CAT/OP/BRA/2/Add.1 community councils’ access to correctional facilities, individuals and offices, and the use of audiovisual equipment and other matters. 100. Community councils perform a legitimate and important function, bringing prison and society closer and countering the social invisibility incarceration helps create. They provide a means of better understanding social relations and embody a hope that it will be possible to move on from the problematic model for the resolution of social conflicts that prison has become. G. Maximum security regime and organized crime 101. The Subcommittee considered that maximum security prisons should not be the norm and that they should be avoided especially in the case of pretrial detainees. In keeping with the Subcommittee’s recommendations, the Federal Government is not encouraging the creation of maximum security state prisons. The situation in the State of Espírito Santo, which has a maximum security state prison, is the exception, not the rule. 102. The federal maximum security prisons are provided for by law and are suitable for special cases, their objective being to promote public safety and protect the inmates. The model chosen for the federal maximum security prisons is justified by the profile of the inmates transferred to these prisons – i.e. those who are most dangerous. 103. The Federal Penitentiary System was conceived as a contribution to national public safety, isolating the country’s most dangerous prisoners with a view to combating violence and organized crime through differentiated criminal sentence enforcement. The purpose of the federal correctional institutions is to facilitate the administrative implementation of measures restricting the freedom of prisoners — whether awaiting trial or convicted — whose internment is justified in the interests of public safety or their own safety, or of those subject to the differentiated disciplinary regime under the Federal Penitentiary Regulations, approved by Decree No. 6049 of 27 February 2007. 104. It should be noted that the federal system is an exception to the rules on prison terms for the accused: an accused person may not remain incarcerated for more than 360 days, a term renewable once if incarceration is still necessary. 105. In this context, the federal maximum security prisons were built to accommodate highly dangerous inmates who may jeopardize order and public safety in their states of origin. It should be emphasized that the same penal and human rights legislation applies and is observed in maximum security facilities as well. Impact of federal prisons’ action on organized crime 106. Decree No. 6049/2007, which approved the Federal Penitentiary Regulations, states that as a preventive measure to stop the formation of criminal gangs in federal prisons, “convicted prisoners shall not have contact with those awaiting trial and shall be housed in separate blocks”. A further such preventive measure is the placing of inmates in individual cells, each federal prison having a maximum capacity of 208 inmates. 107. The Federal Penitentiary System also has a Prison Information and Intelligence Office, which controls and protects information obtained by the various agencies of the Federal Penitentiary System. It also liaises between the Federal Penitentiary System and the federal and state intelligence agencies, handling and passing on information about criminal organizations, gang members and the implications of their activities in the prison system. 108. The Office is likewise the body responsible for advising the Directorate of the Federal Penitentiary System when critical situations arise in federal prisons. It is the body GE.14-42059 25