Iza Barros, Fransérgio Goulart, Catarina Duarte, Juliana Brandão and Marina Dias | Picture: Rebeca Figueiredo
With about 850 thousand incarcerated people, Brazil has the third highest prison population in the world, according to data from the World Prison Population List of 2024. In the face of this mass-incarceration scenario, the second day of the Brazil Fund’s Human Rights Conference promoted a debate about the ways of public security and the justice system in the country.
The “How to advance towards a public security and criminal justice system that respects human rights?” roundtable gathered researchers and activists to debate the current scenario of Brazilian justice and analyze the recent achievements and hurdles in the fight against mass incarceration in Brazil.
The conversation was mediated by journalist Catarina Duarte, editor of Ponte Jornalismo, and counted with the participation of Marina Dias, from the Institute for the Defense of the Right to Defense (IDDD); Juliana Brandão, from the Brazilian Public Security Forum; Fransérgio Goulart, from the Right to Memory and Racial Justice Initiative (IDMJR); and Iza Barros, from the Sergipe Front for Decarceration.
Scenario of national public security
Catarina Duarte started her quote by reporting a piece of news she heard in the morning, about a Black man beaten by five policemen after being mistaken for an alleged criminal. The mediator highlighted the way in which the journalist gave the news, by classifying the agents’ approach as misconduct. For Duarte, the choice may show a small advancement with regards to a traditional pattern of journalistic coverage on public security in the country. She explains that today, perhaps, there’s a media more preoccupied with the matter of public security and an improvement on access to data about the subject, but these conditions are the result of historic struggles. “What we have today isn’t something that came from above; much came from below upwards”, she highlighted.
Juliana Brandão also defends that researchers and journalists that cover public security nowadays have greater freedom in access to data about violence in Brazil, though they suffer with legal matters. “The [Brazilian Public Security] Forum thinks of strategies to tackle crime and violence, that conceive of public security as a human right that is inscribed in the Constitution, as a fundamental right”, she highlighted. The speaker believes it’s important to think about a public security that preserves life and dialogues with the enjoyment of rights.
Beyond analyzing if crime is increasing or diminishing in the country, Juliana defends observing who are the people harmed by the violence and absence of rights. “Who is dying? Who keeps enduring the absence of rights?”, she questioned. She claimed that, in 2025, over 40 thousand people were intentionally killed in the country, the smallest rate of mortality in this category since 2012. The reduction, however, doesn’t happen equally among the different groups of the population, since most victims are Black men and youths. According to the speaker, for every white person killed by agents of the State, around three Black people are killed.
Marina Dias highlighted the difficulty of debating criminal justice and claimed that it’s necessary to analyze the power structures that sustain the current public security model. She pointed towards an advancement of the “enemy’s penal law”, a concept that consists on separating penal legislation in two versions: one for common citizens who commit some infraction, another for those considered “enemies of the State”, such as terrorists and members of criminal factions. Within this initiative, there’s also the idea of preventing prisoners considered enemies of the country of voting in elections, something she disagrees on.
Marina has also claimed that it’s impossible to speak about mass incarceration without tackling the national drug policy. According to her, the legislation contributes to the increase of imprisoned people in the country, and brought a R$ 1 billion (circa 200 million USD) profit throughout 20 years to Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC). For Dias, the acting and current unstable scenario of the Brazilian Supreme Court (STF) also add to the critical prison landscape nowadays.
Have there been advancements?
Every day, five to six “natural deaths” are registered in the prison system, according to Iza Barros using data from the Public Security Directory. A survivor of incarceration and speaker in the roundtable, she believes that the prison system is the “largest genocide plan” against the Brazilian population of Black and poor people, as well as being one of the sectors with the most diversion of public funds. She also defended penal abolitionism, an approach that intends on overcoming the logic of state vengeance and prioritizing public policies aimed towards damage reduction for survivors of incarceration. “We can’t be satisfied with humanizing prisons […]. We need to dream of the day in which we tear down the walls and build a place of support and care networks.”
The custody hearing was pointed out as one of the advancements to the justice system. The mechanism determines that a person deprived of freedom has to have an audience with a judge in up to 24 hours. The debates around the acting of the public defender’s office and how the families of incarcerated people can access it is another improvement in construction in the country, as highlighted by Iza. The creation of social offices contributed so that survivors of incarceration had access to the job market. The Fair Sentence Plan was also cited as a positive action to build a safer prison system, that seeks to socially reintegrate imprisoned people.
De-incentivization to police funding
Fransérgio Goulart, representative of IDMJR, highlighted that the initiative was born seven years ago with the goal of fighting for racial justice in Baixada Fluminense, a place with a mainly Black population. Nowadays, IDMJR defends a public policy of budgetary de-investment in police, through the reduction of purchases of equipment that may contribute to the deaths of Black people, such as lethal weapons, armored cars, among others.
“Public politics without budgeting is a dream”, claimed Goulart. According to him, the country’s police discovered, within the latest years, that it’s necessary to fight over public funding to increase its operations. “Looking towards the budget means understanding the public security policy we have”, the speaker pointed out. He also defended that, in the current electoral scenario in Brazil, it’s important to think of public policies that aren’t punitive.
How to engage the population?
Juliana Brandão defended the need to translate debate about public security and bring it closer to society’s daily life. “Public security means walking the streets safely”, she affirmed as an example of what could be used. Marina Dias supports the idea of bringing the debate closer to society, and affirmed that the radicalization of discourse in defense of respect and inclusion against mass incarceration may be another path towards expanding engagement in the public security agenda.
For Fransérgio Goulart, on the other hand, the budget aimed towards public security and the space for social reflection are factors that generate social engagement. Iza Barros closed the roundtable highlighting that one of the important factors for survivors of incarceration and their families is the understanding and knowledge of their political and social rights. “We will only advance if we occupy these spaces, causing inconveniences or not”, he concluded.
*Gabriela César, member of Junior Journalism in the University of São Paulo’s School of Communication and Arts, under supervision of journalist Mônica C. Ribeiro.
