07/02/2024 – 14:39
Four punitive proposals are currently being processed in the Federal Senate to amend the Penal Code and toughen penalties for inmates or leaders of criminal organizations, change prison administration and eliminate the semi-open prison regime. All of the matters – two bills, one supplementary bill and one Proposed Amendment to the Constitution (PEC) – were authored by Senator Margareth Buzetti (PSD-MT).
Distributed to the Public Security Committee or the House’s Constitution, Justice and Citizenship Committee, three of the proposals already have a rapporteur and are waiting to be included in the session agendas.
The most controversial issue is the one that aims to end semi-open prison. The regime allows prisoners to spend part of the day outside of prison, to work or study, and then return to their cell to spend the night in prison.
The senator proposes that there should only be two types of regime, closed and open, and justifies that the return of inmates after “supposedly”, according to her, completing a work or study routine, generates expenses for the State.
“What is the social gain in this daytime release, without supervision, which entails costs with nighttime accommodation and state control? We understand in advance that there are no tangible benefits that compensate for the costs of this stage of serving the sentence. The releases of inmates are not properly monitored and the State has no control over its actions”, questions the senator in the proposal.
In the national debate on the subject, the position of public security experts is well-known, arguing that releases and sentence progression are resocialization tools, important for preparing prisoners to return to society.
The issue came to the fore with the discussion of the bill that ended the “saidinhas” (small releases) – the temporary releases previously allowed to semi-open regime prisoners, with good behavior, to visit their families on commemorative dates.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) partially vetoed the law approved by the Senate, but the senators overturned the veto and the original proposal, which was reported by the current Secretary of Public Security of São Paulo, Guilherme Derrite (PL-SP), was approved. Now, prisoners can only leave prison to study.
Another proposal by the senator is to give the States the power to legislate on specific issues relating to prisons and penalties, and the PEC that removes from the Union the duty to legislate on penitentiary matters, passing the responsibility also to the States.
“We are convinced that part of the chaos we are currently experiencing in public security is based on the undeniable centralization of criminal and procedural jurisdiction in the hands of the Union, a federated entity that, ultimately, is not responsible for managing public security in member states,” says the project, which does not present data or studies that corroborate the thesis.
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