Mário Ottoboni, the founder of APAC, always premises his words about his experience by saying, “If you don’t have an open heart, you won’t understand what I tell you.” This also holds true when you listen to Valdeci Antônio Ferreira, his disciple.

Ottoboni is a Brazilian lawyer who in 1972 founded the prisons without police, uniforms, barbed wire, without humiliating body searches, weapons, guard dogs, or handcuffs. Those who enter there do so as human beings, and are always and exclusively referred to by name. “The redemption begins with the name,” says Ferreira, the executive director of FEBAC (the Brazilian Federation for the Assistance of Prisoners), who is responsible for the application of the method which has gained recognition in countries beyond Brazil, Italy included.

APAC stands for the Association for the Protection and Assistance of Prisoners, but in the beginning it was the acronym in Portuguese for “loving your neighbor, you love Christ.” It was born as a concrete response of civil society, among a group of Catholics, to the suffering they found in the prisons, and today involves governments and the judicial sector. The APAC exhibit at the Meeting of Rimini last year left thousands fascinated by the method, the goal of which is exactly that of the prison sentence itself: to rehabilitate the prisoner. In the APAC prisons, which are more like communities than places of incarceration, rehabilitation passes through a life of work, spirituality, discipline, and study. Regardless of the crime or the sentence, those in a process of rehabilitation are responsible for managing the center and their own itinerary, and their relationships with the volunteers and their families.

We met Ferreira at the most recent Assembly of CL Leaders in Latin America, where he was invited to share the experience of his life and of this simple revolution that is challenging the failure of one of the most violent and overcrowded prison systems in the world, one which returned to the front pages early this year because of a wave of revolts, with prisoners decapitated and burned by their cellmates.

“The press talks about it because about a hundred people lost their lives all at once,” explains Ferreira, “but in the Brazilian prisons, someone dies every day, through suicide, violence, or illness.” Ferreira was a metalworker who knew nothing about prisoners. “I still don’t know anything,” he says. “I’m an apprentice, and I want to die as an apprentice.” A Combonian lay missionary, he has dedicated the last 33 years of his life to prisoners, ever since at the age of 21 he met APAC.

What is the problem of today’s prisons and the prison system?
Society makes a very big mistake when it thinks that simply incarcerating someone solves any problems. A prisoner is a social problem. He is a wound, because he is the result of unstructured, broken families, the absence of relevant public policy, and the drug trade. But society does not take responsibility for the problem. This is convenient because it doesn’t want to touch the wound and risk seeing that we could all very well be in the prisoner’s shoes. As Saint Augustine said, “There is no evil that one commits for which there is not already someone else who is capable of committing it.”

Why?
A person abandoned behind bars will be released to wound society again because prison has not resolved his personal problems. In Brazil, but not only here, there are grave problems inside the prisons, including a very strong presence of the criminal clans that split their power among the prisoners. They control all the goings-on inside and outside. They occupy the void left by the State. Prisoners necessarily must join one faction or another. It is a system of corruption that involves everyone. And so they remain prisoners forever, because they may leave the prison, but the prison will not leave them.

You assert that the APAC method will have an impact on the prison system in this millenium, and that no matter what happens, after this experience, it will not be the same. Why are you so certain?
Because God is tired of this misery, of seeing His children suffer so much. APAC is a dream of God, His answer to this suffering. The dominant mentality wants the prisoner to suffer or die. This is such a deeply rooted preconception that it will not be rooted out overnight. Maybe it will take centuries. But this work is growing, and it is growing at the foot of the Cross. In the itinerary of spirituality, which is one of the twelve pillars, we do “the journey of the prisoner,” a Bible study of the Gospel of Mark in eight sections. We don’t preach who Jesus is, but the person in recovery discovers it himself, experiences it himself. We are applying this in 44 APAC prisons and in three regular prisons.

You are the one who put the Itaúna APAC keys in the hands of the prisoner José de Jesus: he was sentenced to 56 years in prison and had already escaped 12 times. He was the one who, asked why he didn’t escape from the APAC, answered, “Nobody runs away from love.” It is difficult to believe that the change truly happens only because of love.
But that’s the way it is. We escape from many things in life, but not from true love. “Nobody runs away from love” is true on one condition: if you have a living experience of love. When I gave Jose the keys, he experienced this love. It is an experience that can take three years or an eternity to mature. Or it can happen in the blink of an eye.... It’s something you can’t explain.

Why did you give him the keys?
José needed a gesture of trust that could win him over, so that he could travel the road of freedom. The same thing happened, for example, with me in the case of Washington, another prisoner in the process of rehabilitation. He was very aggressive and we had a lot of difficulty with him. He didn’t want to do anything and his attitude spread to the group. We were about to transfer him when there was one of the Days of Spirituality and he was there in the front row, just because he was obligated to be there. We were in the auditorium of the lockdown area in which there are eight doors that open and close in a sequence. When I asked, “Why don’t you escape?” he jumped up and answered, “Because the doors are locked.” So I ordered them to be opened. One by one. “So why don’t you go now?” “Who’s to guarantee that there won’t be someone outside to get me?” “You don’t believe me? Go outside and bring back a sign that you’ve been ‘out.’” He got up and went out. Absolute silence. They were the longest five minutes of my life (laughter). Washington came back with a small branch in his hand. I asked him, “Why did you return? You have a long sentence,” but he began to laugh. “Nobody ever trusted me.” Love can rehabilitate everyone, starting with someone’s name and an encounter.

What is the love of which you speak?
It is the mercy of a God who bends down over us. Love has many faces. The first is joy–joy is the fastest way to reach the heart, to enter the innermost depths of the person. The other face is sacrifice. The person who loves also gives up something. I spend a lot more time with those who are in the process of rehabilitation than I do with my own blood siblings or my mother. But the sacrifice is never all at once.

Did you believe right away that the method–betting everything on freedom–truly worked?
The first time that I brought the prisoners to the APAC National Congress–there were various prisoners from different structures, considered among the worst–I couldn’t sleep for worrying that someone would escape. One night, two nights... On the third, a friend asked me, “Since when are you the one who controls whether they escape or not?” Well, I still didn’t believe 100% that there was nothing to worry about. I trusted and I went to sleep. The next morning they were all there. I understood that it was true. It’s like in those hallways where the lights turn on a section at a time as you walk. The experience of God is like that. You take a step, and the light goes on, and you walk up to there. When you reach the darkness, then you have to take another step. It’s the same thing in the APACs.

Doesn’t anyone escape from the APACs??
Yes, it has happened. A very few cases, but yes. And why? Because they did not have that experience of love.

So it’s not enough just to apply the method.
No. Those who break from crime don’t do so because the methodology was applied completely, but because a bond of esteem and friendship was created. This is what changes a person. The bond is created in many ways, sometimes the simplest ways. A person in the process of rehabilitation has a toothache, and you call the dentist, and then the prisoner tells you, “I suffered from toothaches so much in the other prisons before this one...” For us, it’s not enough for a man to change his behavior. The change is exterior, but inside there is a volcano of rebellion, of desire for revenge. The mentality has to change, and this coincides with the change of heart.

And for you, when someone escapes or slides back into crime...
I never ask myself, “Valdeci, how many people have you rehabilitated?” I ask myself, “Valdeci, have you loved?” Eugenio, a 23-year-old, completed his sentence, and when he was released he got back into drugs. They killed him. In front of his corpse, I said to myself, “my love has failed.” Over time, though, I’m coming to understand that love never fails. God will not be overcome by our evil, because He never tires.

Today the method has been exported outside Brazil, and also to Europe. How did this happen?
There are different experiences. In Chile, for example, there are already 48 prisons with APAC pavilions. These sectors are completely different from the others: beautiful, clean, where each prisoner has his own room. They are oases in the desert. In Colombia we have begun an APAC for women prisoners. Out of 1,800 women, 40 are there. In other countries, like Holland or the Czech Republic, there are experiences with prisoners at the end of their sentences. In any case, in most countries, from Uruguay to Hong Kong, the method is applied partially, with features adapted to national legislation. In Italy, there is an experience in Rimini, because we don’t have the resources to go elsewhere. The tree is in Brazil, but the seed falls in other places, far from the source. How to maintain the bond with the origin is an open question. We don’t know what will happen, but APAC is not ours, not Ottoboni’s, not mine, not the Itaúna Tribunal’s... It is at the service of all humanity.