Lockdown Read online

  The support sectors were located on the ground floor of the pavilions: electricity, hydraulics, a medical room, Incarceration (where the prisoners’ files were kept), a school and chapels. There were no computers on desks, just typewriters. Employees would sit at them, assisted by teams of inmates who worked in admin. There was invariably a blackboard on the wall showing the pavilion’s numerical data. The pace of transfers and releases was intense.

  The population of the Casa de Detenção fluctuated: approximately three thousand men were released or transferred annually. Originally built to house only remand prisoners awaiting trial, it had become a general prison. Criminals sentenced to over a hundred years did time alongside petty thieves who were in for a few months.

  The Pavilions

  Although the external architecture of the pavilions was similar, their internal divisions and human geography were very different. Those arriving in Divinéia from the street found themselves facing Pavilion Six, in the middle. On the left were pavilions Two, Five and Eight, while opposite them, on the right, were Four, Seven and Nine.

  Pavilion Two

  This was where prisoners had their induction to prison life. It housed 800 prisoners, who worked in administration: general administration, Incarceration, the loudspeaker service and the staff cafeteria. In addition to the support sectors, operating on the ground floor of Two were a tailor’s, a barber’s, a photographer’s, a clothes deposit and ‘labour therapy’, which dealt with sentence reductions for the inmates who worked (for every three days of work, sentences were reduced by one).

  When prisoners arrived at the Casa de Detenção, they would climb out of the police van in Divinéia and be sent straight to General Control in Pavilion Two, where they were registered, photographed and distributed among the pavilions.

  It was in the inner courtyard of Two that the arrival ritual took place: after registering, prisoners were made to strip down to their underwear in front of everyone and leave their clothes in the deposit. They were given a pair of beige trousers and a bowl cut, their first and last free haircut in prison. It really did look like someone had placed a bowl on their heads and shaved everything from there down. It gave them a rough look, especially in the case of older prisoners.

  Thus depersonalised, newcomers were taken to Distribution Cell One, on the ground floor, a four-by-eight-metre cell, which was often overflowing depending on the intake of prisoners on any given day. The next day they were taken to Distribution Cell Two, on the third floor, where they waited to be allocated to a pavilion, which had to be done by one of the three directors: the director general, the director of correctional services or the director of security. Kept closed twenty-four hours a day, Distribution Cell Two could hold sixty, seventy or even eighty men at a time, depending on the number of new entries.

  When there were rebellions at local police lock-ups, fifty or more prisoners could be brought in at once. In one such incident, 200 prisoners were transferred to the Casa. The staff used to say: ‘It’s worse in here than a mother’s heart – there’s always room for more.’

  Or, in a more prosaic vision: ‘The city sewer dumps its contents here.’

  During distribution, the director would address groups of ten to fifteen men who, hands held respectfully behind their backs, would listen to the rules of the house:

  You have come to the São Paulo Casa de Detenção to pay a debt to society. This is not your grandma’s or auntie’s place; it’s the biggest prison in Latin America. Those who are humble and disciplined can count on the staff to help them leave here the way we like them to: through the front door, with their families waiting. However, the man who comes here insisting he belongs to the world of crime, with blood in his eyes, if he doesn’t leave in the Institute of Forensic Medicine morgue car, he can be sure that we’re going to do everything in our power to make his life difficult. We’re in the habit of forgetting people like that in here.

  Special attention was paid to the safety of newcomers. Security director Jesus had a particular way of dealing with the problem: ‘If, perhaps, one of you gentlemen finds himself with social difficulties in one of the pavilions, don’t be shy; you can pour your heart out to me. Let us help you now, before your enemies do.’

  Then, one by one, to be sure of the nature of the crime for which each prisoner was convicted, and anticipating the invariable denial of guilt, he would ask seriously, ‘What is the crime they say you committed?’

  The distribution criteria weren’t rigid, but they did obey some basic rules. For example, rapists were normally sent to Pavilion Five; repeat offenders to Eight; first-timers to Nine; and the extremely rare prisoners with university degrees got private cells in Pavilion Four.

  In distribution, many would ask to remain in Two itself. Due to the availability of work and perhaps because it was located at the front of the prison, closer to administration, the pavilion was renowned for being calm: ‘It’s easier to focus on getting out.’

  Pavilion Four

  Pavilion Four was located on the other side, opposite Two. It held less than four hundred inmates, housed in individual cells, the only place in the prison where this occurred. During distribution, when newcomers asked to be sent to Four, the director would reply, ‘You don’t say! Even I’d like to live in Four, my boy.’

  It was originally designed for the exclusive use of the health department. The ground floor did, in fact, house the inmates with tuberculosis and the general infirmary operated on the fifth floor. However, due to the need to protect prisoners with a death warrant on their heads, administration had to create a special maximum-security sector on the ground floor, known as the ‘Dungeon’ – the worst place in the prison.

  The Dungeon faced the entrance to the pavilion. It was guarded by a heavy door, next to which was a sign warning that the entry of unauthorised persons was strictly prohibited. There were eight cells on one side of a dark gallery and six on the other, all stuffy and overcrowded. The number of inhabitants in the sector never dipped below fifty, with four or five in each cell, deprived of sunlight, locked up the entire time to escape the war cry of crime: ‘You’re going to die!’

  It was a lugubrious environment, infested with scabies, lice and cockroaches that climbed up through the drainpipes. During the night, grey rats scampered through the deserted gallery.

  The cell windows were sealed with a sheet of iron with tiny holes in it, stopping light from coming in. Due to the lack of ventilation, there was a strong stench of people crowded together and a phantasmagorical fog of cigarette smoke hung in the cell. Bathing required an act of contortionism under a pipe jutting out of the wall or with mugs of water from the tap over the sink.

  The Dungeon was inhabited by those who had lost all hope of living among their peers. There was no other place in the prison left for them; not even in the high security wings, such as ‘Yellow’ in Five, for example. They stayed locked away until the prison system bureaucrats decided to transfer them to another prison.

  Periodically, the name ‘Dungeon’ would attract the attention of the press and prisoners’ rights organisations and the Inspector General’s office would be obliged to carry out an inspection. On one such visit the director general, irritated by an inspector who was blaming him for the inhumane conditions in which the inhabitants of the wing were living, said, ‘Sir, I’m going to open each cell, one by one, and you can ask if anyone is willing to be moved from here to any other pavilion. If they agree, I’ll move everyone and close the sector in your presence.’

  After opening the second cell, the inspector understood that all of the men wanted to be sent to another prison, not another pavilion, but as long as that didn’t happen they refused to leave the Dungeon, as they felt safe there.

  On sunny days, in the courtyard of Four, visitors would see many inmates in rickety wheelchairs. They were almost always burglars who had been left paraplegic from shoot-outs, and they served their sentences in Four, where their urinary catheters and bedsores that would
n’t heal were tended to. In addition, they could use the pavilion’s lift, the only one still working in the prison. The paraplegics were treated with respect by companions who helped them with day-to-day tasks.

  On the second floor, there was a section of the gallery whose cells bore a card that read: ‘MP’, to identify the ‘mental patients’. The criteria for assigning such a label were uncertain, since there wasn’t a specialised psychiatry service in the prison. Some of the MPs arrived with serious behavioural disorders, while others began to display psychotic symptoms while in prison, trying to strangle a fellow prisoner without provocation, attempting suicide, falling into deep depression or destroying their brains by smoking crack.

  Genival, one of the inhabitants of this sector, said he had lost his mind because of the vision of a man he had killed in a robbery: ‘When night fell, his lost soul would come to haunt me, on the stairs, in the gallery and even in the locked cell. I tried to commit suicide twice to escape the persecution.’

  Like in nineteenth-century insane asylums, the inmates spent their time isolated in their cells. They all received practically the same psychiatric medication.

  The lives of these prisoners would have been worse if it weren’t for the touching dedication of a converted Salvation Army pastor with wavy hair, serving a twelve-year sentence for crimes he said he had tried everything to forget, who for a long time headed up a group of helpers in charge of hygiene, medication and spoon-feeding those who couldn’t feed themselves.

  The lack of doctors specialised in psychiatric disorders left the door open for unprincipled inmates to fake psychiatric problems in order to take refuge among the MPs to avoid the retaliation of their enemies.

  According to Moustache, a man of character who lived in this pavilion for a long time, former leader of a gang of pirates in the port of Santos who was serving a 213-year sentence, ‘To get out of his own vile mess, he pretends he’s lost his mind and ends up in the middle of the MPs, in Four. Tomorrow he gets out and brags that he did time in the Casa, because he’s a villain through and through.’

  Some such individuals may have found punishment in the psychiatric medication they were prescribed, which impeded motor coordination and caused various neurological alterations, leading among other things to impregnation of the central nervous system, tremors and loss of sphincter control.

  For security reasons, the directors discreetly made Four the destination of certain rapists as well as contract killers who were generally hired by shop owners in lower-class neighbourhoods to kill local thieves. Because the pavilion was less populous and calmer, these inmates had a better chance of escaping the collective wrath. Their hidden presence, however, meant that the inmates in Four were regarded with mistrust: ‘Nobody knows who’s who in there.’

  Pavilion Five

  This was the pavilion in the worst state of repair. It had stairs with crumbling steps, electrical wires dangling from walls that were damp from leaks, puddles of water and burnt light bulbs in the galleries. The inmates wedged poles through the windows to dry clothes on. It looked like a slum.

  Five was the most densely crowded pavilion in the prison. Its corridors were intensely busy. At times, there wasn’t room for a single prisoner more. One thousand six hundred men lived there, triple the sensible number for an entire prison. The Casa had eight to ten warders watching over them during the day and five or six at night, sometimes less.

  On the ground floor, in addition to Incarceration, the medical room and a classroom with an impoverished library, was Solitary Confinement, a group of twenty cells that held four to ten men squeezed into each one. They were inmates who had been caught committing offences within the prison itself, such as carrying weapons, possession of alcohol, trafficking, disrespecting a staff member or planning to escape. They would do thirty days in these dark, humid cells, whose windows were covered with perforated metal sheets like those in the Dungeon. The bar on the door was hard and enduring and the thirty days were without sunlight.

  Lupércio, who was over eighty years old and had been in and out of the Casa for smoking and selling marijuana, said it was nothing:

  In the old days, they used to lock so many in a cell that the men had to take turns to sleep. Half of ‘em would stay standin’ – quietly so they wouldn’t wake up the others. They’d urinate when changin’ shifts. You couldn’t eat much, because you couldn’t have a bowel movement in the cell. Only on Wednesdays and Saturdays, when it was unlocked for an hour so you could shower and use the toilet. The punishment was ninety days, not the no-sweat thirty days they get now.

  On the second floor lived the cleaners, who took care of general cleaning and the distribution of meals, in addition to those who worked in the labour and legal departments, and delivering bags of food brought in during the week to those who were fortunate enough to be able to count on their families.

  The third floor was known as the floor of rapists and contract killers, although not all of its occupants belonged to these categories. Experience had taught that it was best to put the two groups together so they could protect one another in the event that the other prisoners, who abominated rapists and those who hunted thieves down, decided to take revenge.

  The fourth floor was the destination of those who were unable to get a better placement, who had been kicked out of other pavilions due to their failure to abide by the rules, or who had lost personal disputes, in addition to more rapists and contract killers. Most strikingly, however, this floor was where the transves-tites lived, with their silicone-inflated cheekbones, tight trousers and mincing walks. During the day, some would solicit at their cell doors.

  On the top floor, on the right, was the wing of the Assembly of God, the evangelical group with the strongest presence in the prison. You couldn’t miss them: they always wore proper shoes, never trainers; their long-sleeved shirts were buttoned up to the collar; and they all carried faded black bibles. They prayed day and night under the supervision of an energetic chief pastor and his helpers. It was a church and a rehab ilitation centre at the same time. On the left, adjacent to the born-again Christians, was Yellow, a high-security sector that was kept closed twenty-four hours a day. Those who had received death threats were sent there, along with a few unfortunate souls who simply didn’t have anywhere else to live. Yellow housed five to six hundred inmates, almost 10 per cent of the prison population, with at least six or seven men in each two-by-three-metre cell.

  Five was the pavilion of inmates with no family, the homeless and the destitute. Although men who were respected did time there, it was considered the pavilion of the rabble. I saw grown men cry like babies when they were transferred there.

  Because contract killers, rapists, informers and inmates who were in debt to others all rubbed shoulders in the local population, the residents of Five, aware of the danger they were in, needed to be ready to defend themselves. They could live in peace for years, but one day the prison might get turned upside-down and they could wind up on the tip of a knife. As the inmates used to say: ‘Here, anyone who’s made a cock-up in the world of crime lives on tenterhooks.’

  As a result, in addition to being the traditional producer of maria-louca, the clandestinely distilled firewater, Five was also considered the most heavily armed pavilion, and was often referred to as the prison’s ‘knife factory’.

  Pavilion Six

  Pavilion Six was located between Two and Four, in the centre of the complex. It held approximately three hundred prisoners.

  The general kitchen operated there until 1995, when it was deactivated and the Casa began to order in food for the prisoners. At night, the abandoned kitchen looked like the set of an expressionist film: enormous pressure cookers covered with dents, a potholed floor, loose wall tiles and leaks in the ceiling.

  On the second floor was a large auditorium, where we gave talks on AIDS prevention, sometimes to more than a thousand inmates at a time. A cinema used to function there until it was destroyed in a rebellion. Only the
big hall itself remained, with a raised wooden stage at the front.

  On the second and third floor of Six were the rooms used by administration: security correctional services, and the sports and legal departments.

  The cells began on the fourth floor. Two, three, five – as many as fifteen prisoners in each.

  On the fifth floor, a sector called PSM (Preventive Security Measure) was created as an alternative to the overcrowding in Yellow; however, due to the disruptive impact of crack on the prison’s internal order, once inaugurated the PSM filled up immediately.

  Visitors to Six would see groups of black men speaking a strange language. They were Nigerians speaking in their native dialect (although almost all of them spoke English and sometimes Portuguese, with strong accents). They were part of the Nigerian connection in cocaine trafficking, detained in Brazil and obliged to do time here.

  Ball-Sinker – a thief doing five years in Six, who had got $20,000 in a bank robbery, bought a grocery shop and given up crime as his wife had asked him to, and who six months later was forced to follow and kill two adolescents who had held up his shop so as not to lose face – shared the opinion of the majority about the Nigerians: ‘If you ask ‘em a question, they answer and keep it short; if you don’t ask, they keep to themselves. They aren’t villains, that lot. They’re adventurers – their business is trafficking. They don’t help or hinder thieves. They’re down-to-earth, good guys. We respect ‘em.’

  Pavilion Seven

  The cells of Seven held three to six men at most, and most of the inmates worked.

  Like in the other pavilions, the ground floor housed the bureaucratic departments, maintenance and labour, which organised work commissioned from outside the prison: inserting spirals in notebooks or elastic in box files, building miniature sailboats (an old tradition in Brazilian prisons), sewing footballs and other manual jobs.