Brazilian criminal justice

The Brazilian criminal justice system comes from the civil law of Western Europe, in particular Portuguese law, which derives from Roman law. The earliest legal documents in Brazil were land grants and charters dating to the early 16th century, which continued to be used until independence in 1822. Various basic principles of law are enshrined in the 1988 Constitution, such as the principle of legality and the principle of human dignity.

Various institutions work together to implement the criminal justice system, including the National Congress, which passes laws to define what acts are considered criminal in the Penal Code and codifies the criminal procedures for implementing them; three national and multiple state-level police forces to prevent and combat crime and hold alleged perpetrators for prosecution; the judiciary, including 92 courts at the federal and state levels, to interpret the codes, and hear prosecutions and judge perpetrators; and a correctional system to punish and rehabilitate convicted criminals.

The workings of the criminal justice system have had many changes, reflecting Brazil's history of colonialism, Empire, Republics, military dictatorship, and democracy, and of persistent, endemic corruption and scandals. There have been attempts to rein in corruption: in the 2010s, Operation Car Wash an investigation into corruption within the government which lasted eight years. The investigation extended to multiple foreign countries, and resulted in a thousand indictments, half a billion dollars in fines, affected three former presidents, and imprisoned one.

Rates of crime in Brazil are elevated. Brazil ranks high amongst the most number of homicides in the world; it ranked 4th in South America in 2021. In the correctional system, although laws guarantee prisoners a livable amount of space and decent living conditions, in fact prisons are very overcrowded, typically housing two to five times the number of inmates they were designed for.