Brazil resorts to house arrest for 200,000 convicts, including two former presidents

Jair Messias Bolsonaro, 70, is undoubtedly the most famous prisoner in Brazil right now. The former president has been detained at home for two and a half months and wears an electronic ankle bracelet. He has only left the villa in Brasilia where he lives with his wife and young daughter to go to the hospital. In a matter of weeks, a judge will decide whether he will remain under house arrest or go to jail.

Another former president, Fernando Collor de Mello, 76, is also under house arrest. Both he and Bolsonaro have benefited from a profound change in the prison system that benefits both prisoners in pretrial detention and those who have already been convicted. House arrest has gone from being an exception to something relatively frequent. In the space of a decade, the number of inmates under house arrest has soared from 6,000 to 200,000 — in other words, one in five prisoners. Equally striking is the fact that this has not served to alleviate the calamitous situation in prisons.

Few people know Brazilian prisons better than Sister Petra Pfaller, coordinator of the Episcopal Conference of Brazil’ prison pastoral care: “During our prison visits, we don’t see that the increase in house arrests has made any difference. Prisons are still overcrowded and, unfortunately, mass incarceration continues,” she says. The Catholic nun emphasizes something that is often forgotten: “Granting house arrest to people in vulnerable situations is not an exceptional or benevolent measure: it is a legal, humanitarian and constitutional requirement.”

“Brazil arrests a lot and badly,” says Cristiano Maronna, director of Justa, a platform that investigates the Brazilian justice system. Almost a million Brazilians are in prison, according to official figures. When it comes to prison populations, it ranks third globally, surpassed only by the United States (with 1.8 million inmates) and China (with 1.6 million), according to the World Prison Brief. Of the 200,000 who are incarcerated at home, half wear an electronic ankle bracelet, according to the National Criminal Information System. The number of prisoners has continued to increase in the last decade regardless of who is in government. Sister Petra points out that the prison ministry of the Catholic Church has long criticized the penal system for being “selective, racist, misogynistic and structured to punish poverty.”

Even the Supreme Court has called the situation intolerable and unconstitutional. “The Brazilian prison system is responsible for the massive violation of prisoners’ fundamental rights,” it declared in 2023. It went on to demand the implementation of a series of improvements in food, hygiene, infrastructure and health care by 2027, as well as measures to combat the abuse of prisoners and overcrowding. The exponential increase in house arrests is due to these circumstances. Overcrowding is chronic. The deficit of cells is around 200,000, but just before the pandemic there were 300,000 more inmates than prison places.

A large part of the prison system is subject to organized crime, with mafia gangs managing the lives of inmates behind closed doors. Reflecting the impotence or apathy of the authorities in many prisons, when a new inmate arrives, they are given a form to indicate which gang they want to be controlled by. This is an actual policy to prevent the settling of scores and riots.

House arrest was expanded in a bid to humanize punishment. The first to be sent home were seriously ill people in prisons without the means to treat them, explains Justa director Cristiano Maronna. He stresses that “prisons are unhealthy, and some diseases that could be treated easily outside become serious” – ailments such as pneumonia, scabies, tuberculosis... In the decade between 2013 and 2023, around 17,000 inmates died in prison, according to the news outlet Folha de S. Paulo.

House arrest is available to both pre-trial prisoners and convicted persons. At first it was granted to seriously ill inmates, those over 80, pregnant women, mothers of children under 12 and parents in charge of young children. As house arrest has expanded, more prisoners are requesting it, but as always, the system is not exactly fair. Sister Petra stresses that, despite what the law says, she herself knows many very sick inmates who have not been granted house arrest.

In three of the 27 states, more than half of convicted criminals are at home. The state of Paraná holds the record with 60%. In a telephone interview, lawyer Clovis Bertollini lists several reasons for this: the state has always had a serious lack of space in prisons, which is why many convicts ended up serving sentences in police stations; then there is the understanding of the Supreme Court, an active management of how many places are actually available, and a reinforcement of the electronic surveillance system.

Former President Collor is serving an eight-year prison sentence at home for corruption and money laundering. He suffers from Parkinson’s and bipolar disorder. Meanwhile, the other former president, Bolsonaro, is under house arrest due to flight risk while he waits for his 27-year sentence for a coup in 2022, handed down by the Supreme Court in September, to be final. His lawyers have announced that they will request that he serve these 27 years at home, surrounded by his family, due to poor health. The decision lies with the judge.

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