Civil Society Leaders Devise New Criminal Justice Reform Strategy in Brazil

Fifteen Brazilian civil society leaders and human rights activists met last month in São Paulo to devise new inroads on criminal justice reform in Brazil.  The Open Society Institute Global Criminal Justice Fund hosted the meeting of activists and academics from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo to determine a set of objectives that civil society, with modest donor support, could reasonably achieve over the next three to five years.

While aware of the challenges of criminal justice reform, activists at the session identified several areas of opportunity for new approaches to reform. Building on recent initiatives by the federal government's National Council on Justice (CNJ), which is showing some political will for change, leaders developed a set of strategic objectives which include:

• Taking emblematic cases to the courts
• Increasing public access to reliable data about those in detention
• Providing support to the state-level public defender's offices
• Advocating for accountability of government bodies charged with monitoring and oversight of the penitentiary system
• Reaching out to the media and the public to put a "human face" on the situation of those who fall through the cracks of the country's criminal justice system. 

Organizations in attendance:

• Conectas
• The Pro Bono Institute
• The Institute in Defense of the Right to Defense (IDDD)
• Instituto Sou da Paz, Justiça Global
• The Center for Studies on Public Security and Citizenship at the University Candido Mendes (CESeC)
• The Center for the Study of Violence at the University of São Paulo
• The International Bar Association's Human Rights Institute. 

Facing one of the highest crime rates in the world, the Brazilian public is largely in favor of "tough on crime" policies that often require prison sentences for minor offenses.  In the last five years, incarceration rates have more than doubled and Brazil's prisons are now 150% over capacity, holding nearly half a million people.  The head of the Corrections Department reported that almost 50 percent of prison inmates are in pre-trial detention and many wait for months to years without trial.