Ap Photos: Brazil's Crowded Prisons Feed Gangs, Violence

Inside the prisons, ruthless gang leaders don't just recruit dangerous inmates but target the more than 250,000 prisoners who are in for lesser crimes like theft and marijuana possession. "Our prisons are universities of crime and we are financing drug gangs inside the prisons by overcrowding them," Claudio Lamachia, the head of Brazil's bar association, said after visiting some of the most-violent prisons in Latin America's most-populous nation. Earlier this month, The Associated Press gained exclusive access to two prisons in the northern Amazon region where massacres kicked off a wave of violence in several penitentiaries. Guards, administrative prison staff and families of inmates of both prisons said gang leaders ordered newcomers to join killing sprees and dismember and behead the dead. In Manaus, a gritty and increasingly violent city of 2 million that is the jumping off point to the Amazon jungle and a thoroughfare for drug trafficking across South America, the AP also witnessed the aftermath from several murders that authorities said they suspected were gang related.

 

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