Direitos humanos à água e ao esgotamento sanitário de indivíduos em privação de liberdade : uma revisão sistemática

Abstract

The increasing number of built prisons and the onset of mass incarceration are widely debated phenomena among sociologists and other scholars around the world. The assessment of the situation of incarcerated people and the extension of damage reparations can be achieved by enforcing Public Policies. In keeping with this assumption, the need to understand how is the access to water and sanitation in the context of incarceration is what drives the scope of this work, which maps studies that correlate access to water and sanitation to Human Rights. The theoretical framework surrounding Human Rights consists of the declarations and reports by the United Nations (UN), the Human Rights to Water and Sanitation, and the Nelson Mandela Rules and the Bangkok Rules, while the theoretical cornerstone deployed in this work is based on the UN’s 2002 General Comment No. 15, which proclaims water to be a human right. The goals of this research are to conduct a systematic scoping review in the relevant and internationally acknowledged databases Scopus, Web of Science and PubMED, so as to offer a critical analysis of the scientific production regarding access to water and sanitation by the populations in prison systems, under the scope of the Human Rights to Water and Sanitation. The systematic scoping review methodology was adopted with the aims of laying a solid groundwork for pushing knowledge forward in the field in question, by using explicit and systematic methods which were chosen with the intention of minimizing bias in data retrieval through a transparent and reproducible method, itself subject to questioning and improvements in regards to its criteria and conclusions. The methodological approach started by retrieving 4,675 documents which, after having their pertinence assessed by the study group, were cut down to 85, which were then subjected to bibliometric analysis with the computational tool bibliometrix and had their information categorized in relation to their conformity with the normative content and principles of the Human Rights to Water and Sanitation, so as to answer the following research question: “how do incarcerated individuals enjoy their Human Rights in their access to water, hygiene and sanitation services?”. It was possible to observe a gap between the content of the Human Rights to Water and Sanitation and how incarcerated individuals effectively enjoy their access to them. This gap is defined by recurrent signs of overcrowding, insufficient water provision and availability, hindrances or obstructions in accessing sanitation services, and a lack of essential personal hygiene and menstruation items, which points to the need for intervention and for an increase in the number of works dealing with the subjects in question, as well as for filling in the gaps in the literature on the topics.