Profile of prisoners in the Rio de Janeiro prison system: Specifities of gender in the social exclusion process

Abstract

The study of the social and demographic profile, criminal records, drug use and sexually transmitted diseases of the prison population of Rio de Janeiro State in 1998 offered a view of different aspects of this population by gender. The objective of this study is to identify if the profile of social exclusion this population is submitted differs by gender. Through a sectional study, 2,039 prisoners were interviewed, using the prevalence ratio as an association measure between gender and the other variables. Multivariate analysis, using logistical regression, explains these differences in a final model. This population is young and poorly educated, with breakdowns in the links of social life at various levels for both men and women. Factors most strongly associated with men: marital visits in jail, imprisoned for seven years or more, married, sentenced for robbery, have three years or more of the sentence to complete, and having smoked marijuana prior to being arrested; for women: sexually transmitted disease, widowed, non-Brazilian, take tranquilizers in jail, visited someone in jail before being arrested, 35 years old or more. Data analysis permits to conclude that although these men and women are just as excluded from "social life" long before and also after their imprisonment, there are some aspects that make them different in this process of social injustice.