Brazilian inmates find relief and reduce sentences through reading

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — When 33-year-old Brazilian woman Emily de Souza heard about a program allowing her to shave off four days from her prison sentence by reading a book, she seized the opportunity to reconnect with a cherished habit.

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

The possibility of reuniting earlier with her 9-year-old autistic son, who her mother and aunt are looking after, only ramped up her motivation to participate in the project.

“One day is an eternity because it feels like it’s never going to end,” said de Souza, who is incarcerated at the Djanira Dolores de Oliveira Women’s Prison in Rio de Janeiro, which houses approximately 820 female detainees.

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

Like most of her fellow inmates, de Souza was sentenced for drug-trafficking. She said she received five-year prison term for selling a cannabis-infused Brazilian chocolate treat known as “brigadeiro” in Portuguese. She arrived last November, but hopes to progress to Brazil's semiopen prison regime in August, which would allow her 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 and nationwide systems for sentence remission via reading in the world. The rapidly growing program, which was first formally regulated in 2012 and then standardized across Brazil in 2021, received renewed attention earlier this year after the Supreme Court authorized Bolsonaro — who is serving a 27-year sentence for attempting a coup — to take part.

Andréia Oliveira, coordinator of female prisons and LGBTIQ+ inclusion in Rio state’s prisons, said that access to reading programs and schools helps the individual once they have left prison — but also society. “When we encourage education, ludic activities, knowledge, we return to society someone who can reconnect, respect rules,” she said.

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

Participants choose or are given a book in the initial kick off activity. They then discuss their book in the next encounter and finally, in a third meeting, they produce a review or a drawing that demonstrates comprehension.

Detainees have read “Captain of the Sands” by renowned Brazilian author Jorge Amado, “Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoevsky and “ The Color Purple ” by Alice Walker.

A much-loved favorite of participants is the illustrated book “Father Francisco,” by Marina Miyazaki Araujo, which tells the story of an incarcerated father from the child’s perspective, said Tonani. Many detainees in Brazilian prisons are from a poor background and did not complete basic education.

Some participants in the late March workshop at the Djanira Dolores de Oliveira prison were reading “Unsubmissive Tears of Women” by Brazilian writer Conceição Evaristo — including Celina Maria de Conceição, a 50-year-old woman originally from the northern state of Pernambuco.

De Conceição, who took part in the workshops last year and signed up again, said she developed the taste for reading thanks to the project.

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

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

“It wasn’t good for me, because it stirs up our emotions, and we’re in a place where the environment is already truly heavy,” she said.

Brazilian prisons are renowned for overcrowding and harsh conditions. In 2023, the Supreme Court recognized mass human rights violations in the prison system and ordered the federal government to develop a plan to resolve the situation. Called “Just Punishment,” it was launched in 2025 and among other goals seeks to expand study and work opportunities.

While progress has been made, access to earning time off by reading remains unequal across Brazil, said Rodrigo Dias, head of education, culture and sport in the country’s National Secretariat of Penal Policies.

In the northeastern state of Alagoas, some prisoners were handed a Kindle with 300 literary works on them, whereas other, more conservative states have heavy bureaucracy which hinders access, Dias said.

A 2023 government report found that some 30% of Brazilian prison units do not have libraries or adequate reading spaces. But Dias pointed to the secretariat’s data, which shows that the number of remission requests via reading has increased sevenfold since 2021.

Like de Conceição, once people began participating, they often want to continue. “The book gives them the possibility to dream, and often to ‘talk’ with other people — not those who are imprisoned or working in the facility, but with the characters in the stories,” Dias said.

While Elionaldo Fernandes Julião, co-author of the book “Sentence Remission Through Reading in Brazil: The Right to Education in Contest” and a professor at the Fluminense Federal University, underscores the importance of accessing books in prisons, he argues that oftentimes Brazil's sentence reduction programs through reading are used as a substitute for developing access to education, which is much more costly.

Julião also said that access to the policy and books often depends on local projects. “Unfortunately, these are very easy to eliminate or shut down as quickly as possible,” he said.

During the recent workshop, de Souza read out loud a poem written by formerly imprisoned Argentine writer Liliana Cabrera. One of the lines affirms the narrator is “Also something more / than the letters in black / of a court case.”

De Souza shared that the words resonated deeply.

“Someone knew how to explain with beautiful terms (…) that I’m a lot more than a court case, a lot more than the mistake I made, that I’m a human with my story,” she said.

Follow AP’s coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america

Incarcerated women leave after participating in a program part of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro's "Literature, Existence and Resistance" project, at the Djanira Dolores de Oliveira women's prison in Rio de Janeiro, Wednesday, March 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Bruna Prado)

Emily de Souza cries during a program part of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro's "Literature, Existence and Resistance" project, at the Djanira Dolores de Oliveira women's prison in Rio de Janeiro, Wednesday, March 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Bruna Prado)

Incarcerated women participate in a reading program part of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro's "Literature, Existence and Resistance" project, at the Djanira Dolores de Oliveira women's prison in Rio de Janeiro, Wednesday, March 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Bruna Prado)

Joseane Silva de Oliveira, who is incarcerated, reads a book in the library of the Djanira Dolores de Oliveira women's prison in Rio de Janeiro, Wednesday, March 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Bruna Prado)

Incarcerated women read books in the library of the Djanira Dolores de Oliveira women's prison in Rio de Janeiro, Wednesday, March 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Bruna Prado)

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — A group of friends in their mid-20s campaigned door to door last week in a small Hungarian city, supporting a political movement that soon could end Prime Minister Viktor Orbán 's 16-year grip on power.

The young men from Hungary's Lake Balaton region were volunteering for the center-right Tisza party and its leader, Péter Magyar, and campaigning to move past what they described as Orbán's broken system.

“We've lived our whole lives in this system, and we want to see what it could be like outside of it,” said Florián Végh, a 25-year-old student. “I can say on behalf of my fellow university students and my friends that this system is absolutely dysfunctional.”

A generational gap is widening, with Hungary’s youth pushing overwhelmingly for an end to Orbán's autocratic rule while the oldest citizens remain loyal to the prime minister — a split that could be a decisive factor in the April 12 elections.

Orbán, 62, trails in the polls behind Magyar, a 45-year-old lawyer who broke with Orbán's nationalist-populist Fidesz party over a political scandal in 2024. He has led Tisza on a rapid political rise, inspiring a voting cohort that had largely avoided politics for at least two decades.

Fidesz's declining popularity during economic stagnation and political and corruption scandals has widened the demographic divide. A recent survey by pollster 21 Research Center found that 65% of voters under 30 support Tisza, while 14% are backing Orbán.

One Tisza volunteer, 24-year-old student Levente Koltai, pointed out that Fidesz is an acronym in Hungarian for “Alliance of Young Democrats.” But he believes the party no longer lives up to its name.

“Fidesz has lost the title of young, democratic and alliance,” he told The Associated Press. “It’s gone from young to old, from democratic to tending toward dictatorial, and from an alliance to a circle of cronies.”

Andrea Szabó, a senior researcher with Eötvös Loránd University's Institute for Political Science in Budapest, said a changing of the guard was emerging in Hungary, where “a new, active political generation is beginning to unfold before our eyes.”

While Orbán’s political generation was defined by its fight against Hungary’s Soviet-era socialist system in the 1980s and 1990s, "now, we have reached the point where after 25 years, there is a new political generation that is against the Orbán regime,” Szabó said.

Orbán’s government defines itself as both Christian-national and “ illiberal,” and has drifted away from partners in the European Union in favor of closer relations with Russia and China.

Long accused by critics of taking over Hungary's institutions, clamping down on press freedom and overseeing entrenched political corruption — charges he denies — Orbán has become an icon in the global far-right movement.

Admirers approve of his opposition to immigration and curtailing of LGBTQ+ rights, and applaud benefits to young families such as abolishing income tax for mothers with multiple children and providing state-backed loans to first-time homebuyers.

Such policies, as well as a pension supplement for retirees, appeal to many older voters. Fidesz leads Tisza 50% to 19% among retirement-age Hungarians, according to the 21 Research Center Poll.

Zsuzsanna Prépos, a retiree, said at one of Orbán’s recent campaign rallies that she was “very happy” with the government's pension policies, and that she's supporting Fidesz because it “helps young people.”

“When I was young ... I didn’t get anything. Now young people have a lot of help,” she said.

Yet such measures have not translated into youth support for Orbán. In several recent speeches, he has both scolded young people for their anti-government attitudes and pleaded with them to reconsider.

“Young people, wake up!” he said at a rally last week. “These are not times for taking risks, experimenting or trying new things. ... Believe me, today only Fidesz and my humble self can provide this country with security.”

Szabó, the researcher, said while many young people view Orbán's family support policies positively, their “very strong sense of justice” is incompatible with "the authoritarian exercise of power, the corruption, the fact that they feel vulnerable and that there is insecurity in the country.”

“Their lives essentially took place entirely within the Orbán regime, so they know nothing other than this kind of functioning of power," she said.

Recent events in Hungary have turned large numbers of youth against the ruling party.

Hungary was rocked by scandal in February 2024 when it was revealed that the president, a close Orbán ally, had granted a pardon to an accomplice in a child sexual abuse case. The revelation shocked the country, and the president and justice minister resigned.

Days later, some of the country’s best-known influencers led a protest demanding a political transformation. Drawing tens of thousands, it marked a turning point which “opened the door to politicization for a lot of young people," Szabó said.

In the wake of the pardon scandal, Magyar broke with Fidesz and launched Tisza. Three months later, the party won 30% of the vote in European Parliament elections.

Magyar has built his campaign on promises to end Orbán's drift toward Russia and restore Hungary's Western orientation, and to revive the stagnating economy by recovering billions in EU funds that are blocked over rule-of-law and corruption concerns.

That economic message has resonated with youth. Végh, the Tisza volunteer, said it's easier than ever for his internet-savvy generation to access different forms of information, and to travel to nearby countries where governments are putting public money to good use.

“In Austria, you see a much calmer, more peaceful, more educated society with better roads and better health care," he said. "You cross the border and see that you have drifted into a developed European country.”

Although Tisza leads in the polls, its victory is far from assured. Orbán has a lead among older voters and in much of the countryside.

At a recent rally in Budapest that drew upward of 100,000 people, Tisza supporter Dorina Csobán said the election battle had become "pretty divisive in my family for the older people, because we younger people are saying clearly that there must be change.”

Prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán speaks during a countryside campaign tour in Kaposvár, Hungary, Monday, March 16, 2026 ahead of April 12 parliamentary election. (AP Photo/Denes Erdos)

Supporters of prime minister Viktor Orbán listen during a countryside campaign tour in Kaposvár, Hungary, Monday, March 16, 2026 ahead of April 12 parliamentary election. (AP Photo/Denes Erdos)

FILE -People listen to the speech of former Hungarian government insider Peter Magyar next to Kossuth Square on Tuesdy, in Budapest, Hungary, March 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Denes Erdos, File)