Carandiru Penitentiary

Carandiru Penitentiary, officially São Paulo House of Detention (Portuguese: Casa de Detenção de São Paulo) was a penitentiary located in the North Zone of São Paulo, Brazil. It was inaugurated on April 21, 1920 and was built by the engineer-architect Samuel das Neves.

The name Casa de Detenção (House of Detention) was given by federal interventor Ademar Pereira de Barros who, on December 5, 1938, by state decree 9,789, abolished the Cadeia Pública (Public Jail) and the Presídio Político da Capital (Political Prison of the Capital). This decree provided for the separation of first-time offenders from repeat offenders and the separation of prisoners based on the nature of their crime.

It once housed more than eight thousand prisoners, and was considered the largest prison in Latin America at the time. It was the site of the Carandiru massacre on October 2, 1992. It was deactivated and partially demolished in 2002, during the government of Geraldo Alckmin, making way for the Parque da Juventude. In 2019, the remaining buildings and structures of the Penitentiary Complex (the remaining pavilions, the Penitentiary gate, the remaining structures of the prison walls and the prison-hostel building) were listed by the São Paulo Municipal Government, considering that the preservation of the complex is fundamental to Brazil's prison history. According to architect Anna Beatriz Ayroza Galvão, a teacher at Escola da Cidade and former superintendent of IPHAN, we should not "erase the memory of pain". "If that were the case, all the concentration camps would have been destroyed; it is important to leave the marks of this pain so that atrocities like this one are not repeated in our history", she explained.