This is a guest post by Léia Santos, PhD Visiting Researcher at the University of Sheffield.
What is sentence reduction through reading?
Sentence reduction through reading is one of the alternatives for reducing sentences in Brazil, in addition to sentence reduction through study and work.
Sentence reduction through reading was adopted nationwide starting in 2013 and nowadays it is guidance by the Resolution 391/2021
When the purpose is sentence reduction, the incarcerated person can read one book per month and write a review (or perform an activity that proves the reading). If the review is approved, 4 days will be deducted from their sentence, potentially reaching up to 48 days deducted per year.
How does it work?
Those interested in reducing their sentence through reading receive a different book to read each month. After reading, they must write a review that will be evaluated and, if approved, will be granted 4 days of sentence reduction.
The review’s correction is confirmatory, not evaluative, and can be carried out by a committee of reviewers, usually in partnership between the prison unit and a university or by the team responsible for the sentence reduction project of each prison.
The established evaluation criteria are: adherence to the topic, aesthetics, not plagiarism, clarity, and comprehension.
One experience
In the Viajar sem sair do lugar [Travel without leaving the place] project, each month the group of participants chose a title (from a set of 48 titles) and the activities took place over 4 weeks (that’s one possibility, other formats exist):
1st Week: Presentation of the book and the author. Distribution of materials: book, pen, pencil, eraser, notebook paper and reading supplement (Created by us, specifically for each book, and focusing on social issues and imprisonment), and a screening of the film based on the book read the previous month (a session with popcorn and soda).
2nd week: Discussion about first impressions of the reading, explanations about the structure of the review and discussion of the first part of the reading supplement.
3rd week: Discussion about the reading, discussion of the second part of the reading supplement, a playful activity about the book read, and delivery of the draft of the review.
4th week: Participants receive the corrected review and write the final version.
Some results:
The “Travel without leaving the place” project, in its latest version, was carried out at the Santo André Provisional Detention Center, a male unit, between 2022 and 2025.
We started with 11 book titles (20 copies of each) and 3 years later we had 41 titles, all the 30 titles (20 copies of each) were donated.
Our first group had 20 participants, but by the end of the project, we had 4 groups of 20 participants each, totaling 80 places. There were just over 700 male inmates in the prison.
The main comments from participants about the benefits of the project, beyond sentence reduction, were: “I write better letters,” “I understand what I read,” “My handwriting is nicer,” “I’m communicating better”, “I discovered I like to read”, “Reading helps me with anxiety”, “I’m learning new things”, “Participating in the project helps me get out of the prison routine a little”, “Now I want to go back to studying”.
We also held literary teas and Christmas gatherings, and at these events we collected children’s books for parents to give as gifts to the children in their families on Children’s Day and at Christmas.
All this work was done voluntarily by a team that at one point had 9 volunteers, coordinated by the librarian and volunteer Léia Santos. The resources for carrying out all the activities were also donated or paid for by the volunteers.
The prison unit was responsible for: the classroom infrastructure, the movement of inmates within the unit, and sending the results of the book reviews to the judge every month.
Now that the project is over we are keeping in touch with some participants by letter, since after so many months of work, we established a relationship between the reading facilitators and the readers.
Léia Santos is a PhD Visiting Researcher at the University of Sheffield in the UK. She is a Master’s and PhD candidate in Information Science from the University of São Paulo in Brazil. She is a librarian and a researcher of libraries in prisons. Léia is coordinator of the sentence reduction through reading project “Traveling without leaving the place” between 2022-2025.
