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The Washington Post
Opinion: Brazil’s racist wave of mass incarceration
Fausto Salvadori is a reporter for the news site Ponte Jornalismo in Brazil.
A few days ago, my son-in-law told me that he was on a walk with my daughter and grandson in the center of São Paulo, the most populous city in Brazil, when a group of police officers approached them. My 2-year-old grandson didn’t understand why the officers were pointing a gun at his father. I am 40 years older than him, and I don’t understand it either, much less accept it, although I know that situations like this are frequent in Brazil. Unlike my son-in-law, I don’t usually go through this. But I’m White. He’s Black.
In a country that for so long has lied to itself by asserting that it is a “racial democracy”, I can say that the police have rarely approached me on the street, but my son-in-law says that at one point, he was accosted 20 times in a single year. This situation represents a real lethal threat for Black people: They constitute 56 percent of Brazilians but account for 79 percent of those killed by the police. There’s also the fear of being detained; 67 percent of the prison population is Black.
The Anti-Drug Act, approved in 2006, accelerated a mass incarceration process that mainly affects Black and poor people and that the Brazilian government had been promoting since the 1990s. Following this law, the number of people incarcerated for drug crimes increased by 156 percent, according to research by Una guerra adictiva. Now, 1 in 3 prisoners is in jail because of this law. In the case of women, that percentage is over 60. This kind of incarceration – carried out in the name of the War on Drugs – is part of the reason Brazil is the country with the third-largest prison population globally. With about 750,000 inmates, it’s behind only the United States and China.
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