Covid-19 could ravage Brazilian prisons

When Covid-19 reached Brazilian favelas, we reported on the risks for low-income populations who live in poorly-urbanized, densely-populated areas, where social isolation is often an impossibility. But no area is potentially more favorable for the widespread transmission of the novel coronavirus as Brazilian prisons — once described by a former Justice Minister as “dungeons,” after he said he would rather die than spend a night in a Brazilian cell.

As of June 2019, Brazil had 750,000 inmates — 36 percent of them still in pre-trial detention — cramped in jails that have, combined, the capacity to house only 460,000 people.

Mass incarceration has exploded over the past 20 years. In 2000, the country had “only” 233,000 prisoners. This uncontrolled growth, without a significant enhancement of prison capacity, turned Brazilian prisons into breeding grounds for diseases and cesspools of human rights violations. A 2017 survey by the Health Ministry and the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation showed that the chance of a Brazilian inmate catching tuberculosis is 30 times greater than that of someone outside of the system.

HIV-Aids is another ghost that haunts the Brazilian prison population. The latest survey on the disease’s presence in prisons, dating back to 2015, shows that the incidence of the virus was 138 times higher than among the general population: 2,190 cases for every 100,000 inmates, against Brazil’s rate of 15.8 per 100,000.

This spread of disease is aggravated by the lack of adequate medical care within prisons. A survey by the National Council of the Prosecutor General’s Office found that 31 percent of Brazilian prisons have no minimum hospital infrastructure for prisoners....