Our
History

Together with other organizations, we pressured the National Congress to vote against the federal government’s “Anti-Crime Package”, which included several proposals to increase criminal penalties, impacting mainly the black and peripheral population. The campaign “Pacote Anticrime: uma solução fake” (in English, “Anti-Crime Package: A Fake Solution”) was widely mobilized and was an important milestone in the attempt to stop setbacks.

In February 2018, the STF granted collective Habeas Corpus to replace the pre-trial detention of pregnant women, mothers of children under 12 years old or people with disabilities with house arrest. The request was made by civil society organizations, including Instituto Terra, Trabalho e Cidadania (ITTC), a member of our network, and reinforces the necessity of applying a law in force since 2016, the Legal Framework for Early Childhood.

We launched the campaign “Encarceramento em Massa não é Justiça” (in English, Mass Incarceration is not Justice”) which, through virtual reality, denounces the overcrowding of Brazilian prisons. Currently there are more than 700 thousand people imprisoned for only 371 thousand vacancies. The action went around several Brazilian cities and the world, and was a finalist at the Cannes Lions Festival.

A law that prohibits women prisoners from being handcuffed during childbirth and the puerperium has come into force. The presence of pregnant women in prison should be absolutely exceptional – according to the Bangkok Rules, judges should prioritize alternative measures to incarceration for women, especially pregnant women and women with children up to 12 years old.

Custody hearings are the right that people arrested in the act have of being brought before a judge within 24 hours, a fundamental mechanism that ensures the legality of the arrest. Along with other organizations, we approved in the Senate the 554/11, which provides parliamentarians and society with technical arguments for the implementation of custody hearings.

The vexatious body search allows the genitals of people in custody and prison system visitors to be examined by state agents searching for illegal objects. After years of a historical struggle, a state law was approved in São Paulo along with a Federal Senate project, prohibiting the  vexatious body search. The Senate project, however, has not yet been approved by the House of Representatives. Even though several states already unauthorized the vexatious body search, its practice still exists. We continue working against this reality.

The National System for Prevention and Combat to Torture (SNPCT) was founded, as a result of an intense pressure from Brazilian social movements in order to strengthen prevention and fight against torture and other cruel treatment forms, especially in units of deprivation of liberty. The Social Justice Network has since then sought in their actions to strengthen the SNPCT.

The Rede Justiça Criminal has acted from the beginning so that deprivation of liberty is not the rule in the justice system, and was one of the forces that contributed to the insertion of the project in the legislative agenda and the approval of Law 12,403/2011, known as the Law of Precautionary Measures. Based on the principle of presumption of innocence, the law introduced several alternative precautionary measures for people under indictment to await their trial without being arrested.

With the mission of discussing the abusive use of pre-trial detention in the country, the Rede Justiça Criminal arises, as the result of the union of seven civil society organizations. Together, they fight for the strengthening of the Public Defender’s Office, for a more efficient management of the prison system (including the valorization of education and work), for measures for incarcerated women and former inmates, for the effectiveness of the external control of the prison system, data transparency and access to information, the incentive to alternative sentences and challenges of the Drug Law and Restorative Justice.