Brasilia - The Supreme Court aned the presidents of the 27 courts of justice will meet here today to debate on the crisis of the Brazilian penitentiary system, tragically manifested at the beginning of this year with the massacre of 93 inmates.

The meeting was summoned by the head of the Federal Supreme Court (STF), Minister Carmen Lucia, who last week, after the rebellion that ended with 56 inmates killed in the Penitentiary Complex Anisio Jobim, in Manaus, met with the top representatives of the courts of the North Region.

Since she assumed the command of that Power last September, the magistrate made surprise visits to several penitentiaries of the Federal District, Rio Grande do Norte and Rio Grande do Sul, said the Brazil News Agency, that described today's meeting as an attempt to continue the efforts of the Judicial Power to find solutions to the crisis.

In the opinion of doctor in Social Sciences and professor of the Catholic Pontificial University of Minas Robson Savio Reis Souza,

the catastrophic situation of the Brazilian penitentiary system responds, among other causes, to the fact that in the country is practiced 'a selective justice' which reaches almost exclusively to negroes and poor people.

The penitentiary system of the country is 'a producer of delinquency', sustained Reis Souza in a recent article where he stresses also that this 'does not function as instrument of deterrence of crime and even less has the function of social reincorporation' of those who served their sentences.

The problema added the scholar, is not of money, as the expenses of the criminal justice system are stratospheric.

We have one of the mores expensive judicial systems of the planet, which consumes annually 1.3 percent of the Gross Domestic Product or 2.7 percent of total expenses of the Union, the states and municipalities, he argued.

The need to make a wide-reaching reform of the Brazilian penitentiary system was defended two years ago by the then president of the STF, Ricardo Lewandowski, who commented in Folha de Sao Paulo the increasing deterioration of the jails.

In his opinion, the expectation of transforming persons shut out in jails of the country is certain: surely for the worst.

That model of justice administration and tolerance with the infrahuman conditions of reclusion can no longer be admitted, he said after remembering that statistics reveal something terrifying: about 42 percent of those inmates are not condemned indefinitely.

Some studies, he added, indicate that 37 percent of those temporarily in jail finish being absolved or receive another type of sentence that is not in prison. 'Thus, we wrongly arrest and anticipate the sentence as common practice of justice', he stressed.

The overpopulation in jails is one of the fundamental problems of the Brazilian penitentiary system, harshly criticized also by specialists of the United Nations due to the cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment given to inmates.

According to recent estimates, in all Brazil are imprisoned at present over 668 thousand citizens, when the jails have a capacity of barely 394 thousand 800.