A worn copy of Dear John by Nicholas Sparks rests on the urine-yellow concrete shelf, near a shower that automatically sprays water at the same hour every day. Four faded photographs of children are tacked above the bed. On the desk is a pen removed from its plastic casing, beside stenciled drawings of dalmatians, praying hands, and birds in cages.
Layers of gentle pink light stream through lofty cathedral windows. The muffled echoes of metal doors creaking open and the muted voices crying to each other from cellblocks faraway reach us like calls to prayer. For the first time I viscerally grasp the word “penitentiary,” from “penitence.” This place has the feel of an eerie, haunted monastery. It’s as if I’m in a chilling cross between a church and a concentration camp.
Cells have no mirrors, the agent explains. In fact, one news crew filming here left a camera outside the slat of a cell overnight, and returned to find the man who lives in the cell staring at the camera lens, enchanted by his own reflection.
“Neat and clean and efficient, this cell,” says the agent, as if he had built it himself. “Nothing like the state prison. Clean, safe.”
Indeed Catanduvas is worlds away from Brazil’s state prisons, which is clearly why I’m here. The government is eager to show off its pristine, pricey investment. In 2014—the year a video surfaced showing Brazilian prisoners beheading three fellow prisoners—a UN human-rights body expressed concern over the “dire state” of Brazil’s savagely overcrowded, violent prisons, where more than 80 percent of incarcerated people cannot afford a lawyer. Many states do not provide separate facilities for women, and male officers in women’s prisons are known to extort sexual favors; adolescents can be jailed with adults in units without bathrooms. In 2009, 16,466 people were found to be imprisoned irregularly; many had spent far longer in pretrial detention than they would have served as sentenced prisoners—in one case, a man spent eleven years on remand. In the state of Espírito Santo, amid accusations of torture and abuse between 2009 and 2011, the government barred entry to prison cells even to the officially mandated body monitoring the system.
It’s mealtime. Through another hallway, more metal carts are steered by agents wearing wraparound shades. The ritual begins. One by one, drinks are poured into plastic cups, metal trays are inserted through door slats into eager hands, then the slats are slammed shut.
Visiting women in pink pass us on their way out, their cheeks puffy and damp. I make out the cries of a baby.
“So sad,” Mara says, rubbing her eyes. “He is visiting family. Saying ‘Daddy!’ ”
———
We spend the remainder of my time at Catanduvas in its two havens. Qualifying prisoners can escape their cells for a few hours several days a week, if they attend class or work jobs. Job options are limited and unusual. The men can make baskets from discarded magazines or craft children’s toys from paper and Popsicle sticks; both are sold at local craft fairs. I’m presented with one of each product, inside a small room where a dozen men sit at collective tables behind bars. An origami duck, Mara says. And here are Moses, Jesus, and John the Baptist, crafted from matchsticks and googly eyes.
“Talk to them,” Mara urges, introducing the professora to the prisoners. Again swallowing the obnoxious, disquieting feeling of being a visitor in a human zoo, I turn to the men behind bars.
Carlos Augustus, whose black-rimmed glasses hide a weary face, tells me he’d like to go to college one day and become a biologist. He explains that according to Brazil’s Penal Execution Law, every five days a prisoner works, one day is deducted from his sentence, but only about one-quarter of prisoners are given employment.
“Working makes me calm,” he tells me. “Anything not to be in a cell. I will do anything to escape being so alone. All those hours. I believe in love—in love as redemption. There is no love here.”
Next to him is a sad-looking duo who Mara explains are father and son. I look hard at the father but what I see, transposed onto his face, is Anthony in South Africa, his daughter in another wing of Pollsmoor, his son buying drugs from the same dealer. And I see, too, a student back in New York, whose homecoming was dampened by the reality that though he was finally free, his eighteen-year-old son remained behind bars. The painfulness of this sight of a father and son, side by side in a supermax, makes my eyes well up. With all the absent fathers running like a nightmarish narrative thread through global stories of prison and poverty, the one present father in a prisoner’s life is right beside him. The depth of failure one must feel, not only to be in prison but to look beside you and see your son here, too, this is hard to fathom.
I hold back my tears to chat with the men about their lives and what they’ve been reading. Carlos Augustus delivers a moving sermon about Anna Karenina and the power of true love, but soon the conversation turns on its head and they begin to interview me. What is the recidivism rate in America? Is there a difference between this prison and the one you work in? Should America adopt our Rehabilitation Through Reading program? Is it true that in America you still have the death penalty? Really, the death penalty? And life sentences?
Is it true that America is responsible for this prison? For the supermax?
For the hours we rot in our cells?
Growing light-headed, I exit the work area and numbly follow Mara. What about the twenty-one-year-old prisoner whose charge is bank robbery? I ask her. Can he really represent the “worst of the worst”?
“That is nothing,” she says. “Last month we had a nineteen-year-old. I wondered—who is this little boy, so skinny? It turns out he was sent here because he spit in the prosecutor’s face.”
In America, banishment to the Solitary Housing Unit (SHU) can also happen for random reasons. In New York, for instance, 84 percent of SHU sentences are for such nonviolent conduct as failure to get out of the shower quickly, not obeying an order promptly, refusing to return a food tray, possessing excess postage stamps or “reckless eyeballing”—looking at an officer the wrong way. In 2013, a South Carolina man received a penalty of 37.5 years in solitary for posting on Facebook.
We pass the sun bed again, where the soccer ball thumps to a halt and prisoners rush to the bars, lobbing vehement questions at me. They wear contorted smiles.
Do you have the Internet in your American prison?
Could you survive twenty-two hours in a cell?
Tell Barack Obama we say hello!
The feverish energy is so overwhelming, it assaults me with an unnerving blend of sorrow and terror. Trembling, I break out in chills. I have never before witnessed humanity so flagrantly on the brink of going completely mad.
“These men have no work, no school, no program—just twenty-two hours in the cell,” Mara explains. “Some for years now. So sad. So sad.”
There are no gang murders at Catanduvas, as there are in Brazil’s state prisons, and there is the opposite of overcrowding—nearly half the cells here are empty. Clearly, they suffer another kind of torture, a gradual psychological genocide. “A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others still, committed suicide; while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover sufficient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community,” the US Supreme Court declared in 1890 after surveying the use of long-term solitary.
Over a century later Boston psychiatrist Stuart Grassian interviewed prisoners in solitary and found that a third developed acute psychosis and hallucinations, which he identified as symptoms of SHU Syndrome: social withdrawal, panic attacks, irrational rage, loss of impulse control, paranoia, severe and chronic depression, difficulties with concentration and memory, perceptual distortions. Self-mutilation is a common practice; those in solitary are known to bite into their own veins and cut off fingers and testicles. Suicide rates are five times higher in solitary; in California up to 70 percent of s
uicides take place there and teens are nineteen times more likely to commit suicide there. A 2009 New Yorker article by Atul Gawande, on the “hellhole” that is solitary, paints a visceral picture of the experience: “He talked to himself. He paced back and forth compulsively, shuffling along the same six-foot path for hours on end. Soon, he was having panic attacks, screaming for help. He hallucinated that the colors on the walls were changing. He became enraged by routine noises—the sound of doors opening as the guards made their hourly checks, the sounds of inmates in nearby cells. After a year or so, he was hearing voices on the television talking directly to him. He put the television under his bed, and rarely took it out again.” In 1995 a federal judge found that conditions at Pelican Bay in California “may well hover on the edge of what is humanly tolerable.”
Solitary units like Catanduvas represent a brutal amputation—cut off a problem in order to deter, punish, and keep others safe. But one cannot forget that this “problem” is also a human being, who may eventually return to the prison population and the world. How can it benefit him, or us, to return him there utterly mad?
And ultimately, can inducing insanity ever be morally justifiable?
Yet even if we push that concern aside, studies suggest that solitary confinement is not even effective. A 2006 study found that those who spent three months or more in solitary were more likely to reoffend and to commit a violent crime, while a 2003 study on supermaxes in Arizona, Illinois, and Minnesota found levels of prisoner violence unchanged. This is why the United Kingdom, for instance, has begun to turn away from the expensive, ineffective, inhumane practice; in the whole of England today, there are fewer people in solitary than there are in all the prisons of Maine. Instead, the British often house their most volatile in Close Supervision Centres, which are small, stable units of fewer than ten people. There they receive mental health treatment and education and earn rights for exercise, phone calls, contact visits, and cooking facilities. The idea is to give these men more control, not less, which minimizes the scenarios of humiliation and confrontation that, experts agree, form the root of prison violence.
———
Inside a small classroom manned by guards, ten students in blue sweats and flip-flops sit at their desks. They’re separated from the teacher’s bulky desk by bars. I cannot imagine teaching, literally, before bars; even in maximum security US prisons, I’ve seen nothing like this. Mara points to a red line on the teacher’s side of the concrete floor, just before the bars.
“One time a prisoner was reading a dictionary, looking for a word,” she tells me, “and he said he could not find the word, so the teacher approached the bars to show him in the book. And suddenly the guards charged in and drew their guns and shouted, ‘Step back! Are you disrespecting teacher?’ The prisoner’s hands were trembling and he grew red in the face, humiliated. So, Baz, do not cross the red line.”
Today’s class, mixed-level, from fifth grade to high school, is led by a kindly teacher with frizzy blond hair and a colorful cartoon sewn onto the pocket of her white lab coat. She steps aside after she introduces me, and I say a few words about the Prison-to-College Pipeline and the value of education.
Then it’s as if the horses are at the gate: ready, set—erupt!
“If you don’t educate us we will be back on the street!” declares a dark-skinned man in the front row.
“I am fifty-one now. It is too late for me—but not for him.” He points to a light-skinned young man beside him.
“I had no chance for education in my life. There was no school in my favela. I had nothing. Not even a birth certificate.”
I’m meant to be interviewing the men about Rehabilitation Through Reading. After two days, though, it’s clear that although the program means well—it’s a potential sanity lifeline—it also, considering the dire circumstances here, borders on laughable. What is literature in the face of extreme solitary and proliferating supermaxes? What are a few days in the context of quarter-century sentences?
Instead, for hours this morning and then in the afternoon—when the teacher is absent and I am thrust before the class and told, “Teach!”—I let life narratives crash and burn all around me.
Fabio, forty: mother had him at age eleven, when she was raped; ran away from home at six because his alcoholic father was beating him to a pulp; landed in dozens of orphanages and became involved in crime at age seven; entered prison at eighteen and saw his mother only one other time, at twenty-six, behind bars.
Roberto, thirty-eight: born to a family of fourteen brothers; was recruited by the gangs and sold drugs so he could support his family; passed in and out of state prison, where he honed his criminal skills and grew addicted to meth; during a botched robbery of a small store, accidentally shot and killed a federal policeman. Has been in solitary here for five years.
Heads hang low and the room feels like a ticking time bomb.
Mi família, mi família. The words resound like a grief-stricken chorus. To be in solitary, this is torture. But to be thousands of miles away from wives, children, mothers—this, the men affirm, is the absolute abyss.
The prisoners talk on but André, exhausted and unable to keep up, stops translating. I continue nodding, anyway; I know what they’re saying. Because I’ve heard it in America, in Jamaica, and especially back in Pollsmoor. The ghetto is the garrison is the township—and the favela. There are two elephants in the room, and the men are pointing right at them.
First, race.
A legacy of racial inequity produced these men, their favelas, and this prison. More than ten times as many African slaves were brought to Brazil than to the United States, and slavery continued well into the nineteenth century—Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888. After that, policing and punitive methods were used to secure a labor force for coffee and sugar production. Tens of thousands of poor blacks were arrested for misdemeanors—vagrancy, disorder, drunkenness, practicing of capoeira (a martial art that draws on African dance and music, and was illegal until the 1930s)—and put to work or sentenced to stints in the army. Brazil adopted a new federal constitution in 1988, but almost nothing was done to integrate the descendants of slaves into the economy or public life. Segregation here is a reality across all walks of life, from education and the labor market to land distribution, housing, and access to public services. As of 2009, for instance, just 17 percent of Brazil’s black and mixed-race population was engaged in educational activity. Eighty percent have less than eight years of schooling, nearly two out of three nonwhite students fail to complete upper secondary school, and a paltry 6.6 percent attend university. More than 70 percent of Brazilians living below the poverty line are black or mixed-race, earning a wage less than half that of whites, and the life expectancy of nonwhite Brazilians is six years below whites’. Ninety-seven percent of executives and 83 percent of managers are white. If white and nonwhite Brazil were separate nations, the former would rank 44th in the UN World Human Development Index and the latter, 105th.
Is it any wonder that the homicide rates of nonwhite Brazilians are almost double those of whites—in some regions, more than three times higher? Or that nonwhite Brazilians, representing two-thirds of prisoners but half the country’s population, are twice as likely as whites to be in jail? For centuries, the system was built to devastate them.
“Will you give up crime?” Mara is asking a bald prisoner with dense folds under his eyes.
“How can I give it up when I never had the chance to work?” he asks, looking as if he’s going to burst out of his desk. “If I go to the street, who’s going to get me work, who’s going to help me?”
He turns to me with a glare. “How is it in America? Does the state help? Does the state give people jobs who have no opportunity? Take my name down. Remember it. Look me up and see if one day I finally get the job I deserve.”
Minding the red line, I pass my notebook through the bars. Pedro Henrique Procopio, he writes, in elegant script. �
��Remember me,” he says, returning it.
The other elephant in the room is class. Crime is driven by poverty and inequality, a fact realized in the United States, where income inequality is the highest it’s been since 1928, and the richest fifth of families hold 88.9 percent of the country’s wealth. But Brazil represents even more dramatic extremes of both poverty and inequality—income inequality exists at about 25 percent higher rates than it does in the States. The roots of this lie between 1870 and 1980, when Brazil’s economy grew at a faster rate than nearly any other major country. During the 1950s it was on a path to overtake the United States, and some 20 million people migrated to the country’s cities, one of the biggest such movements in history. But a sudden collapse in growth impoverished millions; between 1980 and 1990 the minimum wage decreased by 46 percent and per capita income dropped 7.6 percent. The proportion of income appropriated by the richest fifth of the population grew to 65 percent, while that of the poorest half dropped to 12 percent. Three percent of the country’s GDP is spent on health and less than 5 percent on education, as compared to 12 percent on pensions—nearly two-thirds of which are enjoyed by the richest fifth of Brazil. Those working in the informal economy, meanwhile, roughly 40 percent of the workforce, get no state benefits. There’s a severe housing crisis, too. One in three families lives in inadequate housing, and the country has an estimated shortage of 5.8 million units.
Yet despite astounding poverty and widespread lack of social services, the Brazilian government dug deep into its pockets to spend hundreds of millions building the prison I’m standing in.
Why? I ask the students, my teachers.
They sum it up using an old Brazilian expression: “To make a show for an Englishman.”
The government needs gangs, the prisoners tell me; they coordinate ghetto life and prison life. This is true of the Numbers gang in Pollsmoor, too. Yet politicians here also make regular public shows of eradicating these same gangs, to get reelected. Catanduvas and its four brother institutions represent very grand, very expensive public shows. Never mind that its use of solitary is clearly a form of torture. Never mind that it’s not only not solving problems of crime, violence, and inequality, or even the “problem” of gangs, because a stint in federal can stigmatize prisoners as dangerous and ultimately promote gang leaders, who return to their states with infamous reputations. And never mind that this strategy failed in the United States, as explained by David Skarbek in his 2014 book The Social Order of the Underworld, which delves into California prison gangs and argues that they, like the PCC gang here, “end up providing governance in a brutal but effective way.” California first tried to contain gangs by breaking them up and scattering their members to distant prisons so as to dilute their influence, but that ultimately allowed gangs to spread their influence and reach across states and into the federal system.
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