The government has reduced funding for new prisons by 85%.
Despite the critical situation of overcrowding, the federal government has reduced transfers to states for the construction of new prisons by 85% in two years and has also decreased resources for restructuring and modernizing existing ones; the country's prison system has accumulated a deficit of 250 places, according to the latest federal report, and its fragility was exposed with the death of 56 inmates in an overcrowded prison in Manaus between Sunday (1st) and Monday (2nd); attributed to a war between criminal factions, the massacre was the largest in prisons since Carandiru, in 1992.
247 - Despite the critical situation of overcrowding, the federal government has reduced transfers to states for the construction of new prisons by 85% in two years, and has also decreased resources for restructuring and modernizing existing ones. The country's prison system has accumulated a deficit of 250 places, according to the latest federal report, and its fragility was exposed with the death of 56 inmates in an overcrowded prison in Manaus between Sunday (1st) and Monday (2nd). Attributed to a war between criminal factions, the massacre was the largest in prisons since Carandiru, in 1992.
As information These are from Folha de S.Paulo.
"The Funpen (National Penitentiary Fund), linked to the Ministry of Justice, transferred R$ 111,5 million in 2014 to the program "Support for the Construction of Penal Establishments," used for the construction and expansion of state prisons, according to data from the federal budget."
The following year, the budget fell to R$ 12,6 million and, in 2016, throughout the governments of Dilma Rousseff (PT) and Michel Temer (PMDB), it stood at R$ 17 million. A single penitentiary for 847 inmates, inaugurated six months ago in the interior of São Paulo state, cost the state R$ 36 million.
According to data from Infopen, a system that records the number of prisoners, there were 622 prisoners in Brazil at the end of 2014, but only 372 available spaces.
In Amazonas, the occupancy rate was 259%, or one and a half times above capacity. The Anísio Jobim complex, the target of the massacre this week, had 1.224 men, compared to 454 available spaces.