Veredas Institute

Act towards reducing the number of pre-trial detentions in the Federal District and in Brazil and guaranteeing the human and civil rights of imprisoned people, based on the analyzes and on the coping alternatives underpinned on literature and successful experiences.

• Hold advocacy activities, such as workshops, meetings, deliberative dialogues and public hearings with the Executive, Legislative, and Judiciary to disseminate the analysis and the recommendations made; to gather social movements, local universities and free legal advisors networks.
• Characterize the problem – research documents in processes and interviews with key actors; organize a collective cartography workshop to build citizenship maps with people who went through pre-trial detention.
• Organize communication and campaigns, with the construction of an interactive platform with info graphics, videos, citizenship itinerary maps, research reports, intervention strategies and other data on the situation of pre-trial detention in the Federal District.
• Monitor information and research institutional documents and thematic database on the subject in search of complementing the analysis and intervention strategies; systematizing intervention strategies.

The Federal District is a territory where the invisibility of academic production on the local reality persists. This is a territory where key actors of the Executive, the Legislative and the Federal Judiciary are found, and it is possible to reach national scope in advocacy activities. In 2017, the National Justice Council (CNJ) found that 21.2% of inmates in the Federal District are provisional, with an average prison term of 270 days. According to Infopen (2014), the imprisonment of young Blacks is extremely marked in the DF, representing 81.7% of prisoners, well above the national average (61.7%). Since 2014, the DF has one of the highest incarceration rates in the country, at the time with about 500 prisoners/100 thousand inhabitants. According to Geopresidios, there is a concentration of pre-trial detainees in the Provisional Detention Center of the Federal District, with almost three thousand pre-trial detainees, and it is currently overcrowded with an occupancy rate of 218% of vacancies. The DF Women’s Penitentiary now has 182 provisional prisoners and, according to the report of the National Mechanism for Preventing and Fighting Torture in 2015, the establishment did not comply with the separation of pre-trial detainees from the ones who had already been convicted, it restricted the access to telephone communication and promoted other forms of aggression and violation of rights. The National Justice Council registered 14,585 custody hearings held in the Federal District since 2015, with 48.42% of pre-trial detentions, which contrasts with the exceptional character of this measure.

The Veredas Institute’s mission is to build bridges between public management, academia, and civil society, so that technical and scientific knowledge can be used to improve Brazilian public policies. With this, we are convinced that our public policies can become more efficient, effective and democratic, promoting rights and guaranteeing good living conditions for all Brazilians and Brazilians. The institute is a non-profit organization, composed of professionals with experience in public management and scholars, who believe that the Brazilian State is able to transform our society, but that many times great opportunities are lost due to the difficult access and transfer academic knowledge into practice.

Informed Evidence Policy Network.
Brazilian Forum of Public Security.