Brazil: Is the solution for Brazilian violence Education or Justice?

A2A.Firstly, I would just like to point that this Question is a false dilema. The answer is not only one of the choices given like that, black-and-white, just like it isn't the middle groung.Brazil needs both of them, education and justice, but not only. Our country also needs to rethink its approach to violence. What is its origin? How is it structured? How is the state dealing with it? How did it developed from old times until recently? Those are questions I did not answered even for myself, you know?

Because the difference between me and the most powerful politician in Brazil it is just the scale. The main issue is us, the Brazilian people, until we realize that find out a new cell phone which is making phone calls for free it is not legal and not cool, we are taking from someone, someone is paying for it, until we know this is crime and can be avoided, i'm sure the next politician will think two times before steal the education or health budget... and how we can reach this level maturity level? investing hard on education, however this is not good for the politicians, imagine from now all the nation will be capable to challenge decision high critical sense... this definitely won't be cool for them.. it is much easier control a dumb national than a thinking nation..

What is Brazilian violence?A new kind of  heavy metal music beat? Or hair stile?PS: You mean to say "Brazil's violence".

This is the solution. A fully armed judges patrolling the streets and the most violent areas.

Of course a good education can help change society, and it should be a goal. However, in my view, the greatest problems are broken homes, unwanted teen pregnancy (raises the social debt tremendously), and the lack of ethics in the dominant classes, thus setting bad examples. In other words, corruption is bad... If it is perpetrated by others.

In the nineties New York City dramatically improved crime rates when then mayor Rudy Giuliani started clamping down on all types of offences, even small ones like graffiti, public urination, etc. The results were that even larger offences like armed robbery were dramatically reduced. This is basic social psychology (read "The Tipping Point"). Stopping the decadence, and showing that society cares even in the small things. If NY was considered bad in the nineties, imagine Brazil now. Murder rates are 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 even 70 times that of Europe depending on which cities you look at (Incidentally Fortaleza and the northern cities are far worse than Rio and SP).Thinking about the infrastructural decadence in Brazil...if Eletropaulo in SP started illuminating streets more, as a simple example, crime would go down. Also: Stop graffiti. Clamp down hard on all types of crime.Bigger things like tougher practice on jail time would probably help, too, as would paradoxically improving the jails. I think that if detainees were put in smaller cells of two inmates per cell, not like now where hundreds of criminals make up large communities, this would reduce the effect of prison being crime schools. Cells now have around 50 inmates, and each compound about 6 such cells. All run by criminal organizations like the PCC. I know, because one of my former employees spent 3 months in a jail. Theese kinds of things are under-reported. Like most things in this country where the press is completely incompetent.If children that take to the streets would be taken care of with proper extra-curricular activities, and if schools were better, that would help. Instead, society shuts their eyes and the police simply kills as many of them as they can.A higher minimum wage would help, too. People don't see any hope also because they are stuck financially with no hope to grow. We need more people entering the middle class.The crime in Brazil is evidence to the complete decadence society gets when politicians are corrupted and lazy.

As many said here: Brazilian criminality is a multi-factorial issue. So, I will point some that in my opinion are the most important. Social inequality: this is generally pointed out the most important factor for criminality in Brazil. Although I agree that it is one of the contributing factors, I don’t think it is the most important. In the last years, the economic inequalities diminished a little, but the criminality increased only. In my opinion, this became somewhat of a procrastination factor. For so long there is high social inequalities, the society and authorities can wash their hands and do nothing about it. Drug-trafficking: This is the main economic cause for violence in Brazil. I don’t have the graphs here, but the huge majority of violent crimes involved people directly or indirectly linked with drug use or drug-trafficking (faction wars, territorials disputes, debt collecting, robbery and murder in order to have money for drug use, etc etc). Brazil became in the 1980s and 1990s a big center of drug consume and redistributing to Europe and North America. Brazil has a huge unguarded frontier with drug-producing countries (Colombia, Peru and Venezuela) and a highly corrupt bureaucracy. So, it is quite easy to enter in Brazil with a lot of drugs and ship it to other country through our ports. Prisons: Brazilian prisons must be one of the worst places on Earth to be. They are crazily overcrowded, infested with diseases eradicated from the rest of the country since the 19th century and controlled by criminals. Any sign of human dignity ceases to exists inside of those places and the worst acts of human behavior can be seen inside of them which include murders, rape and even beheadings. Violence culture: I will not say that Brazilians are generally violent, but they tolerate violence as a way of solving conflicts much more than other societies which I know (Germany, for example, where I live in the moment which is a country that does not tolerate any kind of violence). In my opinion, there are some measures that could be taken which would, if not solve the problem, would help a lot Reduce social inequality naturally, but it takes a very long time. So, there is also the need of actions which would result in more quick results. Such as… A proper frontier control and more active police work in ports and airports. Almost no drugs are produced in Brazil. They are mostly imported. So, a proper control of frontiers and entrances would reduce a lot the drug market in the country and - consequently - the violence. A reeducation that showed that violence is not an acceptable way of conflict-solving. Reform of the penitentiary system: Building of prisons controlled by the state and not by the criminals, where the interns would by treated with discipline, but respect and dignity. The problem is that due a stupid position adopted by the Brazilian public opinion many people say that the state should build schools and not prisons. This show the knowledge that the public opinion has about criminality and education in general and how they don’t care about the murderer fabrics which are the Brazilian prisons.

It's my understanding that education is not only the solution for this problem but also it's the solution for our planet future. Considering how uneducated a large portion of the population in Brazil is, it's not hard to understand how they would prefer locking a child with a grown thief rather than doing everything possible to give this same child the support he needs. The bottom line is that, human beings constantly don't like to face problems, they always prefer to circumvent it as much as possible. We see this behavior when we pass by a homeless on the street, when we see a child asking for money, or when we see skinned people starving in Africa through the news, we feel bad but it's not with us, so we don't do anything. In Brazil, accounts of people being robbed by children grown in the past years, something that once was done randomly, started to create a patten and instead of researching this pattern and investigating its possible solutions, the people, in their search for a better life and "justice", decided it was best to lock them up. The politicians are there to serve the people, and it's important they stand by the people's values, mainly when those values help them gain elections. Also, the fear of being incarcerated is a strong motivation to avoid kids of doing illicit things, in theory at least. Now, is that a long-term solution? I hardly think so. But again, humans prefer to deal with the easiest possible option, without caring or considering the downsides, we see that when we use a car, when we buy a computer or a cell phone, when we buy a plastic bottle Coke, etc. We are not aware of the consequences of our actions in the future and this decision is one of those bad actions our country has made.

Both. We have a serious problem here, not solvable in short term. But there are some points that may work at long range: Education. Our educacional system needs reform, specially in early stages. Fundamental school and high school are the ones needing the most reformation. Justice. Make the justice system more effective, that really punishes the "bif fishes". Correction reform. The current prisional system is awful, violent, without good structure, so bad that many times the prisioner comes out worse than it entered