After gaining control of the situation, the police forced prisoners to strip naked and summarily executed them. Many of the inmates were shot while trying to hide under their beds. Nine years after the fact, not a single officer has been convicted of participation in the killings. In economic terms, Brazil is one of the world's most deeply unequal societies, with vast disparities of wealth and poverty. The prisoner represents one extreme of an exclusionary social system.
Incarceration is the ultimate form of exclusion from society.
Brazil, in relying on this approach to handling societal ills, seems to be following the U.S. model, but without a similar commitment of resources. Brazil's inmate population has more than doubled in the past decade, rising from about 100,000 in 1990 to well over 220,000 now. Although new prisons have been built, the pace of prison construction has not kept up with the rise in inmate numbers. As in the United States, there is little political will to address prison abuses. Message Boards oanne Mariner, a FindLaw columnist, is deputy director of the Americas division of Human Rights Watch.