In the Casa de Detenção, aggression towards prisoners, a strong tradition in the Brazilian prison system, never disappeared, but it did become less common over the years, as Luisão explained: ‘When I started, the thing was to knock them about; then it was to lay off them. Warders adapt to the times. If you take your wife to a dance, Doctor, and they play a waltz, are you going to try to dance samba?’
Curiously, the older prisoners considered Colonel Guedes, a director in the 1970s, during the time of the military dictatorship, to be the best director of all. They spoke of him with great admiration:
His motto was clubs and cells, but there was respect, on our part and the part of the warders. He’d walk alone through the whole prison and everyone would put their hands behind their backs when he went past. The man was a fascist, he didn’t go easy on us or the justice system. With him, both sides had to obey the law. He’d call up the authorities and tell them that so-and-so had finished his sentence: they could either send over the release permit quick-smart, or he’d put the guy on the street anyway. The judges were all afraid of the colonel.
Given the prison’s conditions, it was impossible to put an end to the aggression, as their constant dealing with criminals had made some employees so callous that they didn’t see any other way to impose order. How could anyone keep tabs on them in the middle of the night, in a hidden corner of a dark prison?
Once, in a conversation with Lourival, an experienced warder, about a scandal in which two prisoners had complained to a priest that they had been beaten with an iron pipe and the complaint was relayed to the Inspector General’s office, he said: ‘I doubt anyone sits the public exam to become a prison warder just so they can beat up inmates. It’s the environment here that makes men like that.’
The cycles of prison violence invaded the warders’ lives. When the inmates were settling matters among themselves and a group decided to finish someone off, the warders had orders not to interfere. Those who had to die would die. They couldn’t intervene, as they worked unarmed. ‘At times like that, Doctor, there’s nothing to be done. It’s like trying to break up a dogfight.’
A 30-something-year-old warder who had a second job as a security guard at a brothel, which he swore was a respectful place and insisted that I visit, told me that the image of the first prisoner he saw die, five years earlier, would come back to him when he least expected it. ‘Eight men arrived in the cell of a certain Alagoas carrying knives and clubs. He saw me and started yelling, “Help me, Paulo, for the love of God!” The only thing I could do was ask them not to kill the boy. It made no difference. He took over twenty blows. It’s ugly, Doctor, a human being screeching like a pig being slaughtered and you can’t do a thing.’ Over the years, Paulo witnessed other, similar deaths, but the first one made a lasting impression on him. ‘To this day the expression of terror on that boy’s face comes back to me, at a family birthday party in bed with my wife or watching TV with my children.’
On my part, I can confirm that the influence of the environment was no trivial thing. Regardless of the fact that I am a doctor, I often felt like hitting someone in the prison, not because they had treated me with disrespect, which never happened, but out of indignation at the perversity with which one prisoner was treating another.
The Flock
Catholic priests, evangelical pastors, mediums, Candomblé and Umbanda high priests and priestesses and even Satan worshippers frequented the prison to lead the stray sheep to the Lord. Belief in divine help was, for many inmates, their last hope for spiritual comfort, the only way to help them establish some kind of order in their chaotic personal lives.
The Protestant preachers, who offered a path to heaven through knowledge of the Bible and a clear division between Good and Evil, were more successful than the Catholic priests.
Of the born-again Christians in the Casa de Detenção, the most cohesive group was that of the Assembly of God, which had close to a thousand men in its ranks – over 10 per cent of the prison population. In Pavilion Nine alone there were 200; on the fifth floor of Five, next to Yellow, 180. They wore long-sleeved shirts buttoned up to the neck and carried the holy book with them at all times. They called one another ‘brothers’, claimed to be God-fearing and repeated biblical jargon in a monotone.
In practice, with the born-again Christians, I always had a hard time distinguishing between those who had converted to the way of the Lord and those who had donned the stereotype to avoid reprisals from the prison population. Rapists, contract killers, drug users with unpaid debts, informers and thieves who had cheated their partners when dividing up the loot from robberies sometimes pretended to have converted in order to obtain the protection of the religious group. Because they wore the same clothes, carried the Bible and dropped the Lord’s name into every sentence, it was impossible to tell them apart from the real ones.
The other inmates complained of the same difficulty. They respected the born-again Christians but demanded consistency. Once, in the infirmary, I treated a member of the Universal Church who had been beaten up by his fellow inmates in Pavilion Nine when they caught him sneaking a cigarette. The guy had welts on his back, a bruise over his right eye and a knife cut on his arm. My nurses justified the aggression: ‘If he wants to be a born-again, we respect his choice, but he can’t mess around with us. It’s his job to spend the day prayin’ for God to protect us criminals.’
To bring in new recruits, the brothers would even go as far as to pay off recent converts’ debts. It was often an inglorious task, explained one of the pastors from Five – a barrel-shaped man doing time for selling lots in the middle of Billings Dam and other scams aimed at the poor: ‘Because the Bible itself says to pacify, Ecclesiastes 10 and 4, we pay his debt. But some aren’t sincere and, after we’ve paid, they go crazy again and insist they’re wicked and goodness knows what else. While they’re among the wolves, they’re sheep; then they come here and want to play the wolf in God’s fold.’
In Pavilion Five, the head pastor ran the wing, aided by three others. The pastors had to be married, have a good testimony and a spotless reputation with the prison directors. They were chosen over time, after moving through the ranks of co-operator, deacon and presbyter and were kept under observation for three to four years before they were nominated, according to one deacon with a pious gaze doing time for robbery, selling crack and participating in a mass murder in the favela of Heliópolis: ‘They keep an eye on ‘em to see if they’re spiritually elevated, if they know the Lord’s word and if they lead a life of prayer, because this one might not be totally sure of his faith, that one might have a bit of a temper on him, and another one masturbates; in other words, not cut out to be a man of God.’
The path of recent converts was arduous, as all eyes were on them. There was no escaping the group’s constant supervision and the omnipresent gaze of the Lord. Valente, a guy condemned to 130 years for the deaths of seven people, justified the need for this rigour: ‘The problem is that we can get some pretty good actors here. Really big-time fakes! So a team of deacons watches ‘em forty-eight hours a day. It’s not like we’re the police and investigate them; it’s the Holy Ghost who warns us that that person did this or that and doesn’t want to stay in the flock.’
The behavioural code was severe and born-again Christians had to stand out from the crowd for their exemplary behaviour. They had to give up slang, women and their swaggering ways, dress formally, with polished shoes, bathe regularly and comb their hair. People in common-law marriages weren’t allowed to live in the Assembly of God gallery, only single men and those who were legally married. Gay men were accepted, but with one proviso: ‘They have to give up their lives of sin and go back to being normal citizens.’
The born-again Christians believed that rapists – universally hated in the prison – deserved the Lord’s pardon, because they had problems. ‘Mental and diabolical problems,’ according to Valente.
Those who joined the ranks of the faithful hoping f
or an easy life were mistaken. The paths to God were thorny, the deacon with the pious gaze told me: ‘The Church routine in here leaves no time for slacking off.’
At eight o’clock in the morning, as soon as the doors were unlocked, they would all leave for the first prayer, which lasted sixty minutes. At nine, the prayer meetings would begin: eight to ten men would gather in their cells to pray for another hour. Half of the meetings were dedicated to prayer, fifteen minutes to praise and fifteen to ‘The Word’, when everyone spoke at once and their voices rose up to God. Anyone passing through the gallery at that hour felt as if they were in the tower of Babel, with them all talking simultaneously. The brethren could work up quite a sweat and lose their voices from so much elevating themselves to the Creator.
After this prayer meeting, another one began at ten, in which an older brother would lead everyone in prayer until eleven-thirty. Then it was time to shower, eat lunch and quickly head downstairs, because from one to three p.m. they prayed outside, to attract new members. When it was over, they would race back up to their cells because 5 o’clock was lock-up time and they didn’t like to make work for the warders, as a matter of principle.
After lock-up, there was more prayer, praise and ‘The Word’ until six-thirty. Then they would shower and eat dinner. Afterwards, they would pray, study the Bible or give testimony until bedtime, which was early, because television was prohibited and they were not allowed to listen to any kind of music on the radio, only evangelical stations.
The church functioned as a rehabilitation centre, perhaps the only one available in the prison. With the exception of the fakes, who – it was said – ‘threw sand’ in the eyes of their brethren, the others were happy, in the pastor’s opinion. ‘We feel God working in their existence,’ he told me. ‘Here there are bars and walls, there’s no escaping, but you look at the sky and see God. His presence brings peace and, with your heart flooded with faith, you pray with devotion to leave this malignant place.’
Yellow
Next door to the faithful, on the top floor of Pavilion Five, was Yellow, one of the gloomiest parts of the prison. Over five hundred men, most of them sworn to death, inhabited cubicles thick with cigarette smoke, in which five or six inmates, often more, lived in cramped conditions. A strong smell of prison filled the atmosphere. The cells were in a very poor state of repair. Sometimes there wasn’t any water, and there were often clogged drains, leaks and floods. The inhabitants of a cell could spend the entire night standing in water.
The inhabitants of Yellow were almost permanently locked up, and releasing them was an operation that meant keeping the rest of the pavilion in their cells. Nevertheless, as a precautionary measure, the warders limited the unlocking to Saturdays, which was visiting day in Pavilion Six, next to Five. One hour was all they got and then back they went. It was wise, since the presence of families in the building next door ensured peace in the courtyard of Five. Even so, there were some who felt it was more prudent to pass on the sunshine and stay behind bars: ‘Better safe than sorry, Doctor.’
Yellow was never painted yellow: the name came from the skin colour of its sun-deprived inhabitants.
The biodiversity of the sector was rich: insolvent crack-heads, informers, contract killers, rapists, the losers of disagreements, men who had run into enemies from the outside in the prison and many others, including those who were unable to buy a decent cell or who had sold the one they had.
I once treated a thief from Yellow, dressed in old trousers and a tattered T-shirt, whose body was covered in tiny contagious sores. He requested a medical certificate for his wife, a lawyer, to send to the central court. I asked if his wife couldn’t help him get out of Yellow and he answered:
‘Doctor, more help than she already gives me? She’s already brought me the money for a cell five times. And I smoked it every time.’
Smoking crack and being almost constantly locked up were enough to drive the occupants of Yellow crazy, according to Dionísio, a thief with incurable tuberculosis, whose wife had left him because she was tired of his promises to get straight: ‘You’re under lock and key day and night, surrounded by men who are out of it and neurotic. You go to sleep next to a stranger and five minutes later he’s at your throat. There’s no rest. It’s psychological torture, Doctor.’
Days in Yellow were spent in absolute idleness, with the prisoners lolling about on mattresses, when there were enough to go round. No one read or watched television. For the final of the 1998 World Cup, Waldemar Gonçalves had a plan to put a TV set in the gallery and allow them to watch the game. It didn’t work out; the directors warned him off it for security reasons.
To broaden their visual horizons, the inmates would climb up to their cell windows, sit with their legs hanging out and hold onto the bars. They would stay like that for hours at a time, giving the facade of Pavilion Five a unique decoration, with a row of legs hanging from the top floor. For this reason, they were disparagingly known as ‘the shins’.
From the windows on the outside wall of the pavilion, the shins were able to watch football matches in Eight or talk to passers-by on the path between pavilions by shouting. Those who occupied the cells facing the inner courtyard were less fortunate; there was only a view of the clothes drying in the windows of the cells on the opposite side.
The inhabitants of the inside cells established a curious symbiosis with the members of the Assembly of God, who attended the open-air prayer session in the courtyard. While the brethren were praying to convert infidels to the way of the Lord, the inmates from Yellow would fasten a plastic bag to an old trainer to weight it down, tie it to a piece of string and throw it down towards the faithful. They did this with great skill; the string was exactly long enough for the bag to hover a metre above the ground. As patient as fishermen, they would hold the string until the faithful publicly demonstrated, with bananas, bread rolls, sweets or clothes, the love that they professed to feel for their neighbours.
Sweet Talk, a dealer from Eight deserving of his nickname – who used to smuggle cocaine from Bolivia and threatened to kill distributors who mixed it with other products because he had a name to protect – once explained the origins of the high-security wing: ‘Yellow exists ‘cause we got no invoicin’ department, which leads to misunderstandings. Doctor, if I sell a rock of crack and the guy doesn’t cough up, I got no judge to complain to or promissory note to claim. If I let it go I become a doormat, see, nobody pays me anymore and my supplier doesn’t give a rat’s ass. It’s a chain reaction; one man’s debt brings consequences for the next man.’
Security in Yellow was relative, however. Florisval, the director of correctional services, unanimously considered by his colleagues to be one of the people who best understood the Casa, was realistic: ‘We do what we can, but unfortunately nowhere here is safe. When they decide to kill someone, it’s very hard to stop them. In a jail, death doesn’t respect geography.’
Mário the Dog – a thief who used to break house windows with a car jack, found twelve kilos of gold bars one time and was later arrested with a blonde in the Northeast of Brazil – showed up at the Incarceration office in Nine one afternoon, claiming he had received death threats from enemies in the pavilion and asking to be transferred to the secure wing. In Yellow, his behaviour was exemplary, he earned the warders’ trust and was integrated into the team of inmates who served meals to their partners in misfortune.
A few days later, a certain Ronaldinho, bald like the football star, sentenced to prison for having raped a mother and her daughter among other serious crimes, arrived at the Casa. With this past, he insisted that there was no possibility of his living with the masses and he was sent straight to Yellow. As it happened, Mário the Dog was the son and brother of the violated women and had requested a transfer to Yellow in advance because he had heard that the rapist was being held at a police station and was to be transferred to the Casa de Detenção.
At breakfast, Mário the Dog opened his enemy’s cell.
The first stab punctured the right eye of the rapist, who tried to find the exit in vain. When I saw his body, I was struck by the number of stab wounds and, in particular, the punctured eyes and two deep, symmetrical puncture wounds in the soles of his feet. An inmate standing nearby said: ‘Mário the Dog worked with the stealth of a cat.’
Jeremias, nostalgic for the good old days, said that if he were ever invited by the governor to take over as director general of the Casa de Detenção, he would do away with Yellow as his first initiative: ‘That’d fix the problem, seein’ as a guy can get into debt and then ask to go to Yellow. That’s not how a real man does business. If he knew there was nowhere to hide, he’d take responsibility for his actions. Without Yellow, a few would die here and there, but it’d be good ‘cause there’d be more respect like there used to be.’
The first time I treated the inhabitants of Yellow was on a winter night. I took Julinho, a helper from the infirmary who was later transferred to Pavilion Nine when it was discovered that he was diverting inmates’ medications from their intended destination, most likely in cahoots with one or two prison employees.
We went up to the fifth floor and improvised a consultation room in a cell in the born-again Christians’ wing. One by one, the patients were brought to us. There was widespread tuberculosis: the men were underweight and complained of fever, night sweats and coughing, scattering droplets of secretions throughout their crowded cells. In that poorly ventilated environment, the only thing that couldn’t complain about its living conditions was Koch’s bacillus.
Most of the sick scratched so much that it was hard to watch them. They had little blisters on their legs, forearms and lower torsos, and the weary look of sleepless nights. The scratching broke open the blisters, allowing their crystalline contents to ooze out. This made the itch better, but the blisters would start to sting. In the place where the blister had been, a thick crust would form and when it fell off it would leave a dark, permanent scar. Their contaminated fingernails would sow new blisters and the infectious process would go on for months.
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