The Brazilian National Justice Council and H360 define plan to create cooperatives of inmates in all the regions of the country by 2020
On 01/03/201925/06/2019
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The Brazilian National Justice Council and H360 define plan to create cooperatives of inmates in all the regions of the country by 2020

InNews, Violence Reduction

In compliance with the first phase of the agreement signed in December, the Brazilian National Justice Council and the Humanitas360 Institute have recently approved the joint plan to spread entrepreneurship behind and beyond prison bars throughout Brazil. According to the plan, in this year alone, four new cooperatives will be created in prisons in different areas of the country.

The process of replicating H360’s entrepreneurship model on a national scale was divided into three successive stages, which happen in 5-month cycles, and will involve an increasing number of prison units. At the moment, a set of evaluating criteria is being defined to select the first cooperatives to be implemented. It will be up to the justice courts of the states to recommend prison units to be evaluated.

The agreement between the Council and H360 aims to develop productive organizational models for inmates and ex-inmates with the final objective of reducing recidivism in the prison system. The tools to achieve this goal include entrepreneurship, collaborative economy and professional training.

One of the biggest challenges social impact projects face, especially when they deal with public security, is to measure their effective return to society. For this reason, Insper (a leading higher education research institute in São Paulo, Brazil) is preparing a proposal to develop methodologies to monitor and evaluate the impact of the projects, always ensuring the protagonism and involvement of all stakeholders and beneficiaries.

The implementation of the project counts with the collaboration of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), through the work of the prison policy consultant Felipe Athayde Lins de Melo. Victor Martins Pimenta and Melina Machado Miranda are the project managers for the National Justice Council, and Ricardo Anderáros, Higor Cauê and Heloisa Bonfati are the project managers for the Humanitas360 Institute.