Children in custody in Brazil.

15 years after Brazil adopted one of Latin America's most progressive juvenile justice laws, substantially reflecting the guarantees contained in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the country's juvenile detention centres continue to be grossly deficient. Many facilities are decaying, filthy, and dangerously overcrowded, failing to meet basic standards of health and hygiene (see, for example, CRC Articles 37 and 40). Beatings are common, and most complaints of ill-treatment are never investigated by state detention authorities. Human Rights Watch has inspected 23 juvenile detention centres in the Brazilian states of Amapá, Amazonas, Maranhão, Pará, Rio de Janeiro, and Rondônia, and has undertaken preliminary research on detention conditions in São Paulo. About 12 400 young people aged 12–21 years were in Brazil's juvenile detention system as of January, 2004, the federal ministry of justice reported. Of that total, 2800 were in pretrial detention. 4 Under Brazil's Statute of the Child and Adolescent, detention for a maximum of 3 years is the most serious of six possible juvenile dispositions; other possible sentences include warnings, probation, and placement in facilities similar to halfway houses. Reflecting international standards, the Statute provides that detention should be used only as a measure of last resort, and then only for the shortest time necessary for rehabilitation. In practice, detention is often the first resort for judges involved in the sentencing of young people. In early 2005, when Rio de Janeiro's juvenile detention centres held about 800 youths, Human Rights Watch noted that at least 148 were held for non-violent offences; most of the rest were detained for robbery, an aggravated version of theft. Few individuals were held for very serious violent offences, such as murder or rape. This finding is not surprising. A common misconception in both industrialised and developing countries is that juvenile offenders are largely responsible for violent crime, even though such crimes are overwhelmingly committed by adults. In Rio de Janeiro, for example, individuals younger than age 18 years were responsible for less than 1% of homicides in each of 2003 and 2004 and for 1·5–3·6% of robberies by threat or force in 2003. 3 The rehabilitative purpose of detention is rarely realised. In many detention facilities, in fact, youths do not routinely receive an education. In the northern states of Pará and Amazonas, for example, several facilities offered no schooling whatsoever at the time of our visits in 2002. …