CNJ launches Web site that reveals prison movement

06 April, 2011 - To house all prisoners in decent conditions, it would be necessary to create immediately in Brazil more than 90 000 places in prisons, public jails or police stations. This is one of the many data that the National Council of Justice enables us to obtain from the Prison Establishments web site, released on Monday, 4th April, in Brasilia. The deficit of 90 000 places was revealed through data sent to CNJ (National Council of Justice) by the judges responsible for each prison unit. The Council's web site with the data can be accessed through the link: http://www.cnj.jus.br/Presidios/pages/jsp/index.jsp

The data regarding to the conditions of Brazilian prisons has been collected by CNJ since 2008, under Resolution 47, December 2007, published by the Council. The rule requires that judges responsible for criminal enforcement make monthly inspections at the prison units of the country and send the data to CNJ.

"The data would arrive, but there was no analysis of the numbers," says Marcio Kepler judge responsible for the Department of Monitoring and System Prison Inspection. The idea of launching the site, according to him, is to enable easier analysis of data by society and authorities, in order to facilitate public policy projects related to prison population.

Kepler said during the launch that the data may be outdated and that the CNJ urged judges to provide all the update information within 30 days. In fact, at DC and the Amapá state, for example, some numbers are missing. In DC case, there isn't the total number of places and in relation to Amapá, nor the number of places, neither the number of prisoners.

About the other 25 other states in the country, it is possible to get this data in a quick navigation through the map of Brazil, which appears on the main screen of the site. From these data, one can verify that there's just over 390 000 people arrested in the country, or temporarily condemned, but only 300 thousand vacancies in prisons.

From the site, you can also get statistics on male and female prison population, the number of temporary prisoners, how many prisoners work in prisons and elsewhere, how many prisons are there by state, among many other numbers.

For example, in Piauí State, over 65% of prisoners are incarcerated temporarily. In five other states, between 50% and 65% of the prison population is provisional. In the other 26 states and DC, less than 0.05% are civilian detainees. In eight states, less than 5% of prisoners are studying. In 14 other states, they are less than 15%. Only in five states the percentage of the ones that study is greater than 15% but less than 40%.
The system also lists all the places where there are prisoners, whatever they are prisons, public jails, police units or psychiatric hospitals, and enables you to look up data for each of the prisons. Also shows the location of prisons, almost like a Google Maps.

Source: Ascom CNJ - Rodrigo Haidar

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