THE rampage lasted 17 hours. By the end of it, 56 inmates of the Anísio Jobim prison complex in Manaus, a city set amid the Amazon rainforest, were dead. Many had been decapitated; severed arms and legs were stacked by the entrance to the jail, known to most as Compaj, a contraction of its full name. Luís Carlos Valois, a judge who negotiated an end to the violence on January 2nd, called the hellish scene “Dantesque”. It was Brazil’s bloodiest prison riot in a quarter-century.
Only the death toll makes the carnage at Compaj stand out. Brazil’s prisons erupt often. Last year 18 inmates died in clashes between gangs at prisons in the northern states of Roraima and Rondônia. In Pernambuco, a north-eastern state whose prisons are overstuffed even by Brazilian standards, violent deaths are a frequent occurrence. In January 2016, 93 prisoners broke out of two of the state’s jails.
Prisons are both hellholes and headquarters for Brazil’s most powerful criminal gangs. The country’s prison population of 622,000, the world’s fourth-largest, is crammed into jails built to hold 372,000 inmates. Compaj houses 2,200, nearly four times its...Continue reading
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