Brazilian prisoners find relief and reduce sentences by reading

Rio de Janeiro., When Brazilian Emily de Souza, 33, learned about a program that allows her to shave four days off her prison sentence for reading a book, she took the opportunity to reconnect with a beloved habit.

Like tens of thousands of detainees across the country – including former President Jair Bolsonaro – he enrolled in a sentence reduction program that encourages inmates to immerse themselves in literary works in exchange for reducing their sentences by up to 48 days a year.

The chance to meet earlier with her 9-year-old autistic son, who is cared for by her mother and aunt, only increased her motivation to participate in the project.

“A day is an eternity because it feels like it will never end,” said De Souza, who is incarcerated at the Djanira Dolores de Oliveira women’s prison in Rio de Janeiro, which houses approximately 820 inmates.

Reading is “a kind of escape to get out of this environment a little, to think about other things: other stories, other people, not just about me,” he said.

Like most of her companions, De Souza was convicted of drug trafficking. He said he received a five-year prison sentence for selling a Brazilian chocolate candy with cannabis known in Portuguese as brigadier. He arrived last November, but hopes to move to the semi-open regime in August, which would allow him to leave prison during the day to work.

Brazil, which has one of the highest per capita incarceration rates in Latin America, stands out for having one of the most formalized systems for remission of sentences through reading. The program was first formally regulated in 2012 and then standardized across Brazil in 2021; received renewed attention earlier this year after the Supreme Federal Court authorized Bolsonaro – who is serving a 27-year sentence for attempting a coup – to participate.

Andréia Oliveira, coordinator of women’s prisons and LGBT+ inclusion in prisons in the state of Rio, pointed out that access to reading programs and schools helps the person once they leave prison, but also helps society. “When we promote education, recreational activities, knowledge, we give back to society someone who can reconnect, respect the rules,” he said.

Since 2022, literature professor Paulo Roberto Tonani has been holding workshops in prisons so that detainees in Rio can benefit from the measure.

Participants choose or receive a book in the initial activity. Then they talk about their book at the next meeting and, finally, in a third meeting, they create a review or a drawing that demonstrates understanding.

The detainees have read Captains of the sandby renowned Brazilian author Jorge Amado; Crime and punishmentby Fyodor Dostoevsky, and The color purpleby Alice Walker.

A beloved favorite among participants is the illustrated book Father Francisby Marina Miyazaki Araujo, which tells the story of an imprisoned father from the child’s perspective, Tonani explained. Many detainees in Brazilian prisons come from poor backgrounds and did not complete basic education.

“We can go somewhere else.”

Some participants in the workshop at the end of March at the Djanira Dolores de Oliveira prison were reading Rebellious tears of womenby the Brazilian writer Conceiçao Evaristo.

One of them is Celina Maria de Conceição, 50, originally from the northern state of Pernambuco, who participated in the workshops last year and signed up again.

“It helps us a lot because we are locked up and it becomes very stressful, very noisy,” she said. “We can go somewhere else, interact with other people and talk about good things, like the book we are studying.”

But she said she had to put down Evaristo’s book, which explores the impact of violence on the lives of black women, because it disturbed her.

“It didn’t do me any good, because it stirs our emotions and we are in a place where the atmosphere is already really heavy,” he explained.

Brazilian prisons are known for overcrowding and harsh conditions. In 2023, the Supreme Federal Court recognized massive human rights violations in the prison system and ordered the federal government to develop a plan to resolve the situation, which was launched in 2025 and, among other objectives, seeks to expand study and work opportunities.

Although progress has been made, access to earning sentence reduction through reading remains unequal in Brazil, said Rodrigo Dias, head of Education, Culture and Sports at the country’s National Secretariat of Penal Policies.

In the northeastern state of Alagoas, some prisoners received a Kindle with 300 literary works loaded, while other, more conservative states have heavy bureaucracy that makes access difficult, Dias said.

A 2023 government report found that around 30 percent of Brazilian prison units do not have libraries or adequate spaces for reading. But Dias cited data from the secretariat showing that the number of reading referral requests has increased seven-fold since 2021.

Like de Souza, once people start participating, they often want to continue. “The book gives them the opportunity to dream and, many times, to ‘talk’ with other people – not with those who are imprisoned or working in the establishment, but with the characters in the stories,” Dias said.

Although Elionaldo Fernandes Juliao, co-author of the book Remission of sentence through reading in Brazil: The right to education in dispute and professor at the Fluminense Federal University, highlights the importance of accessing books in prisons; argues that Brazilian reading sentence reduction programs are often used as a substitute for developing access to education, which is much more expensive.

“Much more than a judicial file”

Access to books, he added, often depends on local projects. “Unfortunately, these are very easy to eliminate or close as quickly as possible,” he warned.

During the recent workshop, De Souza read aloud a poem written by Argentine author Liliana Cabrera that describes the narrator as “something more than the bold letters on a file.”

De Souza shared that those words resonated deeply with him.

“Someone knew how to explain in beautiful terms (…) that I am much more than a judicial file, much more than the mistake I made, that I am a human being with my story,” he expressed.