Association for the Promotion and Defense of the Human Dignity of the Imprisoned Person

Promote access to justice and the fundamental rights of women in pre-trial detention, so that they can benefit from house arrest and alternatives sentences, with a view to reducing the damage caused by the prison system.

• Enable access to justice
• Harm Reduction
• Capacity training on human rights
• Community therapy

Today, Brazil is the country with the highest percentage of incarcerated people in the world, while the numbers in United States, China and Russia are decreasing. This incarceration displays a selective and massive character. People who have been in the prison system almost always have the same color and come from the same social class: they are young, poor, Black and live in peripheric areas. The criminal selectivity has another serious and violent bias: the criminalization of women. In the last ten years, there has been a 260% increase in the number of incarcerated women. There are about 38,000 women in Brazilian prisons today, approximately 900 of those women are in the state of Ceará – 720 of them are in a single prison in the metropolitan region of Fortaleza. Most incarcerated women are mothers, Black, poor, and were involved in the transportation and/or drug trafficking. The Brazilian Judiciary system holds, tries and sentences these women without taking into account possible alternative sentences, such as those provided for in the UN Rules for the Treatment of Female Prisoners, also known as the Bangkok Rules. The patriarchal character of the prison system reveals extremely cruel and symptomatic traits of machismo. Cases of violent and illegal separation of women from their children, pregnancies put at risk, and the systematic violation of the fundamental right to the presumption of innocence are not uncommon. The majority of the inmates are pre-trial detainees (560) and the State of Ceará does not have a specific place to enforce the semi-open regime.

The Prison Pastoral’s has the mission of promoting the dignity of every incarcerated person fighting the disrespect for fundamental rights and racial and social prejudices. They work by actively participating in projects to build new public policies, aiming at awareness raising on the issues surrounding the prison population. The Association for the Promotion and Defense of Human Dignity of the Imprisoned Person was founded on May 24, 2010. This entity provides legal support to the Prison Pastoral.