“Over sixty people from Paraná state are employed by my prison,” explains the director, puffing out his chest and explaining its history, as André translates.
The idea of the supermax took hold as a solution to gangs, an infamous staple of Latin American prison life. Their reach extends from Mexico, where in 2012, imprisoned members of the Zetas murdered forty-four prisoners at a jail in Apodaca, to Venezuela, where gangs control almost all prisons and guards are merely responsible for perimeter security, head count, and court transfers. In Brazil, the story really begins in 1991, at São Paulo’s notorious Carandiru Prison, now closed. That year military police killed 111 incarcerated people, including pretrial detainees, most via machine guns at point-blank range from the doors of their cells. Surviving men were stripped naked and many were attacked by dogs trained to bite genitals; some were stabbed, others forced to watch executions, carry bodies, and clean up blood because police feared contracting AIDS. To avenge the prisoners’ deaths, the Primeiro Comando da Capital gang was formed, and since then the PCC—often compared to South Africa’s Numbers gang—has flowered into a mammoth entity that all but runs prison life throughout the country. Since its formation the gang has been behind hundreds of deaths and dozens of prison uprisings. One example that can stand in for numerous similar incidents took place in 2014, here at the state prison in Catanduvas, when a thirty-hour rebellion involved dozens of masked prisoners on the prison roof, unfurling PCC banners, tying the hands of other prisoners behind their backs, beating them, and dangling them over the roof’s edge.
The Catanduvas supermax, opened in 2006, was the government’s answer to gang violence. In a booklet distributed to the town’s population, the Department of Corrections explained that this first-ever Brazilian federal prison would house those deemed highly dangerous in an effort to reduce gang activity. About 25 percent of its population would be PCC leaders from across the country, removed from the state system and temporarily deposited in this supermax, home to 208 solitary-confinement cells. The structure cost some $18 million to build, thus representing an unprecedented financial investment in incarceration, and four more identical supermaxes soon followed. The annual cost per prisoner in this supermax is a whopping $120,000 a year, compared to what can average $36 per prisoner in Brazil’s impoverished state system, where prisoners often must feed and clothe themselves.
Back at the prison after lunch, Mara guides us through laborious security. There are two sets of sensitive metal detectors, electronic thumbprints, X-ray belts, wands, and thorough pat-downs. Surveillance cameras broadcast all angles of our search and this prison direct to Brasília, the country’s capital.
An agent in a navy-blue uniform, one of dozens circulating about the place, has been assigned to escort Mara, André, and me. He carries hulking keys that clink and clatter. Apparently the gates were initially electronic, but after a virus locked everyone in, the old lock-and-key system was instated. We pass a barbed-wire courtyard carpeted by gravel, where men and women in green uniforms wield buckets and sling garbage bags over their shoulders. I take them for prisoners but in fact they’re cleaning staff. We’re enveloped by the stinging smell of disinfectant.
It’s dead quiet.
Where are the prisoners?
“Your school teaches law, yes? I have a law degree,” our guide declares proudly. Agents in the federal system, which boasts higher salaries and better benefits than state prison jobs, generally have university degrees and are tasked not only with security but with intelligence gathering, mostly about gang activity. There are two agents for every man imprisoned here, as opposed to an appalling 350 prisoners for every one agent in the state system.
“Wear this,” Mara says, handing me a cover-up that resembles a white lab coat. She dons one, too. It feels bizarre, as if we’re scientists or clinicians. But it’s also a fitting uniform for so neutered a setting.
Down the hallway, through a door flanked by clear garbage bags filled with stale-looking bread, we enter a ward that evokes a meat locker. Perhaps it’s a morgue?
No, this narrow cell block is the prison-within-a-prison—solitary-within-solitary. The Regime Disciplinar Diferenciado, or RDD, is an extreme isolation regime used for exceptional disciplinary measures. The men in this unit, which many Brazilians have decried as violating the constitution’s ban on torture and inhumane treatment, are denied any contact whatsoever with other prisoners. Everyone at Catanduvas spends his first twenty days here.
Our agent swings open the metal door to an empty cell, which looks like a life-size dollhouse—or the nightmare version of one. It’s immaculate, about as big as a parking space, with a square desk, circular seat, and rectangular bed: blocks of conjoined concrete shapes under long fluorescent bulbs. Soft sunlight sneaks in through the slats of cathedral windows high above, dancing on yellow walls and creating neat orange shadows: four squares of sky. The sliver of a “sunbed,” which substitutes for a yard and provides a gasp of outdoors, is the size of a shower and has a tiny observation window, so guards can keep watch. Lines marking days counted have been etched into the cell’s metal door, the lone sign that human life was once here.
Human beings live behind two of the closed doors on this block, though I can’t see or hear them. I know they’re here only because their names are listed on paperwork affixed to the doors, along with their dates of admission. Both have been here, in extreme solitary, for two weeks now.
“You’re getting a good report, yes?” the agent says, smiling at my notebook. “You have many supermaxes in America. Many trips there to make this one and now you are come to see ours. Funny.”
America invented solitary and the supermax. Beginning in 1787, the Quakers experimented with solitary cells at the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia and then in 1829 Eastern State Penitentiary, opened as an all-solitary facility, modeled after monasteries, where prisoners covered their heads with monklike hoods and Bibles were their only possessions. By the late nineteenth century, New York’s Auburn Prison model, involving daily hard labor and lockstep cohorts, had begun to take precedence. But solitary was resurrected during the 1930s in Alcatraz’s “D Block” and other storied “big houses” like San Quentin, Folsom, and Attica—colossal institutions designed for thousands and specializing in monotonous routines and extreme prisoner isolation.
Solitary made a full-on comeback in 1983, when a prison in Marion, Illinois, became America’s first to adopt a twenty-three-hour-a-day cell isolation policy. As the US prison population soared and tough-on-crime rhetoric intensified, other states followed suit. In 1989 California, where today the average term in solitary is 6.8 years, built Pelican Bay, considered the first supermax and characterized by extreme solitary, a total lack of activities or communal spaces, and a powerful administration not subject to outside review or grievance systems. In 1994 Colorado erected the so-called Alcatraz of the Rockies, ADX Florence, where the longest isolated federal prisoner has spent thirty-two years under a “no human contact” order. By 1999 there were fifty-seven supermaxes in thirty-four states; at Pelican Bay, 227 prisoners have been in solitary for over a decade.
Latin America, meanwhile, constructed its modern prisons between 1830 and 1940 and modeled several on Eastern State and a few on Auburn. Now, more than a century later, official visits to America and other countries boasting US-style supermaxes—in Australia, Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Ireland, Denmark, South Africa, and Russia—have brought us to Catanduvas.
En route to Cellblock Charlie, as the agent calls it, I finally hear a sound of life: muffled calls from the double-tiered wards, echoing through labyrinthine hallways.
Prisoners exist in the heart of this maze—and that term is apt, since its vestibules and courtyards have been designed to disorient. “Though he live to be in the same cell ten weary years,” Alexis de Tocqueville once wrote of the American prisoner in solitary, “he has no means of knowing, down to the very last hour, in what part of the building it is situated.”
I
am steered to a cell where a hinged slat on the dense metal door creaks open. I peer through.
Eyes greet me. They belong to Carlos.
He stands at attention in his pristine, pint-sized cell, as if in a lineup.
“Bon dia!” André says.
Those eyes. Windows to a grief-stricken soul.
It’s the most bizarre, unsettling conversation—interview?—I’ve ever conducted. I speak through a hole in a safelike door, André whispering hasty translation for me, and I’m surrounded by eavesdropping ears, interred behind neighboring iron doors.
Carlos, forty-one, is from a notorious Rio favela. These are essentially self-contained slums erected on vacant land by a growing class of urban poor during the 1980s, often compared to the garrison communities of Kingston, Jamaica, or the townships of South Africa. They lack basic social services and are lorded over by gangs. Carlos has spent sixteen years in prison on homicide, gun possession, forgery, and hijacking charges, and has lived in Catanduvas for two years and eight months, after being transferred from the state system.
“But Mara,” I ask, spinning around, “isn’t there a 360-day limit to a prisoner’s stay in solitary here, after which he’s meant to be transferred back to the state?” I could’ve sworn the director told me as much.
“Most cases, yes,” she says. “But not always. It depends. This rule has changed.”
Carlos straightens out a wrinkle in his sky-blue T-shirt, which has “Interno Sistema Penetenciaro Federal” printed across it. He explains that he has a ninety-eight-year sentence, but no one actually serves more than thirty years in Brazil.
“Good that our country is not like the USA,” he quips.
Carlos unfastens three photos from his wall and proudly displays his five children, aged five to twenty-three, and a seven-year-old grandson. Like most of the men at Catanduvas he’s had no in-person visits since his arrival. His family cannot afford to fly here—they can barely afford the bus fare from the favela to the virtual prison visit center in Rio, where families, using a Skype-like system, log on to see their incarcerated loved ones. Once, after Carlos painted the entire prison, the director paid his family’s transportation fees to the virtual visit center—it cost about twenty dollars—but they’ve made just three more trips there since.
“How can I rehabilitate without family?” he asks.
“I dream, nightmares. Of being abandoned by my family, by my children. I wake up in panic with this kind of dream, anxious with fear. I want the chance to give them an example of how I made a mistake, yes, but I learned from my own mistakes, from the mistakes of others. I learned human beings deserve a second chance, an opportunity to show themselves so everybody will see that person has changed.” Carlos pauses and swallows hard.
“Twenty-two hours inside this cell. It is just hell. My days are hell, to tell you the truth. I am suffocating. I am dead. There is nothing else to say. Buried but alive, still.”
There is more to say, of course. But we talk Dostoyevsky instead. Carlos participates in Rehabilitation Through Reading, which Mara had explained to me. It was started in 2009 by a controversial federal judge who essentially told prison officials that, since there was no money for programs, let the prisoners read books! Like the supermax, it has American precedents such as Changing Lives Through Literature, a Massachusetts-based “bibliotherapy” program offering alternative probation options via literature classes. Good stories, the program’s Web site explains, provoke us to feel compassion for fictional characters, each other, and ourselves. By stepping into another’s shoes, it goes on, people in prison can process their emotional struggles without confessing.
Lifting a well-worn copy of Crime e Castigo, Crime and Punishment, from his shelf, Carlos delivers his analysis.
“Crime brings consequences to family. Think before you act. This is the novel’s essence. The main character, too—he confesses. Guilt eats him alive. He murdered and stole and he cannot go on. He is tortured in his mind. Impossible to do wrong and not feel guilt.”
“Do you feel guilt, Carlos?” I ask.
“Every day of my life. I am a living error—a walking mistake. Do you imagine how this feels? To be a living error? And only an error? But even in hell, I am hopeful. I am almost forty-two now, but my life is not ended. I want to go to university. Study theology and psychology. I am writing a book, too; it is titled The Hikers of the Deep Fall. The hikers are you and me who look inside and see that as human beings, our job is to grab the rope and climb. Upward. Never seeing the long fall.”
Two men in white wheel a metal cart down the hallway, passing small plates of pills through the slats in each cell. Eighty percent of the men locked up here are on medication.
“I only took them when I first came here, yes …,” Carlos says. “To sleep, pills. And for anxiety. Depression. To be alone all of these hours—impossible. I am afraid.”
The agent seals the slat on Carlos’s door and, without a goodbye, he vanishes. Time is up.
Through muted echoes, we follow another metal cart carrying magazines to the library. It looks more like a closet, encumbered by books. They’re strewn about, especially the ones on the Rehabilitation Through Reading approved list, titles by José Saramago, Clarice Lispector, the Dalai Lama, J. D. Salinger. There’s a Bible, a dictionary, a book of evangelical songs, and stack after stack of celebrity magazines.
“Lots of Sidney Sheldon,” Mara says with disdain. At Otisville, too, the tiny library has a sliver of a history section, a few Latin American studies titles—and an outsized “fantasy” section.
“Prisoners are begging for more books, begging the government. Instead”—she rifles through a mound of glossy pages—“silly magazines.”
Outside the gates, the air is suddenly fresh and the landscape a blanket of emerald. André and I drop Mara at her condo in Cascavel, a gated complex that is, like the prison she works in, a striking simulacrum of US housing.
“Thanks, America, for exporting this housing style to us, too,” André quips.
Our hotel, meanwhile, seems like Miami circa 1952. The whole town might well exist in another time and place. It feels like 1980s America, from the big-hair styles on the women strolling about, snacking on pão de queijo, to the hard-rock soundtrack emanating from Irish pubs on the road. André and I sit at one of them, eating fried fish with farofa, a dish made with manioc flour, and unraveling our day. Wringing his hands, he bemoans his country’s devotion to incarceration. The FIFA World Cup is around the corner and folks are joking, he tells me, that those pricey new stadiums will, once the crowds go home, become prisons. He grabs his temples.
“Even my family, my brother and father—they all say lock up the criminals and throw away the key. But how is this an answer?”
———
The next morning when we arrive, spots of fluorescent color in the form of women visitors animate the drab barbed wire. Dress-code rules ban almost every hue except yellow and pink, because Big Brother in Brasília must easily differentiate, on camera, between prisoners, staff, and visitors. The result is bizarrely cinematic. All of these women have come from worlds away, some have had their travel paid for by the PCC because their husbands are prominent gang members. Many have slept outside the gates in hopes of being first in line and all are about to endure marathons of waiting, security procedures, and body-cavity checks, only to land a few hours with loved ones. But here they are swathed in the most cheery, exuberant tints imaginable.
As we pass them and go through security, we are handed shots of cafezinho. Discarded plastic cups leave a trail through the prison; with agents working overnight shifts, this strong, black, sweet stuff is the oil that keeps the machine running.
Today is cold and rainy. Snaking through dark, concrete hallways, the chill seeps into my bones.
As we turn a corner, narrow rays of light illuminate a massive field behind bars, with a barbed-wire skylight. Cohorts of thirteen prisoners are granted two hours a day in this sun bed, which I’d
spied earlier, and during this time they are forbidden to speak to more than three men at any given time.
The soccer ball slams against the wall. Bodies tear through the space with ferocious alacrity, leaping and kicking and calling to each other. Bodies gasp for air; bare-chested, barefoot bodies smile, laugh, leap, live.
Then: Pare!
Silence.
The soccer ball rolls to a slow halt. Prisoners freeze, line up against the wall and bow their heads. Smiles dissolve.
“Número um!” calls the agent.
The richly choreographed perp walk begins. One by one, head hanging down, march to the agent. About-face, kneel, present hands to be cuffed through the bars. Spin around and approach the next agent. About face again, as the door opens and slams shut, and the body is once more interred in a cell for twenty-two hours.
“Número dois!” calls the agent.
The ritual repeats until all that remains in the sun bed is a half-deflated soccer ball. Agents walk the perimeter with plastic gloves, checking for objects left behind.
Then, minutes later, the door opens and thirteen men march silently, single file with head bowed. They stand facing the wall and are uncuffed, one by one.
“Liberal!” calls the agent. You are free!
Instantly there are hugs and embraces, laughter and smiles, heads held high. They talk with each other, with the guards. Haircuts are given, with an electric razor plugged in near the bars. Puffs of hair sail to the ground; the soccer ball soars skyward. The whole thing is a death-and-resurrection rite of the most profound order.
I spy Carlos, looking even more boyish now that more than just his eyes are visible. Interno says his T-shirt, but I misread it as Inferno.
“Come, let me show you their cells,” our agent says.
“Are you sure that’s OK?” I ask, hesitating to trespass on private spaces.
“Of course. This prison is ours, not theirs,” the agent insists proudly, guiding us inside Cela Ola on Cellblock Charlie.
Incarceration Nations Page 17