Riot Police Storm Brazilian Prison, Free 600 Hostages No Deaths Reported, Ending Latest Wave Of Inmate Unrest

Riot police stormed a jail Wednesday where armed inmates were holding about 600 hostages near Sao Paulo, Brazil, ending a three-day standoff that was the latest in an alarming wave of holiday prison riots and escapes throughout the nation.

Throwing smoke bombs, riot police using clubs and dogs overpowered the inmates in an apparently well-executed operation that was launched about 6:15 p.m. and averted the considerable death tolls of previous prison standoffs in Brazil. State officials confirmed that one police officer suffered a leg injury, and there were unconfirmed reports that 10 inmates and three other police officers were hurt.

There were no reported injuries to the hostages being held at the Sorocaba House of Detention, who included 16 prison guards and hundreds of women and children who had been visiting inmates. It was the largest number of hostages taken in the troubled history of a penal system described as “degrading” and “near-apocalyptic” by human rights advocates.

Police attacked because they learned that the inmates were digging an escape tunnel and because they feared for the hostages’ safety, said Danilo Cesar, chief of prison security for Sao Paulo state.

“The result was satisfactory,” Cesar said in a telephone interview. “The police only went in to ensure the well-being of the inmates and the hostages. There was no resistance. It all went as expected.”

In a hopeful sign about 4:30 p.m., a group of women and children were released by the 20 inmates armed with revolvers, clubs and knives. But negotiations bogged down, police said, and the inmates failed to comply with a promise to surrender in exchange for transfers to other facilities.

The siege began during visiting hours Sunday when two inmates tried to escape disguised as women and set off a shootout that killed an inmate and an inmate’s wife, who allegedly smuggled in wigs and dresses.

The uprising focused international attention on a social problem that has become as routine as it is dire.

Overwhelmed by overcrowding, violence, corruption, squalor and bureaucratic breakdown, Brazilian prisons average nine escape attempts daily and three revolts a month, justice officials say. Populous Sao Paulo state, home to more than a third of Brazil’s 160,000 inmates, experienced a 147 percent rise in uprisings this year.

The penal system, Latin America’s largest, is perennially on the verge of explosion, said James Cavallaro, the Brazil representative of Human Rights Watch.

“It is an extremely short fuse,” said Cavallaro, whose organization has visited about 30 facilities for an in-depth study. “Inmates see this as a possible way out. A lot of these revolts are protests by inmates who want to be moved somewhere else.”

In a long and grotesque litany of incidents, inmates have conducted macabre lotteries to select fellow inmates who are killed to protest overcrowding; police commandos were charged with murder for slaughtering 111 mutinous inmates in Sao Paulo in 1992, and 18 people suffocated to death when guards forced 51 inmates into one cell in 1989.

Tensions rise during the holidays. A nationwide flurry of disturbances in December included a Christmas Day blood bath in the northeast state of Fortaleza, where nine escapees took hostages and died after a car chase and shootout with police.

The crisis is most severe in police lockups and detention centers such as the one in Sorocaba, where authorities said after Wednesday’s raid that they would transfer the 20 hostage-takers to a top-security penitentiary.

Sorocaba and other often-primitive facilities lack security measures, recreation space and rehabilitation programs. Although they are intended to be temporary jails, they end up housing inmates - convicts and accused alike - for months and years. Guards cram up to 40 inmates into cells designed for eight, according to Cavallaro.

Recognizing the need for urgent nationwide action, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso has more than doubled the prison budget and launched a drive to build 52 new prisons. Authorities are steering non-violent convicts into sentences requiring community service rather than jail time and trying to reduce the number of delayed trials, paroles and releases that cause anger to boil over with increasing regularity.