors, sex was bureaucratised in São Paulo’s Casa de Detenção and the system spread throughout the country.
Each inmate had the right to register one woman. Wife, mistress or girlfriend – legal ties were not required. In the case of a break-up, another one could only be enrolled after six months. With a little diplomacy, however, this period was sometimes substantially reduced. There were over two thousand women in the programme at any given time.
The routine was thorough: after being frisked, they headed for the pavilion, where the men were waiting in freshly pressed clothes, combed hair and scent. On the ground floor, at a table by the door to the stairs, was a warder with a box of registration cards. The couples would line up in front of the table, the woman would hand over her ID card and the warder would check the photo, attach the ID to the woman’s registration card with a paper clip and keep it until she left. From that door in, there were no warders; the inmates managed their own visits.
In the more populous pavilions, such as Five, Eight and Nine, the inner courtyards would become so crowded that inmates without visitors avoided going there to make more room, and because they couldn’t stay in the cells occupied by couples, they would wait standing in the corridor. The galleries were full of men.
People unfamiliar with the prison probably imagine that the stronger men would take the weaker men’s women in these corridors, full of criminals leaning against the walls. Nothing could have been further from the truth: the place was more respectful than a nunnery. When a couple walked past, everyone would look down. It was not enough to look away; the men had to bow their heads. No one dared disobey this procedural rule, no matter whether a woman was a man’s wife, fiancée or a prostitute.
On one occasion, Genésio, a Northeasterner with a lisp who had blown the proceeds of over one hundred robberies in nightclubs, recognised a prostitute he had been with: ‘A mate was walking along with his arm around her shoulders. I turned to face the wall so she wouldn’t see me and show any sign of recognition. See what a gentleman I was, Doctor!’
If only one resident of a cell had a visitor, all of the time available was his; if there were several, the time was divided equally. There was no need to knock on the door; the men were highly punctual. In larger cells, with twenty or thirty men, where they had no choice but to use the cells at the same time, they would improvise private spaces by hanging blankets. To drown out the more enthusiastic demonstrations of female pleasure, they would turn up the volume on their radios.
Those without visitors could rent out their cells to more fortunate inmates: ‘Nothing’s free in a prison.’
If an inmate could afford it and knew a few people in the right places, it was even possible to receive a visitor in another pavilion, a stratagem used to receive the wife in the original cell, on the Saturday, and the girlfriend in another pavilion with Sunday visits. There were not enough warders to deter infidelity.
Due to an unfathomable mystery of the female psyche, many men found girlfriends while doing time. Once, an inspector general, after examining so many requests involving inmates and their women, complained to the director general, ‘What do they have that we don’t?’
Many women would come to visit a relative and were introduced to a friend of his. Others would answer letters in women’s magazines and would be invited to meet the author, invariably a fellow with good principles who had made an error of judgement and hoped to find the strength to turn over a new leaf with a woman’s love.
Visitors felt protected there. By removing the warders from inside the pavilions, administration had wisely handed over the management of visits to the only ones capable of ensuring total security. Men behind bars are terrified of losing their lady loves.
Not-a-Hope, an experienced thief, spoke of the cunning of a ‘Ricardão’, a generic name for a woman’s lover: ‘If visits aren’t respectful, Doctor,’ he told me, ‘they’ll be afraid to come back, and then one girl’ll tell the next one about somethin’ unfortunate that happened to her and before you know it: “I’m not goin’ there no more!” “If you’re not, I’m not, it’s dangerous!” And there you go. Here we’ll be, frothin’ at the mouth, and they’ll be havin’ a good time on the outside, ‘cause there’s a Ricardão on every corner, ready to exploit the fragility of a lonely woman. Not a hope.’
An inmate had to know how to proceed: he could never covet another man’s woman and order had to be kept at all times. No offence was considered small; the slightest slip was very serious.
A moustached con artist once struck his wife during a visit and her cries were heard in the neighbouring cells. The wife-beater was lucky that a warder, minutes later, heard three men in the courtyard plotting to kill him as soon as visiting hours were over, and immediately had him transferred to Yellow, where those sworn to death are sent.
This strategy was only partially successful: in the early hours of the following morning, right there in the high security wing, the man was stabbed twice. He was taken to the Mandaqui Hospital in a critical condition, underwent surgery, spent four days in intensive care, lost eighty centimetres of intestine and was given a colostomy, but came out alive. ‘He got lucky!’ said the inmates.
Although women of all ages participated in the programme, the majority were young. At the exit, one couldn’t help but notice the number of young women with babies. Many left with their hair wet, from the shower they had taken in the cell.
Slamming
My work at the Casa de Detenção started with the diagnosis of an epidemic. From May to August of 1990, we took blood samples from 2492 inmates and conducted an epidemiological survey about sexual practices and drug use, among other things.
In the morning, when they opened the cells, the warders would call seventy to eighty men, who were escorted to Pavilion Four and made to wait in the locked ground-floor cage, so they wouldn’t come into contact with their enemies in that pavilion. In groups of ten, they were taken from the cage to the laboratory to have their blood taken and to answer our survey.
The study was carried out with the decisive assistance of six prisoners from Pavilion Four. Among them were those in charge of taking blood, former users of injectable cocaine for whom it was never impossible to find a vein; when there were no other options, they could access invisible ones in elbows. The most skilful of them all – a guy with curly hair and darting eyes who laughed at the wrong times, doing time for conducting robberies with the wife of his best friend, who wanted to kill him when he found out – modestly justified my praise of his technique: ‘Doctor, for someone who’s shot up coke in the dark with a blunt needle washed in rainwater drippin’ from a roof, takin’ blood with this disposable material that you bring could even be considered cowardice on our part.’
The results showed
that 17.3 per cent of the inmates of the Casa de Detenção were HIV-positive. Among them we identified two significant risk factors: the injecting of cocaine and the number of sexual partners in the year before the survey. In addition to these inmates, we studied a group of eighty-two transvestites doing time at the prison, of whom 78 per cent tested positive. Of those who had been in the prison for more than six years, 100 per cent were positive.
While working with the transvestites, we came across Sheila, sentenced to three years and two months for having bought electrical appliances as wedding presents for an ex-boyfriend – with whom she was still in love – with a cheque book stolen from a Protestant pastor who had picked her up. With her enormous breasts and blouse knotted above her navel, Sheila confessed, in the presence of witnesses, to having had more than a thousand sexual partners in the Casa de Detenção in the year prior to our study. With them she had had unprotected passive anal sex, the sexual practice associated with the highest risk of AIDS transmission. She was HIV-negative. Her test was repeated and confirmed at the Laboratório Bioquímico in São Paulo and the retrovirology department of the Cleveland Clinic in the United States, showing that some people do not become infected even after extensive exposure to the virus.
Almost simultaneously, a group from the University of São Paulo conducted a similar study with prisoners the day they arrived in Pavilion Two for distribution. The results obtained were very similar to ours, suggesting that the vast majority had become infected on the outside, before they were incarcerated. At the time, shooting up cocaine was the latest trend. Warders would find syringes around the prison and punish the owners. After riot squad searches, there were always piles of used syringes alongside the knives seized.
Chocolate – an unlucky thief who had unwittingly burgled his drug-dealing uncle’s girlfriend’s house and been beaten with a chain for his mistake, and then burgled another, not knowing that it belonged to the son of a district chief of police – once told me about a riot squad visit: ‘They came with dogs and tommies. They opened our cell and told us to walk out naked, place our hands on the gallery wall and not look ‘em in the face. They found a spike with blood still in it under Scratchy’s bed. They didn’t even ask whose it was – they just started layin’ into us with their batons, with the German shepherds going wild.’
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