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The
question has been repeated exhaustively in the broadcasted news of TV
Globo on Monday, december 9th. It was the repercussion
of the images – “the images that resume an absurd” – filmed
you can’t know how and shown by the programme “Fantastic” the
previous day, under the title “Drug Shopping in Bangu IV”.
The
responsible for the “report” – perhaps with his small camera
hidden in a pocket – would say that an image is worthwhile a
thousand words. Yet, the Fantastic did not avoid to attribuite ia a
meaning: “the criminals feel at home”; “they smile all around”;
“wherever glances, will conclude those men are in a club, enjoying a
holiday or in a summer vacation”.
The
frech sociologist Loic Wacquant saw it on a close examination. The
author of “Prisions of Misery”, “The convicts of the city” and
“Punishing the poor – the new administration of misery in the
USA” visited the prision Hélio Gomes, in Rio de Janeiro, in 2001,
and warned “it is very easy to say the prisioners deserve all that,
but any brazilian person, watching that reality closely, will be
ashamed of it. No one deserves such fate. The prisons are hell where
human beeing live”.
From
penal colony to “vacation colony”: the house policy of the late
capitalism.
In
a report of 1998 entitled “Brazil behind bars”, the Human Rights
Watch” describes the general conditions of the places where,
according to TV Globo, “the criminals feel at home”: “the
brazilian prisioners are generally forced to menain in terrible
conditions of living in the prisons, jails and police headquarters. As
they are overcrowded, many of them sleeps on the fllor of their cells,
sometimes in the bathroom, near by the sewage hole. In the most
overcrowded establishiments, where there is no free place not even in
the floor, prisoners sleep tied up to the bars of the cells or hanging
on nets. The greater part of penal establishments have a deteriorated
physical structure, some very seriously”.
The
report presented a daily view of the prisoners, in whose overcrowded
cells there is plenty of “dirt, stinking odours, rats and insects”,
among other incoveniences of the “vacation colony”. In the item
“light, ventilation and temperature”, it is reported the death for
heat of two prisoners in Rio de Janeiro, because the prisons “become
incredibly hot during the summer, due to the combination of high
degrees of temperature and overcrowded cells”.
Still
according to the Human Rights Watch, brazilian prisons don’t follow
minimum rules as the guarantee of an individual bed and clean bed
clothes, sanitary installations are not in accordance with
international rules and the violent living with jailers and among the
own prisoners does not remember exactly moments of peace and quietness
of a “vacation day”; but of a daily routine marked by incessant
fighting for survival, sanity and the minimum of dignity that rests to
the so called “prision population” – if we admit the task for
more and more prisons constitutes the real house policy of the late
capitalism, as Loic Wacquant pointed.
“Brazil
behind bars” won a distinction in the mass media when it was
released. The newspaper O Globo, that reafirms in its editorial
of Monday the comparison with the “vacation colony” broadcasted on
Sunday by the TV Globo, presented on december 16th,
1998, “Report denounces practice of torture and executions in
prisons of the country”.
Laughing
of what?
The
“report” of Fantastic ends saying that “that’s how they
go on living: smilling and unpunished”. Unpunished? A few times
polite and well-paid journalists seemed not to know what they said
about the “punished and badly-paid” quite well imprisoned.
Or
maybe there’s a campaign to include the “criminal” smile in the
category of hideous crimes. Nothing bad. And then we would have some
more time in prison for Fernandinho Beira-Mar and Celsinho da Vila
Vintém – who are contumacious all smiles.
Yet,
the punishment of the street vendor charged of killing a city police
officer in Rio de Janeiro downtown would be aggravated, for the legend
of the photo published in O Globo of december, 6th
said he smiled as he looked to the policeman who had arrested him,
although the photo showed clearly that the policeman the street vendor
was not looking at. But, it is true, it is true, he was smiling.
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