After a recent prison riot that left a grizzly aftertaste for those who saw the pictures of the dismembered, beheaded and disemboweled prisoners in Brazil's Monte Cristo Agricultural Penitentiary in Boa Vista, the question that arises is: Why are Brazil's prisons so prone to violence?
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This is the second brutal attack in 2017 leading to the death of almost 90 people in the span of a week. In 2016, 372 inmates lost their lives, according to Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper. In the recent attack, 31 people were killed.
Overcrowded prisons and gang-violence have so far been cited as the main reasons for increasing violence in Brazil's prisons.
While in 2000, there were about 230,000 people incarcerated, the number has trebled to over 620,000 in 2014 as the country has taken a strong stance against violent and drug-related offences in recent years.
According to the World Prison Brief, Brazil's 1,424 detention centres are running at 157 percent of its capacity.
Apart from overcrowding, the prisons are also full of inmates from Brazil's two warring gangs Sao Paulo-based First Capital Command (PCC) and the Red Command (CV). So, any feud between the two gangs spills from the streets to inside the prison walls.
"We see that as soon as we have a gang war, these killings are inevitably going to happen because the state has no control over the prisons," Rafael Alcadipani, a public security expert at the Getulio Vargas Foundation think tank in Sao Paulo, told Reuters.
It also doesn't help that the prison system is short on staff and prisons. A single guard oversees 300 to 400 prisoners in some prisons in the South American country, leaving the gangs to self-regulate most of the time.
The recent spate of violence has been attributed to a breakdown in truce between the PCC and the CV.
As a result, "when the prisoners want to have an uprising, they have an uprising," Camila Dias, a sociologist at the Federal University of ABC in Sao Paulo and expert on Brazil's prison system told Reuters.
On January 1, as many as 56 prisoners were killed in gang violence between the two groups.
