People’s Legal Assistance on Human Rights Association – Collective Antônia Flor

Mitigate the extent of harm caused by pre-trial detention and illegal arrests as central elements of the mass incarceration in Piauí.

• Provide legal assistance in emblematic cases involving criminalization of Black and poor people, as a way to highlight the authoritarian and selective practices that contribute to the increase of the prison population.
• Promote a public hearing to involve the attending institutions in the construction of a platform with effective measures to reduce pre-trial detention in Piauí and to defend human rights.
• Promote education campaigns through alternative and social media and also expose the human rights violations in the prison system, as well as the lack of efforts of different institutions to mitigate these problems.
• To research by means of monitoring, qualification and documentation of criminal cases in process and identify illegal arrest and irregular situations of imprisonment, such as the transfer of prisoners and the consequent restriction of the right to defense, the detention of prisoners for crimes with sentences of up to 4 years, abusive methods of investigation, among other criminalizing mechanism identified.
• Produce a final report and a dossier analyzing the prison system and the issue of pre-trial detention and proposals for the criminal justice system of the State of Piauí.
• Creation of an extension course in partnership with the popular university legal advisory services and with the Research and Extension Center Esperança Garcia (UFPI / CCHL) to produce quantitative and qualitative research, considering the situations of imprisonment, providing Law students the opportunity to get to know such reality from close distance.
• Organize a meeting to prepare the participatory planning of the project and its activities with the contribution of institutions, interested students, collaborating teachers, free legal advisors and social movements.
• Hold a seminar focusing on the discussions related to the criminal justice and the role of institutions in the process of disincarceration in Piauí and in Brazil, with the participation of representatives of institutions and social movements.

According to data raised by the National Justice System in Courts of Justice, pre-trial detainees constitute 35% of the total number of people arrested in Brazilian prisons.  As for the crimes committed, drug trafficking is at the top of the list, accounting for 29% of cases involving incarcerated defendants. Currently, Piauí appears in second place with the highest percentage of pre-trial detainees (63.28%), behind only the state of Amazonas (65.77%). Provisional release has become an exception and the state’s major prisons are overcrowded. It is possible to relate this reality to the slowness of the State Justice, which reaches the Index of Justice Compared Productivity (IPC Jus), assessed annually by the National Justice Council, of 44% (1st instance) and 60% (2nd instance), when the Brazilian average is 81% (1st instance) and 85% (2nd instance), which makes the local judiciary the most inefficient in the country and responsible for the frightening percentage of pre-trial detention in the state. It is pointed out that the continuity of these arrests is also promoted by the hardening of several laws, such as the Drugs Law (Law 11.343 / 06) and the Law of Heinous Crimes (Law 8.072 / 90), legitimized through the context of punitive pursuits arising from various social spheres, from different public institutions, legitimized by the Public Prosecutor1s Office, which operates the punitive response demanded by various sectors of society, by a Judiciary system that often believes that the imprisonment can be an efficient punitive resource, by a Military Police that acts under the logic of repression and violence. Also by the type of legal education offered in Law schools in the country, as well as by a large part of the media, which turns the incarceration into a show, and trivializes the imprisonment in exchange for the top in its audiences. Such factors have fueled the culture of mass incarceration as a solution to the problem of violence and obscure the debate over the expansion of public policies and the accountability of the State and its disregard for such reality.