Brazil’s prison system under scrutiny after high-profile escape

A prison break at a federal maximum security prison in Brazil’s Northeast has gripped the country and caused a major headache for the Justice Ministry, only weeks since former Supreme Court Justice Ricardo Lewandowski took charge of the department. 

The escape, the first of its kind since Brazil introduced federal penitentiaries in 2006, has sparked a broader debate about the country’s prison system as a whole.

In the early hours of last Wednesday morning, Rogério “Tatu” da Silva Mendonça, 36, and Deibson “Deisinho” Cabral Nascimento, 34, managed to escape from the federal prison of Mossoró, in the northeastern state of Rio Grande do Norte. Investigators say that the two men are linked to the Rio de Janeiro-based Red Command criminal organization, and they remain at large.

The latest hypothesis is that the two men escaped through the ceiling of their cells, before making their way to the prison roof and proceeding to cut through the fences separating them from the outside world. 

Justice Minister Lewandowski claims that problems in the prison’s design facilitated the escape, and there is some suspicion that guards may have been co-opted to turn a blind eye to the breakout.

The backfiring of the federal prison system

Brazil’s federal prison system was first implemented in 2006, with the construction of the Catanduvas maximum security facility in the southern state of Paraná. The Mossoró prison was inaugurated in 2009 and has the capacity to hold up to 208 prisoners.

The idea behind creating federal prisons was to isolate and break up leaders of major criminal organizations such as the Red Command and the First Command of the Capital (PCC), which were growing in size and influence at the time. Leaders of these groups were transferred away from state prisons in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo — where they held...