Adults in the Brazilian Prison System

Brazil has the world’s third-largest population of incarcerated adults, and this text seeks to provide an overview of prisons in that country. With this in mind, we trace out the history of changes to prison policies during the previous decades, highlighting the main social processes that have driven the rapid rise in incarceration rates in the country. During this process, the increase in incarceration has been accompanied by degradation in prisoners’ living conditions, difficulties in implementing effective policies, and the emergence of organized prisoner groups. These phenomena have resulted in recent years in a number of serious human rights violations inside Brazilian prisons that continue to pose a challenge to democracy in the country.