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Prison Football Cup — Brazil

Player s warm up among mattresses and

clothes hanging on lines. When they walk

outside, they’re stopped at a metal door and

frisked by armed guards. After a second

metal door, they arrive on the pitch. Any slip

over the sidelines is dangerous: the area is

encircled by barbed wire. “We need to be

calm, patient,” says one. “It’s our hot heads

that got us in this place.” Outsiders are

barred from the match. Once it ends, the

players file back inside, saluted by hands that

stretch into the corridor through steel bars.

Their cell doors lock and screams of celebration

echo through the prison.

Since 2012, this football tournament has

been played every year inside Geraldo Beltrao,

a maximum-security prison in João Pessoa,

capital of Para.ba, Brazil. Each cell may form

one team of five prisoners. After a week of

continuous matches, each player on the winning

team receives his prize: a box of food

containing rice, beans and other goods,

usually later sent to his family. The winning

team also gets to play against prison guards,

a match in which daily tensions sometimes

creep into the pitch. “Bring a bag to carry all

the goals home,” one inmate teases, and then

quickly apologizes. Once the match is over,

only one team will be armed.

This year’s winner was Cell 15. With 15

inmates, it could easily have formed three

teams. But it can’t, because each cell can only

field one squad, and it shouldn’t because the

cells in Geraldo Beltrão are only supposed

to hold seven people. Overcrowded prisons

are the rule in Brazil, with the nation’s

400,000 inmates crammed into structures

built to hold only 260,000. Last year, 83

suicides, 110 homicides and 769 other deaths

were recorded in prisons countrywide, but

the government has other priorities than

improving life behind bars. Since 2008, only

R$1.5 billion (US$670 million) has been

invested in the national incarceration system,

while in the same period, R$8 billion ($3.5

billion) of taxpayers’ money has gone to construct

new stadiums for the World Cup ..

In Manaus, state capital of Amazonas,

stands a newly built, 42,000-capacity football

arena that will likely be left vacant once the

World Cup ends, and a 400 capacity prison

that currently holds more than 1,000 detainees.

So in September 2013, Sabino Marques, a

judge in charge of monitoring the state’s

prison system, proposed that, when the last

footballer leaves the locker room, the stadium

be used as a temporary detention center.

It’s just one among many opinions aired in

the national debate about Brazil’s World Cup

spending. Even inside Geraldo Beltrao,

pragmatism struggles with football pride ..

“All the money being spent on the World Cup

is an investment in the wrong place,” says

Alex Herculano, 32, an inmate who plays

as winger, “but the national team is good;

I think we are going to win.”

published in COLORS #90 – Football

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