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.”