Warning, Graphic Images!Life Inside The Toughest Prison In Brazil Is A Daily Battle With Crack Cocaine And Murder

Seeing Inside The Toughest Prison In Brazil Will Keep You On The Straight And Narrow For Life You’ve all seen prison dramas like Orange Is The New Black and Prison Break, but none of you have any idea what really happens in some of the world’s cruelest and deadliest institutions. While western TV and the media paints prisons as places where inmates can live an easy life,  I can assure you it’s very different in Brazil.

 

Not known for being the most law-abiding nation on Earth, Brazilian prisons are a law unto themselves. Bosses in the state’s overcrowded prisons are frightened of inmates and give the most dangerous ones called ‘chaveiros’ – or ‘keyholders’ – control over their cell block for them to ‘maintain order’.

 

Maintaining order might sound like a good thing, but the reality is very different. The job often goes to convicted murderers, rapists and drug dealers because they ‘command respect from fellow inmates’. Good news for everybody else then? Not really, vulnerable inmates are gang raped and relatives outside are blackmailed into paying off inmates’ drug debts.

It only gets better for these ‘keepers of the peace’. Chaveiros live in spacious private rooms with their own TVs, fridges, fans and bathrooms, and employ prisoners as personal servants, known as ‘chegados’. Basically these degenerates run the whole show.

 

A prison director told charity Human Rights Watch (HRW): ‘If a keyholder goes to the administration and says that a person attacked someone, brings witnesses, we believe him and punish the violator.’ Essentially these men run their own form of justice, and fail to protect the inmates from each other.

 

Jorge, 28, whose name has been changed, was ambushed by the ten men he shared a room with in the COTEL prison in Recife, Pernambuco. Jorge said they put a plastic bag over his head, tied his hands behind his back and raped him. His attackers also threatened threatened him with a knife and vowed to kill him if he told anyone. But he later confessed to a guard who replied: ‘Prisoners have to suffer.’

As a result of these unprovoked and unpunished sex attacks, the HIV rate in Pernambuco’s prisons is 42 times higher (870 per 100,000) than Brazil’s, according to the National Prison Department. A ghastly statistic.

But it’s not just the inmates themselves who are the problem. Most of the prisons in Brazil are seriously overcrowded, understaffed and underfunded.

 

Brazil’s prisons hold more than 607,000 people in jails designed for about 377,000 – which is shocking inn itself. To give you an example; in Pernambuco, almost 32,000 inmates are housed in prisons with capacity for just 10,500.

But it just keeps getting worse; around 59% of inmates have yet to be tried, but share cells with convicted prisoners – a violation of international and Brazilian law. On top of that, prisons in Pernambuco on average have one guard for every 31 prisoners.

While the government understand there is a need for change and tighter regulations, the current plight does not look like dissipating any time soon. This stuff really does make western prisons look like a summer camp

 

 Source; Viralthread