Attorneys create work group for monitoring prisons in Brazil
The Brazilian Bar Association (“OAB”) will monitor the conditions of penal institutions more strictly and on a more regular basis. Through the newly-created Coordination for the Monitoring of the Prison System, whose members assumed office on Tuesday (Feb. 4), the OAB promises not only to investigate whether criminal regulations are being observed and public resources properly used, but also to report the states which do not provide inmates with legal assistance, safety, employment and the appropriate conditions for their reintegration into society.
OAB’s president Marcus Vinicius Furtado Coêlho explained: “We’re opening a permanent monitoring section for each establishment, so we’ll get monthly information, kept up-to-date by a computer program, in order to show society what happened in a prison unit during a certain period, the construction works taking place and the resources being used.”
In case irregularities are detected – such as lodging temporary and sentenced prisoners together, or not ensuring their physical integrity – it shall be the responsibility of the OAB to take civil action against local authorities. “We’ll find out who’s working with negligence and write out permanent public reports [on them].”
According to him, the OAB is also interested in making mandatory the compensation of relatives of the inmates killed in prison, as they were held in the custody of the State, which is responsible for ensuring their physical integrity: “This is for making the State aware that it is more appropriate to collaborate with public security and to take care of the prison system than to brutalize human beings by treating them like animals.”
The creation of the work group was a decision made in December, when the OAB reported Brazil to the Organization of the American States for the precarious conditions in the Pedrinhas Penitentiary Complex, in São Luís, in the state of Maranhão. According to the National Justice Council, sixty inmates were killed in 2013 within the facilities of the prison, which is Maranhão largest penitentiary. It recently faced a public security crisis, when prisoners ordered, from inside the prison, other criminals to attack police stations and set buses alight.
Translated by Fabrício Ferreira
Fonte: Attorneys create work group for monitoring prisons in Brazil
