By Patrica Rey Mallen
IB Times
BRAZIL — Brazil’s incarcerated population, the fourth-largest in the world, grows more numerous every year – which means the prisons are running out of space. There are currently 548,000 inmates piled up in 340,000 places in the whole of the country, and the solution being discussed is to turn the prisons over to private hands.
Three state governments have already hired private contractors to manage their prisons. The next one on the list is the state of São Paulo, the economic hub of the country and its most developed state. State governor Geraldo Alckmin announced the construction of three new prisons, each of them with capacity for 10,500 inmates in both closed (the inmate never leaves the premises) and semi-open regime (inmates only sleep in the premises).
The federal government’s model is public-private management, meaning that the concession to the private management company will be temporary – in São Paulo, the expectation is for the contracts to run for 27 to 33 years. But even if it would only be temporary, the idea of hiring a private company to manage the penitentiaries has been very contested, even by the Council of Political and Criminal Politics, which believes managing prisons should be exclusive competence of the government.
Full story: Brazil’s Growing Inmate Population Might Require The Privatization Of Prisons