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The Arena da Amazonia stadium under construction in Manaus
The 44,000-capacity Arena da Amazonia in Manaus will host four group stage matches during the competition but many fear it will be left vacant and become a white elephant.

Even Fifa admits on its website that the city is "not a traditional hotbed of Brazilian football".

But prison authorities have raised the possibility of using the massive arena to hold suspects temporarily before being transferred elsewhere.

Sabino Marques, president of the Amazonas custodial system's monitoring and control group, told Brazilian website G1: "After the World Cup, I believe there will be entirely idle spaces. Every day we have arrests in Amazonas and where are we going to put them?

"The prison in Manaus has capacity for 200 to 300 people but there are at least 1,000 detainees there."

He suggested using the stadium as a triage centre for detentions of up to 72 hours to relieve Raimundo Vidal Pessoa public prison, where earlier this year, inmates staged a revolt that left 18 people injured.

Mr Marques suggested the stadium's primary use as a football arena was not an obstacle to his proposal.

"First of all, it's important to find solutions," he added. "No one is going to lie down on the grass. It's no privilege for Amazonas that the prison system is getting unbearable." Last week, Guilherme Calmon, from the National Council of Justice, visited the prison to see the levels of overcrowding.

"Today, Amazonas has one of the highest percentages of pretrial detainees compared to the Brazilian average," he said.

"Around 78 per cent of the prison population are pretrial detainees and the national average is 42 per cent." The Arena da Amazonia is due to be delivered to Fifa by December this year.

Some 1,700 labourers are working in two shifts to finish the stadium, which has received £106 million in federal funding