Association of Friends and Families of Incarcerated People – AMPARAR (SP)

Strengthen the mobilizing role of Amparar as an association dedicated to offering social support, legal assistance and reference to the families of detainees.

• Providing assistance to the families of detainees who come to Amparar so that the cases are monitored and the reports sent to the institutional legal-assistance organs.
• Talk groups with family members, where they can exchange experiences, discuss common challenges and produce materials.
• Systematize and analyze the information collected during the visits.
• Organize a seminar on pre-trial detention and mass incarceration.
• Produce and disseminate informational material on pre-trial detention and mass incarceration.
• Register emblematic testimonies told by family members.
• Systematize service records.

In 2017 Brazil reached the number of 654,372 incarcerated people in prison, an increase of almost 600% in relation to the prison population of 1990. These numbers confirm the process of mass incarceration that places Brazil as the country with the fourth largest prison population. The same survey indicates that 34% of all prisoners in Brazil were not yet tried, and of the total number of pre-trial detainees, two-thirds were arrested for four types of crimes: drug trafficking, robbery, theft, and handling stolen goods. This massive increase in the number of incarcerated people also involves the prisons and Provisional Detention Centers (CDPs) of São Paulo, where the prison population can be twice or three times bigger than the actual number of available places in the units, according to the Secretariat of Administration State Penitentiary (SAP). The calamitous context of the public prisons and Brazilian prison institutions is an effect of the State policies that oppose the guarantee of human rights. In addition to mass incarceration, these policies are supported by Zero Tolerance projects, making prisons human deposits characterized by structural violence: overcrowding and precariousness, lack of medical and psychosocial care, inadequate food, lack of legal assistance, and cultural and educational activities; and by the practice of psychic/physical violence and torture. The prison acts as a mechanism to contain historically marginalized portions of the population. At the same time, pre-trial detention is a key element in understanding the phenomenon of mass incarceration in Brazil. The effects of prison violence are not restricted to detainees. It affects their families. These families are mostly composed by women (wives, mothers and sisters), who are subjected to society’s prejudice, the humiliation during visits and in their daily lives. We could say that they have been incarcerated with their loved ones, once they go through different types of rights violation, just as if they were in prison, such as hand searching and the need to pay high expenses and travel to visit their family members. Often, the suffering shared between family members and detainees is seen as normal, once it is already part of the daily scenario of residents of the peripheral areas of large cities.

The Association of Friends and Relatives of Prisoners (AMPARAR) aims at defending the human rights of incarcerated adolescents and adults and of those who have already left the prison system and their families. It also aims at supporting these people in the exercise of their citizenship.

Unified Black Movement
Uneafro:
Network of Resistance and Protection against the Black Genocide