BELO HORIZONTE — On a school day in the second semester of 2018, Belo Horizonte actor and public school teacher Simon Oliveira realized that one of his students was crying. The girl was 10 years old, in fifth grade, and he’d already noticed that she’d recently done worse than usual on her school work.
So he asked her what was wrong: “It’s just that my father’s in prison,” she said.
This is what it often looks like when young people find out one of their parents is in prison: a drop in school performance, isolation from peers, long periods of silence, repression of their own feelings and even the development of mental health disorders.
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“The hatred that society harbors against those targeted by the criminal justice system has repercussions for children and young people. Many even drop out of school because they suffer prejudice,” says Alessandra Vieira, PhD in social psychology. “And these children are invisible to the state, which doesn’t develop any kind of protection for those who go through this kind of experience.”
Melissa Luanda, now 21, never dropped out of school. But when she was only 14, she heard the mothers of her classmates tell her peers they shouldn’t talk to her because she was “a criminal’s daughter.”
Luan Cândido, Luanda’s father, was arrested for drug trafficking when she was eight years old. People Luanda had previously considered friends distanced themselves from her while her father was in prison. At the same time, her school work suffered, resulting in her repeating a grade.
“I was naive, I thought everyone was my friend, and it was a shock to have to deal with these comments and people being so mean,” she says.
Before the arrest, Luanda and her father lived together. The father liked to cook for his daughter and the two of them watched a lot of movies late into the night. “I felt like he was my best friend,” Luanda recalls.
Meeting her father on prison visiting days was a harsh experience. In the strict prison environment, the prison officers were “curt and rough” during the searches, says Luanda. “I was afraid to even talk to my grandmother, who took me there, or to ask the officers anything,” she says.
Hot as hell
After having faced the correctional officers, she arrived at the cells, an environment that stuck in her memory: “It was absurdly poor. Small cells, everything very precarious — it was hot as hell, and all the families were crammed in there together.”
We have the right to a weekly visit and nothing more.
A day’s visit starts early for the families, who usually arrive at 6 a.m. at the state prisons — some even spend the night outside to get a good place in the queue. Often, the first family member isn’t admitted until 10 a.m. — before then, mothers, grandmothers and children, some of them babies who need to be held all the time, wait for their turn in the sun or rain, as few prisons have shelters for family members.
Once inside the prison, if a child needs to go to the toilet, they will most likely use the cell’s toilet, the same one used by 20, 30 or even 40 prisoners. “As family members, we have the right to a weekly visit and nothing more,” explains Tereza, whose son served time in prison. “It’s as if being a relative of a prisoner is a crime in itself.”
“Your mother is in prison”
The routine of prison visits had consequences for Luanda, who developed depression and anxiety. “I was at a time of getting to know myself, getting to know the world, forming my own opinions, and the fact that my father was in prison certainly contributed to my becoming ill,” she says.
With the help of her family and friends, she recovered. Today she is studying marketing at a university in Belo Horizonte and works as an administrative assistant.
It was in 2011, when Milena Barra was 11 years old, that the Minas Gerais Military Police broke into her house in the Cabana do Pai Tomás slum in Belo Horizonte. She remembers it like a scene from a movie: the noise, the screams, the threats, and also the drugs of her mother’s then-boyfriend found by the police.
Maria Amália, her mother, was detained for 15 days, and Milena went to live with an aunt. When her mother returned home, she was very upset and never said a word about the two weeks she had spent in prison.
It took Barra a while to understand what had happened. It seemed to her at the time that her mother might well have been kidnapped — but, having grown up in a violent home, used to seeing her mother beaten by her father, the girl had learned a lesson: “I had to keep what I was feeling to myself,” she says.
She continued to go to school, without telling her friends or teachers what had happened. The adults in the family, who knew about the arrest, watched her in bewilderment. “From what they told me, I didn’t show any feelings, nothing,” she says.
At 16, what she was unconsciously suppressing came to the surface. Barra suffered from severe bouts of depression, repeated one grade at school and abandoned her studies for a year. She spent days without showering and months without leaving the house or seeing any friends, and was finally admitted to hospital, where she was heavily medicated.
Then came years of psychological counseling, from which Barra emerged stronger. At 19, she resumed her studies, but she was surprised by another blow. On her way to school, her phone rang, with a prosecutor on the other end of the line. “Your mother is in prison,” he said.
Barra’s mother was imprisoned for the same drug trafficking case from 2011, which was still open. In their ruling, the judges of the Minas Gerais Court of Justice found that she was guilty of hiding drugs on behalf of her then-boyfriend.
Maria Amélia, however, didn’t have the chance to defend herself: the bailiffs went to her old house to summon her to testify, but the family no longer lived there, and because they couldn’t find anyone, the trial went ahead in absentia. Mother and daughter, says Barra, were living on the same street, just a few meters away from their old home.
Since her mother’s first arrest, Barra’s family had split up — her sister and older brother went to one house, she to another. So, during her second imprisonment, when her mother’s letters arrived, only Barra read them. She learned how precarious her mother’s situation was, and it also fell upon her to send her hygiene kits. In order to raise the money she needed to support her mother in prison, she dropped out of her design course at the time.
There is the issue of knowing that the letter will be read by the jailers.
With so many things to deal with inside the cell, Barra’s mother was spared the bad news from outside. Her daughter’s anguish, the fear of something happening to her mother and the family quarrels were never discussed in the letters — and so writing to her mother became an ordeal.
Unconstitutional State
In addition to Barra and Luanda, other young people interviewed anonymously by Agência Pública reported the same struggles with communicating. For social psychologist Vieira these are common difficulties. “In addition to having to convey a different image from what happens on the outside, there is the issue of knowing that the letter will be read by the jailers — and many will not be handed over, and they will know about your private life,” she says.
Stories like these are common in Brazilian prisons. They make up the book “Relatos do Cárcere” (Prison Reports), published in 2019 by Instituto DH, an NGO in Belo Horizonte. The book contains letters with comments from incarcerated people, and it is organized by professors Carolyne Reis and Vanessa Barros, from the psychology department of the Federal University of Minas Gerais, and psychologist Luciana Silva.
Here are two examples:
“Doctor, I left my son when he was only one year old, and another daughter who is only five years old, and they are suffering a lot because of my absence, and I don’t know what to do, because my family is humble and can’t afford a lawyer.”
“I have a 12-year-old daughter who is in great need of help, I’m desperate, because since I was incarcerated she’s been very shaken psychologically, she has no contact with her biological father who is also in prison.”
The other side
In 2016, the Superior Court of Justice ruled that mothers of children up to 12 years old have the right to serve their pre-trial detention sentence at home, a decision endorsed by the Supreme Court in 2018 in a collective habeas corpus granted by then Justice Ricardo Lewandowski. The same is also valid for men, if they are the sole guardians of their children, and exclude those who have been convicted of crimes against life.
Pregnant women have the right to stay with their children up to one year old.
What we see in the national prison system, however, says social psychologist Vieira, is once again that such laws are only appled to people who can afford expensive lawyers. Prisoners who are also parents — with inadequate access to lawyers — spend months, sometimes years, without contact with their children. And these children, for whom there are no charges, also bear the brunt of criminal justice convictions.
Asked by Agência Pública if the state prisons have specific facilities for visiting children and adolescents, the Minas Gerais Department of Justice and Public Security (Sejusp)* said that “all prison units are able to receive visiting children and adolescents, as long as they are duly registered to do so.”
Agência Pública also wanted to know if Minas Gerais had already compiled statistics on the school difficulties and mental health problems of children and adolescents whose parents are imprisoned. Sejusp did not respond to this question.
As for public policies that could mitigate the psycho-social impact of parents’ imprisonment on children and adolescents, there is a model unit for the “sheltering of pregnant prisoners.” Located in Vespasiano, in the Metropolitan Region of Belo Horizonte, the Reference Centre for Pregnant Women Deprived of Liberty has no cells or bars.
“Pregnant women have the right to stay with their children up to one year old in the unit,” Sejusp explains. “This minimizes the impacts of incarceration and separation from the mother.”
*Sejusp manages a total of 172 prison units in Minas Gerais.
