IDEAS – People’s Legal Assistance Bahia

Contribute to fighting criminalization, mass incarceration and the genocide of black people, working to reduce the incidence and amount of prisoners through precautionary and pre-trial detentions resulting from trafficking, robbery and theft of small amounts.

• Organization of meetings to present the project, gather information and request data from the criminal enforcement system’s organisms.
• Empowerment of male and female detainees and of their families through the promotion of legal education for the people.
• Strategic litigation.
• Research on the modus operandi of the prison system and on the profile of the prison population in precautionary and provisional stage.
• Systematization of data.
• Publication of research findings.
• Organization of a debate to present, review and discuss the research findings and launch the publication.

The Northeast region has the second largest prison population among the five regions of the country with 86,661 people in jail. In the Southeast region, which ranks first, there are 282,000 people in jail.  11.82% of the Brazilian inmate population is in Bahia (10,251 people). The state has the eighth largest number of inmates arrested due to drug dealing and there are strong indications that the prison population is not connected to large-scale international trafficking, but to small traffic dealing to the retail consumer. Black population in neighborhoods, communities and slums located in specific places of downtown Salvador is criminalized and became the subject of sensationalist T.V. shows in Bahia. These shows forge a potential enemy, the black young man in tactel shorts, shirt and cap, features presented by over half of Salvador’s population. The “war on drugs” in Bahia is a war on black people.

IDEAS People’s Legal Assistance promotes the right to the city, specifically by making visible those conflicts arising from the development model based on the usurpation of black people’s territory, culture and lives. It aims at empowering communities and movements. It has assisted the Homeless Movement of Bahia since 2012, and in 2014, it started working in the Old City Centre, in Salvador, on the articulation of a network of urban popular resistance.