The Rebirth of the Prison in Brazil: Christianity, Identity, and the Politics of Rehabilitation and Punishment

By MC

Abstract

Home today to the fourth largest prison population in the world, Brazil’s penitentiary system has historically relied on religious assistance to provide resources denied by the State. A recent phenomenon that has caught the interest of scholars is the growing influence of evangelical actors in criminal justice, through both their social assistance programs in penitentiaries and in their militância for public security and new moral codes at the level of state and federal legislatures. Behind this new development lies a history of a complicated relationship between church and state in Brazil and centuries of religious institutions’ involvement in the nation’s penal practice – both at the legislative level and inside prisons. This paper seeks to trace the influence of religion in the nation’s penal codes and explores the ways religious institutions have played roles of both resistance and complicity to the state’ efforts to enforce mechanisms of social control throughout the nation’s history.

Keywords:

Brazil, 20th and 21st century, religion, politics

Imprisonment first became the standard form of punishment in Brazil in 1830 with the signing of its first Penal Code. While code entrusted local governments with the task to build new penitentiaries based on ideas of crime and rehabilitation through surveillance, isolation, and labor coming from Europe and the United States, by the declaration of the Republic in 1889, only four prisons following the Auburn model had been built, enough to house no more than few hundred detainees in all. Towards the end of the 19th century, rapid urbanization and vagrancy laws that criminalized desprotegidos (unmarried men without jobs or fixed residence) had resulted in a spike in arrests, leading to massive overcrowding and deplorable conditions in prisons and putting pressure on the state to find alternative means to control a rapidly growing urban, freed, migrant, and wage-laborer population. In “Conscription versus Penal Servitude,” Peter Beattie details how the Brazilian government turned to army conscription for less-serious offenders and penal colonies to circumvent this issue. This is just one example of a recurring trend of mismatched law and reality in Brazilian penal practice. Today, Brazil is home to the fourth largest population in the world, and its prison conditions couldn’t be further away from the rights granted to inmates in the 1988 Constitution. Studies looking at Latin America-wide trends of mass incarceration, overcrowding, and carceral self-governance, identify a “new punitiveness” under neoliberalism, where – much like the case of the desprotegidos in Beattie’s piece – prisons become mechanisms to shut away those deemed unproductive to society. As state negligence led to chaos and mismanagement, the task of enforcing control has thus been transferred to the hands of non-state actors. Starting with the Leis do Império of 1850, which ordained the presence of a Catholic chaplain in all penitentiaries, religious institutions (notably the Catholic Church) have consistently held privileged positions in carceral spaces. The 1934, 1967, and 1988 constitutions, as well as the Lei de Execução Penal of 1984, all ensure the provision of religious assistance to inmates. , The 1988 constitution even frames it as a human right. But while these provisions are derived from a secular state’s commitment to religious freedom (at least for Christians), religious actors in Brazilian prisons have done much more than just service individual inmates’ religious self-expression, to the point of transforming social and political relations inside and outside. As the state consistently failed to ensure proper living conditions, prisons have relied on religious assistance for essential social, educational, material, and legal services. Beyond their philanthropic roles, by developing personal relationships with inmates, working with their families, and more recently, by inserting themselves into state and federal legislatures, religious actors have also been crucial in shaping outside society’s understanding of carceral spaces and crime. If we are to understand penal practice in Brazil, it is impossible to ignore the historic role of religion in penitentiaries. Using a historical approach, this paper argues that by offering inmates support and a means of survival, religious institutions have been central agents in the enforcement of social control in prisons. Despite the formal separation of church and state in 1890, Brazil’s Catholic origins ensured that religious thought would form the crucial moral and philosophical basis upon which the modern Brazilian state’s laws and criminal code would be built. In the Birth of the Asylum, David Rothman identifies western society’s construction of crime as one based on conceptions of sin. As a result, the way to deal with crime would be framed in the language of penance and spiritual rehabilitation, best exemplified by the Philadelphia and Auburn prison models, which sought to rehabilitate criminals via isolation from society, silent reflection, and labor. In “Moral e Religião o Código Criminal Imperial,” Luciana Rocha Pinto argues that in Brazil, the fact that both the Catholic Church and the state use similar mechanisms to enforce submission and individual control is not coincidental. One informs the other. She illustrates this by drawing comparisons between the church’s claim to truth and its mission towards salvation and the state’s civilizing mission via law. As the rhetoric of religious institutions in prisons intertwines laws policing individual behavior with Biblical commandments, the idea of “paying one’s debt to society” with the language of redemption, prisons become fertile ground through which religious actors, in the name of a higher power, enforce social control, sometimes with, other times against, and often despite the State. End of the World in the Suburbs The first religious actors in prisons came in the figure of the chaplain. According to reports from the Casa de Correção in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s first panopticon-style penitentiary, the role of the chaplain was to be understood as one of a “spiritual doctor,” working with the state to heal and rehabilitate sick, criminal souls. Beyond conducting mass and other religious services, the chaplain also took an educational role, teaching subjects such as grammar and arithmetic to inmates. With the official separation of church and state in 1890, religious actors beyond the chaplaincy, notably Catholic congregations, started entering penitentiaries. Congregations were religious organizations whose members had taken vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Rejecting the social isolation promoted by monasteries and convents, congregations directed their activities towards offering social assistance and operating schools, orphanages, hospitals, and penitentiaries. Their expansion throughout Europe and Latin America in the 19th century came as a response to the secularization of states, the birth of the welfare state, increased migration and urbanization (which called for more missionary work), and a growing scrutiny of traditional Catholic institutions associated with the monarchy. In this, congregations were a means through which the Catholic Church was able to remain politically active. Brazil’s first women’s prisons, notably the Presídio de Mulheres do Estado de São Paulo and the Presídio Feminino de Tremembé, were entirely run by the Congregação da Nossa Senhora da Caridade do Bom Pastor de Angers, a French congregation with branches in the U.S., Latin America, and French Colonies. Handing Bom Pastor the authority over women’s prisons was an intentional move of Vargas’ Estado Novo, which was interested in maintaining a corporativist relationship with the Catholic church. In tandem with the rhetoric of reformers and criminologists behind the Eastern State Penitentiary, the Congregação da Nossa Senhora sought to promote discipline and “moral reform” via silence, isolation, constant surveillance, and manual labor. Beyond just criminals, these female inmates were seen as almas perdidas in need of salvation. This was enforced by the domestic nature of the forced labor and the way they framed the relationship between sisters and inmates as that of a parent and child. Historian Angela Teixeira Artur also argues that Bom Pastor’s work in prisons was part of a larger project: “A partir daqui já fica evidente que a reforma moral e o resgate de almas de mulheres e meninas para Deus se tornaram subterfúgios legitimadores de um projeto bem maior: a consolidação e ampliação do próprio Instituto do Bom Pastor.”

End of the World in the Suburbs

The reforms presented in the Second Vatican Council in 1965 and the Latin American Episcopal Conference (CELAM) in Medellin in 1968 and the subsequent birth of Liberation theology, a Latin American branch of Catholicism that combined Christian theology with Marxist socio-political thought, marked another important shift in the catholic church’s work in penitentiaries. With the objective of offering social assistance to what they saw as the most marginalized members of society, in the 1970s nuns, priests, and other volunteers began advocating for prisoners’ rights and offering social, material, and legal services in prisons, this time as outside and non-state affiliated actors. Their activities ranged from running religious and recreational activities, offering educational services, and visiting inmates’ families. By the 1980s, sisters and priests working at the Casa de Detenção in São Paulo had mobilized to form a more centralized structure, the Pastoral Carcerária (PCr), which become an official branch of the Conferência Nacional dos Bispos do Brasil (CNBB) in 1986. As opposed to the logic of penance embraced by Bom Pastor and the emphasis on spiritual healing promoted by the chaplaincy, the PCr cites Christ’s divine mercy as its leading philosophy, positioning itself by prisoners and against the state. Beyond its direct work with inmates, the PCr is a vocal advocate for inmates’ rights, denouncing human rights violations in prisons and campaigning for abolition and restorative justice. The PCr remains active in prisons to this day. With the growth of prison populations in the 80s and 90s, the demand for religious assistance such as those provided by the PCr also increased. In Religion and Politics in Latin America: The Catholic Church in Venezuela & Colombia, Daniel H. Levine highlights how belief systems and religion, like all institutions, are constantly evolving and responding to changes in society. The end of the military dictatorship, the rise of mass incarceration policies, and the explosive growth of evangelicism starting in the late 80s is an extreme example of such. The Constituição Cidadã, known for its highly progressive, rights-based approach, was passed in 1988. One year later, the Washington Consensus, a package of neoliberal policies proposed by the IMF to revitalize depressed Latin American economies, was signed. This ushered in a new phase in Brazil’s socio-economic and political fabric, where citizens were granted ample civil and political rights, but via growing inequality and the deterioration of living conditions in urban periferias, denied access to social rights such as health and education. This change, combined with a war on drugs that increased policing in favelas and explicitly targeted young, black men, resulted in an explosion in prison populations. Overcrowding and state negligence saw deteriorating prison conditions, and in a struggle for survival, prisoners began organizing among themselves, consolidating into factions such as the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) and the Comando Vermelho (CV), developing their own sets of administrative and behavioral rules. These decades also saw a massive religious upheaval. While evangelical missionaries from Europe and the United States had been actively proselytizing in Brazil since the early 19th century, it was only until the 1980s that evangelical, notably Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal sects, began experiencing significant growth. In a setting of urban violence, poverty and government negligence, evangelical churches – which could be quickly set up in any warehouse – became a source of community and assistance. Between 2000 and 2013, membership in the Catholic Church fell by nearly 25% as evangelicals grew from 15,4% to about 28% of the population (19% of which are Pentecostal). The growing presence of evangelical actors was not only felt in favelas, but also in prisons, who were increasingly relying on religious assistance to ensure services and basic living conditions. A study conducted in prisons in Rio de Janeiro in 2002 showed that about 41% of the religious institutions in these prisons belonged to either the Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus (IURD) or the Assembléia de Deus (AD), as opposed to catholic institutions (at 19%), a significant disparity given the relative size of the catholic vs. protestant churches in Brazil in 2002. While both catholic and protestant groups place a strong emphasis on assisting inmates’ families, treating the familial unit as an important means towards resocialization, deep doctrinal and methodological disagreements exist between the two. While Catholic actors such as the PCr direct their efforts to improve inmates’ living conditions, seeing that as a means towards spiritual transformation, evangelical actors take the opposite approach, focusing on individual inmates’ spiritual conversion as a means towards social change. While catholic activists focus on providing legal counsel and holding the State accountable, evangelical actors focus on proselytization. The entrance of evangelical actors with this goal was welcomed by prison administrators desperate to impose some sort of order, given that a “preso convertido é preso mais calmo.” Evangelical services in prisons are also characterized by rituals such as testemunhos, where inmates get to share their own personal stories of conversion, and exorcisões, where inmates crimes’ are attributed to demons that can be exorcised. These rituals create a sense of inclusion and community, allowing individuals to create new identities by distancing themselves from their past, criminal selves and see themselves as “liberated through faith.” Here, sin and crime are seen as one and the same, adding cosmic stakes to the state’s enforcement of criminal justice. Participating in these activities has also been a large source of empowerment for inmates. In “Católicos e Evangélicos em prisões do Rio de Janeiro,” Edileuza Santana Lobo, identifies a hierarchy that inmates can climb through participating in Bible studies, leading meetings, and being active “multipliers of faith.” This has allowed inmates to take the term “religious assistance” into their own hands, creating their own groups and in time, forming a “Terceira-via,” which alludes to the prison’s divisions between opposing factions. In some prisons, converted prisoners are allowed to be physically segregated into “evangelical cells,” each of which has its own hierarchy of leaders who lead worship, provide bible studies, and manage finances. While many conversions are earnest, it is also worth highlighting that membership in this “Terceira-via” is also a tactic of survival for inmates, for it becomes a source of protection from violence. One important aspect of evangelical doctrine is the ongoing battle between God and Satan that takes place in all aspects of life, including in one’s most personal thoughts. As a result, conversion entails the adhesion to a strict set of rules and “bodily regimes,” that regulate dress codes, ways of speaking, sex, and drug use. Always in the lookout for demons, the task of policing others’ behaviors thus falls onto the entire community, or in the case of prisons, the evangelical cell members. Under this light, the “Terceira-via” begins to behave a lot like the social norms enforced by prison factions, as described by Dias and Salla in “Formal and Informal Controls and Punishment.” Framing crime as an individual, spiritual issue and controlling inmate behavior through strict moral codes, makes the evangelical narrative a very convenient one for Brazil’s new, neoliberal punitiveness. Outside of prisons, this narrative has also reached state and federal legislatures. The growing influence of evangelical, mainly Pentecostal, leaders in Congress (best exemplified by the bancada evangélica), in state governments, and in Bolsonaro’s cabinet has brought their agenda based on “family values” to the national debate. Their moralistic, anti-drug politics and their understanding of violence and corruption as symptoms of individual moral failure has made them strong allies for politicians advocating for greater policing and punishment in response to growing concerns of public safety in a country stuck in a deep political and economic crisis. Since entering office in 2018, these politicians (ex. Wilson Witzel and João Dória), have adopted policies that follow examples set by the United States’ criminal justice model. This evangelical wave in prisons is not exclusive to Brazil. Scholars Chris Garces and Luis Duno-Gottberg identify similar instances of evangelical prisoner self-governance in Ecuador and Venezuela. Much like what happens in Brazil, they argue that these configurations are convenient for the state by filling in a resource and power vacuum without directly challenging it. , As the influence of evangelical churches continues to grow throughout Latin America and as prisons conditions continue to deteriorate, the ways democratic governments will balance religiously-backed policies of punitiveness with the pressing need to reform prisons is yet to be determined.