Prison: America’s Most Vile Export?

The U.S. incarceration problem is now the world’s to solve.

by Baz Dreisinger

Behind the bars of a prison in Brazil, the federal agent on duty sidled up to me.

“You’re getting a good report, yes?” he said, smiling at my notebook.

“You have many supermaxes in America. Many trips there to make this one.” He gestured toward the barbed wire, offering scant details about just how many trips and precisely when they transpired. “And now you are come to see ours. Funny.”

I didn’t think it was funny.

I was visiting the Penitenciária Federal de Catanduvas, Brazil’s first federal super-maximum security prison, opened in 2007 to house 208 solitary confinement cells. The “supermax,” as this model is known, is generally characterized by a severe lack of activities or communal spaces, a powerful administration not subject to outside review, and, in its starkest difference from lower-security prisons, extreme solitary confinement for all its residents. The imposing edifice cost $18 million to build, was followed by the construction of four more identical supermaxes, and thus represents Brazil’s current, and unprecedented, investment in incarceration. Yet it looks like a slice of the United States plunked down on ...