Abstract
This paper is about a situation that perhaps represents one of the most radical and profound challenges to the reality of the consensus that contemporaneous western societies – and Brazilian society in particular – claim they share regarding the equality and essential or ontological dignity of mankind. It is an attempt to investigate how Brazilian society, immersed in a context of fear as a result of urban violence, deals with its prison population. This paper examines some possible explanations for the ongoing, generalized, serious and practically institutionalized violation of the fundamental rights of prison inmates in Brazil. This situation of fact easily leads one to conclude that inmates in Brazil are not treated like human beings (and are probably not even considered human beings). Considering that neither the principle of human dignity nor the actions of the Brazilian legal system have been able to change the scenario that has built up in recent decades, perhaps it would be useful – to start a forum of discussion of this topic – to suggest that inhumane treatment of inmates is not just a problem restricted to prisons: society as a whole receives the effects of this policy in the form of more violence.
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