Carandiru Station

Drauzio Varella is an oncologist, trained at the University of São Paulo, known for decades of work fighting cancer. In 1989 he began going into the São Paulo House of Detention, Carandiru, as a volunteer, trying to slow an AIDS epidemic that was spreading fast among the inmates, at a time when the disease still killed almost everyone who caught it.

The original plan was to stay a short while, give a talk, put together a pamphlet, and go back to his usual office. That is not what happened: he ended up returning every week for more than a decade, until he became a kind of trusted doctor in a place that trusted no outsider.

This summary tells what he saw and heard in those years inside the cell block, without romanticizing or demonizing the people locked up there. It is the account of a middle-class man trying to understand a reality that most Brazilians only see from a distance, through the bars of a newspaper headline.

Carandiru was designed to hold about four thousand inmates and at one point had more than double that living within its walls. Each cell block worked almost like its own neighborhood, with its own daily schedule and its own way of organizing the line for showers and meals.

This overcrowding was not a background detail, it was the problem running through everything: cells meant for four inmates holding twice that, mattresses on the floor, lines for everything. The book shows that much of the tension inside the prison came straight from that math that never added up.

Even so, there was a recognizable routine: work in workshops, classes, visits on set days, lockdown time. In official documents, each inmate was recorded by the term "reeducando" (a bureaucratic label for someone serving a sentence), a language that contrasts with the informal way they talked to each other inside the cell block.

Inside the cell block there was a code of conduct that appeared in no official regulation, and that the inmates themselves enforced among each other. Debts incurred inside the prison had to be paid, informants were treated with contempt, and crimes against children or rape drew internal punishment much harsher than most other offenses.

This code worked as a kind of parallel law, created because the state, in there, could barely guarantee basic safety. Those who understood and respected the informal hierarchy among the inmates had a better chance of getting through their sentence without serious trouble; those who ignored the prison's rules ran a real risk.

The book does not treat this code as something nice or fair, but as a fact: with the state almost entirely absent inside the cells, the inmates built their own system of order, with rewards and punishments defined by themselves, not by the law outside the wall.