Lockdown

by Drauzio Varella

  It was almost ten o’clock at night when we finished. At the end, the head pastor came up to us ceremoniously:

  ‘Doctor, I know you must be very tired and need to rest in the Lord’s peace, but there’s a transvestite with some inflamed silicone in her rear end. She’s in pain and insisted I ask you to see her.’

  ‘No! That’s enough. My work here is never-ending. Besides, I know nothing about silicone.’

  ‘Of course, Doctor. I’ll tell her to be patient and to pray with faith for Jesus to intervene in her life.’

  I gave in to the blackmail in the Lord’s name and told him to send her in. Today I thank the pastor for having introduced me to Veronique, a character we will meet in another story.

  After this time, I returned to Yellow regularly, which earned me prestige among the prison staff because many of them, out of fear, refused to work in that sector. I treated the sick in a little room with a window that faced the entry cage. There was no privacy; to examine anyone without their clothes on, I had to ask them to go into the little adjoining bathroom. This staff bathroom had a toilet and a sink and its floor and walls were wet from the constant leaks. In order to wash your hands, you had to turn the shutoff valve and quickly jump back to avoid the water that squirted out of a pipe in the wall. Merely opening this valve would cause the water to gush in the sink and the toilet to flush on its own.

  Later, in Yellow, I gained the assistance of Paulo Xavier, ‘Black Paulo’, a nurse from the Sírio-Libanês Hospital who had volunteered his time to help me with the sick inmates. Paulo organised my consultations with the help of a prisoner by the name of Lúcio, a strong young man with different-coloured eyes.

  Lúcio cared for the sick with dedication and was gracious with me. One day he told me that he had been arrested after a street fight. He was walking along unarmed, when an arch enemy with many killings under his belt appeared holding a sharp knife. His enemy stabbed him three times, but Lúcio managed to grab a piece of wood and smash it over his head. Then, taking advantage of the knife and the fact that his assailant was unconscious, he cut off both his arms so he would never stab anyone again.

  One Saturday, Black Paulo, Lúcio, Manoel – a thick-bearded employee of the pavilion – and I, decided to attack the scabies epidemic that was making the inmates’ lives hell. The operation started at seven. The entire pavilion started the day locked up so the men from Yellow could leave their wing. In the cells of the sector, the inmates piled up their belongings on the ground so they could be sprayed with insecticide. Downstairs in the courtyard, next to the side wall of the prison, a pipe of cold water was waiting for them.

  The prisoners lined up in front of the pipe, while an inmate sprayed their cells. It was cold. Manoel, with his twenty years of experience, warned me:

  ‘Prepare yourself, Doctor. Convicts are like cats: they’re water-shy.’

  He was right, there was no shortage of complaints. They claimed to have a cough, tuberculosis, pneumonia; some had bronchitis and others simply refused to take a cold shower. I explained to the queuing men that those who didn’t wash and apply the medicine they were given would spread scabies to the others, which would affect them all. It was a convincing argument: the inmates would never risk being accused of harming their fellow prisoners in any way.

  As they were bathing, I noticed that they all stood under the pipe with their backs almost touching the wall. I mentioned this to Manoel, who explained:

  ‘Criminals never turn their asses towards one another, Doctor.’

  After showering, purple with cold, the men went and stood in front of a fellow inmate charged with spraying them with scabies medicine from head to toe. When they were dry, those with dermatological infections were separated by Lúcio and Black Paulo and brought to me.

  The job, involving over five hundred men, was finished by midday, the time to lock Yellow and release the rest of the pavilion. Anticipating a few asthma attacks triggered by the insecticide, I left ten ampoules of cortisone for Lúcio to medicate them with and left with Black Paulo. We were pleased with the success of the operation and chuckled about how the inmates had taken their cold showers with their asses against the wall.

  All On The Spoon

  Crack invaded the prison in the middle of 1992. One afternoon, on the football pitch of Eight, I saw a guy who was completely out of it. He was talking in an intimidating tone of voice and gesticulating at an imaginary figure in the window of a second-floor cell. At the door to the pavilion, a corpulent guard who suffered from hypertension gave the diagnosis and a bitter prediction:

  ‘Look, Doctor, it’s crack arriving at the Casa. That’s all we need.’

  I was surprised. In my naïvety, crack was something in American films, a problem in the Bronx, never in Carandiru.

  In the prison, crack was prepared by hand. They would mix cocaine with sodium or ammonium bicarbonate on a spoon, under which they would hold a lighter to heat up the mixture and melt it. When it turned to liquid, an oily base would rise to the surface, which they would push to the edges of the spoon with a matchstick to cool and solidify. The resulting rock was smoked in improvised pipes.

  Sad, a dealer on the inside who spent his nights preparing it and who was once caught with 300 grams of rocks ready for consumption, complained that the process was hard work: ‘People say I’m makin’ easy money, but no one sees how hard I work. On the outside it’s easy, the crack comes ready-made from the lab; in here, it’s all on the spoon.’

  Crack swept injectable cocaine off the map. It is a compulsive drug; there is nothing left for the next day. When experiencing withdrawal symptoms, if an addict sees pure cocaine, a crack rock or someone under the effect of it, they will feel awful: they experience heavy sweating, a racing heart, abdominal pain, diarrhoea and vomiting.

  Ronaldo – a thief with AIDS who escaped from a penitentiary hospital and was smoking crack in the street forty hours later – told me that while holding up a draper’s in downtown São Paulo, he had suddenly felt ill when the manager opened the till: ‘When I looked at the money, I got this image of myself buyin’ coke at the den. My stomach started churnin’ right then and there and I left the hold-up halfway through it, vomiting.’

  Cocaine can be snorted, injected or smoked. When snorted, the powder sticks to the mucous membrane of the nose and is gradually absorbed; the effect increases, reaches a peak and then decreases. When injected intravenously, it passes straight into the circulatory system, through the lungs and to the brain; the euphoria comes and goes quickly; users feel a buzzing in the head and a rush to the brain. With crack, the effect is even more instantaneous, because the cocaine goes straight into the lungs and doesn’t lose time in the circulatory system.

  Ronaldo, who had learned to smoke crack with his wife, the mother of his four children, told me that the quality of the cocaine in the prison had fallen: ‘It used to give you a long twing in your ear. Now it’s a quick twong and it’s over.’

  Injectable cocaine users, or ‘slammers’, aren’t interested in the slow effect of snorting, which they consider ‘square’. Crack, however, gives users a similar feeling to that of slamming, with certain advantages: it is cheaper, doesn’t leave scars on their arms and, above all, it doesn’t transmit AIDS.

  Within a matter of months, cocaine injecting in the Casa was limited to a few die-hard slammers, who later died of AIDS in the infirmary in Four. Slamming had gone out of fashion in Carandiru as silently as it had entered.

  In January of 1994, we repeated the prevalence study we had conducted four years earlier. We found that 13.7 per cent of the inmates were infected with HIV (compared to 17.3 per cent in the 1990 study). The only explanation we found for the decrease in the number of inmates infected in the four years between the two studies was the reduction in the number of intravenous cocaine users. In 1998, of 250 volunteers tested, 18 were HIV-positive (7.2 per cent).

  As the years passed, many former users of injectable cocaine told me they had switched to crack
because of the talks in the cinema. If it is true, I am happy. Maybe even crack has a good side.

  To Bring Down the Cons

  Everyone recognised that crack had shaken up the prison. It is a treacherous drug. The first few times the effect takes a while to wear off; however, with daily repetition, it ends in seconds. It is rapidly addictive; in the infirmary I met people who, after their first contact with the drug, were never able to stop, not even locked up in the cells of Yellow, indebted, with their lives at risk.

  With time, cocaine users develop symptoms of persecutory delusion every time they use the drug. In the prison, those who suffered from this syndrome, commonly referred to as paranoia (or ‘noia’, in prison parlance), moved through the galleries terrified, locked their cells from the inside, curled up like children under their beds, screamed and ran away from imaginary enemies.

  Ronaldo, the father of four who had vomited during the hold-up and who died of tuberculosis in the infirmary six months after being recaptured, used to describe the paranoia that tortured him like this:

  Crack is so devastatin’ to the mind that I smoke locked in my cell and convince myself that someone’s under the bed with a knife waitin’ to kill me. I get terrified. I want to look but I’m afraid if I look he’ll stab me in the eyes. It takes me ages to work up the courage to sneak a quick look. Of course there’s no one there. I’m alone in the locked cell, but even so I’m still not sure: there is someone there, I just didn’t see ‘im properly. I look again, even though I’m afraid he’ll stab me in the eye, and I don’t see anythin’. But it doesn’t make any difference, I’m not convinced, and I look again. And so on, ten, fifteen times. When the effect starts wearin’ off, I realise it was all just noia: how can there be someone there if the cell’s miniscule and the door’s locked? Before I have another smoke, I look under the bed and check to make sure the door’s properly closed; sometimes I even take a peek in the crapper. Fine, I’m gonna have another smoke and this time the noia isn’t going to attack me. The minute I take another puff, Doctor, it happens all over again: there’s someone under the bed, he’s gonna kill me, if I look he’s gonna stab me in the eye . . .

  Finally, Ronaldo summarised the existence of crack users: ‘We have a miserable fate. If there’s hell on earth, it’s the life of a crack-head.’

  It was impossible to know how many smoked crack in the prison. The inmates estimated at least 60 per cent. I once asked Lúcio, the nurse from Yellow who had cut off his enemy’s arms so he would stop stabbing people, how many of the inhabitants of Yellow were crack users. He answered: ‘All of them, Doctor. When one shows up who isn’t, I take him out of here and ask the pastor to accept him in the born-again gallery.’

  The old-time warders used to say nostalgically: ‘I miss the good old days of joints, Doctor! There was more respect among the inmates. They’d have a puff and sit quietly in a corner thinking, then they’d eat and go to bed. No one lost their family home because of marijuana. We were happy and didn’t know it.’

  Crack shook the internal power structure, the inmates’ morale and generated more violence. Addicts compulsively spent what they didn’t have; then they would blackmail family members claiming to have received death threats. When their family was depleted, they would sell their personal belongings and, when they had nothing left of any value, they would steal, get beaten up, stabbed, take the responsibility for crimes committed by others and even work as hit men in exchange for a rock to smoke.

  Addiction liked financial ruin. One of the techniques I used to identify those who didn’t smoke crack was to look at their feet: if they were wearing new trainers, they weren’t a crack-head.

  Carlão, who smoked crack non-stop for a year on the outside and two inside before giving it up, reached an extreme: ‘Crack came to bring down the cons. Because of it I even sold my revolver – my work tool. I was caught muggin’ someone with my aunt’s kitchen knife.’

  Debts in the Casa were not forgiven: if an inmate didn’t pay up, he could run, get beaten up or die. The only way out was to ask the warders for protection. If they were convinced of the seriousness of the case, they would transfer him to Yellow. There, in the high-security wing, the crack-head would run up new debts, ask for another transfer and end up in the Dungeon in Pavilion Four, his last chance at survival.

  Asking the warders for help was demoralising for the inmates. I once found the infirmary in a flap because Júlio – a big-time criminal doing twenty years for killing three rivals who had ambushed him in the alley of a favela – had sought refuge in Yellow because he owed thirty-eight reais to a drug dealer half his size. In the end, an inmate admitted to the infirmary with chronic boils in both armpits, which forced him to hold his arms out like wings as he walked, summed it up: ‘Crack does away with a man’s sense of shame.’

  On another occasion, Xanto – who had shot his drunk uncle in the chest because he didn’t know how to shoot anyone in the leg – was upset with a fellow prisoner who, during a visit, had offered his own wife to the dealer to pay a debt. The fact that the girl worked as a prostitute in a bar didn’t attenuate matters. ‘It doesn’t matter how she makes her livin’ out there. In here, among us, she’s a fellow con’s wife and deserves respect. Offerin’ her like that takes a lot of piss.’

  Xanto wasn’t the only one who felt that way. The day after the visit, the indebted crack-head was forced to pack up and move to Pavilion Five: ‘He didn’t deserve our respect.’

  Goal Net, a skinny dealer from Eight, attacking forward on the pavilion’s football squad, house burglar and father of two little girls whom he maintained in a private school, would give crack-heads two weeks to cough up and not a day longer. In five years of prison and dealing, he had sent many a man to Yellow, although he recognised how useless it was: ‘What good is it to have the fools locked up there, hanging their shins out the window, and me here without my money?’

  One day, the wheel of fortune span and Goal Net was transferred to a penitentiary in the interior of the state. There he found three former prisoners from the Casa whom he had sent to Yellow. He died the night he arrived, his throat cut.

  The prison became a very different place to the one I had found when I first arrived, in 1989. Crack subverted the internal order. Like people, prisons also change with time.

  The Inside Deal

  Drugs go looking for addicts, the inmates used to say.

  Two trips abroad convinced me of it. The first was during a visit to Rikers Island, New York’s biggest prison, when I passed the door of a communal bathroom situated in the wing that is shown to visitors and caught a strong whiff of marijuana. The second was in the icy outskirts of Stockholm, in a model prison which exclusively housed fifty young ex-drug users, guarded by 350 trained warders (seven per prisoner). Each morning, when their private cells were opened, the inmates had to go down to the infirmary and, in the presence of a doctor, urinate in a glass for a toxicological exam. The laboratory would often detect heroin, cocaine, alcohol, marijuana and even everyday shoemaker’s glue in their urine, mysteriously smuggled into the model institution.

  Shorty, the lisper who had killed four police officers, didn’t believe that drugs could enter the Casa without the collusion of prison employees or the guards on the wall: ‘Can an inmate go out to get cocaine, Doctor?’

  It would be unfair to generalise, however. Most of the warders were never involved in trafficking, in spite of their low wages and professional disenchantment. Additionally, the prison administration was always rigging traps to catch those who had ‘crossed over’, and when they were caught the punishment was harsh: five or six years in prison.

  Smoky, a well-liked teller of tall tales in which he was invariably the protagonist, knew first-hand that drugs weren’t a problem exclusive to Carandiru: ‘I’ve been in the system for eighteen years, in several different prisons, and in all of them I was able to smoke a joint or crack – which I’ve been off for two years now, ‘cause there’s no future in it – and, b
ack when slammin’ was the thing, the only reason I didn’t do it was ‘cause I don’t care to jab myself over and over. It’s funny, Doctor. I don’t mind other people’s blood, but I start to black out when I see my own.’

  Shorty said: ‘If coke corrupts free society, why would it be any different here inside, where there are lots of thieves, dealers and users? Here of all places, where it costs double what it does outside!’

  In the consulting room, when inmates came to see me with tuberculosis, I would forbid them to fill their lungs with smoke, be it from marijuana, normal cigarettes or crack. It wasn’t hard to get them to see that the smoke was harmful to their inflamed lungs. In the following weeks, when I asked if they had stopped, most had given up marijuana and even crack, but few were able to quit cigarettes. I saw so many similar cases that I became convinced that nicotine is the most addictive substance of all.

  Inmates who could get drugs into the prison could sell them. It wasn’t like on the outside, where dealers owned a specific spot which they guarded with bullets. According to Horácio – whose wife had left him after he had lost the movement in his legs when he crashed a stolen motorbike into the back of a truck, with a blonde sitting behind him: ‘The dealer distributes to the guys who work for him. If he pays four thou a kilo, he’s gonna sell it to us middle-men for seven or eight thou, to double his capital. And I’m gonna want ten a gram, ‘cause of the risk. If you get caught it’s a serious crime, which is terrifyin’ for a man who’s already tallied up a lot of years.’