SÃO PAULO (CNS): The Prison Pastoral, an organisation linked to the Brazilian Bishops’ Conference, demanded the release of prisoners as part of efforts to contain the spread of Covid-19 among incarcerated Brazilians.
“If the virus spreads through Brazilian prisons, the consequences will be disastrous. Eighty per cent of coronavirus cases have mild symptoms, such as the flu; however, prisoners and inmates have very low immunity due to the degrading conditions in prison,” pastoral officials wrote in an open letter in mid-March.
Pastoral officials said they fear that rate of Covid-19 among prisoners would be similar to that of tuberculosis, which, they said, is 30 times higher in prisons than in the general population.
According to the latest data from the Ministry of Justice, 62 per cent of inmate deaths in Brazilian prisons are caused by diseases such as HIV, syphilis and tuberculosis.
Brazil’s federal government, along with 10 state governments, enacted stricter measures in prisons, but according to Prison Pastoral these are only palliative and are not likely to reduce contamination.
“The actions that have been taking place in recent days, such as suspension of visits, greater cleaning of cells, provision of cleaning products to prisoners, distribution of information booklets for prison officers and medical screening of prisoners are, in our evaluation, measures of little efficacy, taken more to respond to the social panic that the spread of the virus has caused than to ensure that prisoners are, in fact, not contaminated,” said Pastoral officials.
The pointed out that cleaner cells will not help if they are still overcrowded and if prisoners do not have hygiene materials.
Brazil has approximately 710,000 incarcerated people, 31 per cent of whom are still awaiting trial, according to data from the Violence Monitor, produced by the Brazilian Public Security Forum. However, the country’s prisons can only house fewer than 424,000 inmates.
