Based on a doctor's actual experiences inside the Carandiru Dentention Center in Sao Paulo, Brazil, this 145-minute marathon of a film is successful only in the sense that it makes the viewer feel like he's doing 45 years in a muggy cell.
A nameless doctor starts work at the notoriously violent and overcrowded prison, making AIDS prevention his first priority. Prisoner after prisoner is introduced, each presented as a likable rogue or justified killer, with the entire institution shown as an all-male paradise in which convicts, unruly on the outside, govern themselves and are almost always well-behaved. Sex and drugs are commonplace, the warden is happily impotent and the guards almost nonexistent.
Once introductions are over, we get a little bit of story for each and then it's time to present a brutally one-sided version of an infamous 1992 riot, with police essentially portrayed as faceless killing machines, in which 111 out of 7,500 inmates died. The lack of any overriding story and the blatant dishonesty with which hardened criminals are drawn make Carandiru nothing more than polemic propoganda.