CARE OR CRUELTY: A DISCUSSION ABOUT COVID-19 IN BRAZILIAN PRISONS

Abstract

When the new coronavirus pandemic emerged in 2020, one of the groups that most concerned health authorities and the scientific community was the incarcerated population. Our country's unsanitary prison conditions offered a potential risk for the pandemic in prisons to become a massacre of enormous proportions. However, the data between 2020, 2021, 2022 show that proportionately the prison population had much fewer deaths from COVID-19 (fatality rate of 0.43%) than the general Brazilian population (lethality of 1.91%), despite the condition of prisons has not changed substantively for the better. Based on the sociology of punishment and prison studies, we want to discuss the possible causes that resulted in these numbers. From the information provided by prison managers and inmates, in addition to articles published by the secretariats responsible for Brazilian prisons, we hypothesize that both the argument/dialogue of a series of actors and the measures taken were successful and prevented even worse pandemic consequences in prisons. The concern about the imminent disaster reinforced and promoted the commitment to the implementation and adherence to care that, on the other hand, also resulted in measures that restricted a series of inmates' rights.