Treatment, Reintegration, and Quality of Prison Life: Perception by Inmates

Date01 October 2019
DOI10.1177/0306624X19851669
Published date01 October 2019
Subject MatterArticles
https://doi.org/10.1177/0306624X19851669
International Journal of
Offender Therapy and
Comparative Criminology
2019, Vol. 63(13) 2291 –2317
© The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0306624X19851669
journals.sagepub.com/home/ijo
Article
Treatment, Reintegration,
and Quality of Prison Life:
Perception by Inmates
Jesús Barquín1, Miguel Ángel Cano1,
and María de los Ángeles Calvo1
Abstract
This article inquires into the validity of the hypothesis on which prison sentences
are formally based in Spain, according to Article 25.2 of Spanish Constitution:
reeducation and social reintegration of the convicted person. For this purpose,
we have analyzed the current state of prison “morals” in five penitentiary facilities
located in the south of Spain through a representative sample of prisoners. They have
answered a questionnaire that includes, among others, some questions connected
with the following two issues: (a) their relationship with prison staff, and (b) the
prison environment as related to the effectiveness of their treatment in terms of
their reintegration into society. This investigation will also allow to detect possible
differences in the quality of prison life in the five penitentiaries analyzed.
Keywords
prison life, imprisonment, prison treatment, reintegration, prison sentences, Spanish
penitentiary facilities
Introduction
Spanish criminologists have not focused their work particularly on the prison system
over the last decades. Their main fields of interest have typically been the study of the
causes of crime, the offender, and, occasionally, the victim of the criminal offence.
However, in recent years, there is an increasing number of quantitative and qualitative
studies on the prison environment in Spain, whose purpose has been to analyze both the
situation of Spanish prisons and, to a lesser extent, the so-called “quality of prison life.”
1University of Granada, Spain
Corresponding Author:
Jesús Barquín, Full Professor of Criminal Law and Criminology, University of Granada, C/Rector López
Argüeta s/n, Granada 18071, Spain.
Email: jbarquin@ugr.es
851669IJOXXX10.1177/0306624X19851669International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative CriminologyBarquín et al.
research-article2019
2292 International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 63(13)
One of the first empirical studies on inmate population in Spain was carried out in
the 1990s by Cabrera Cabrera and Ríos Martín. In this study, both authors developed
a questionnaire, which was completed by a sample of 1,011 inmates who were serving
prison sentences during 1997. It should be noted that this questionnaire was not dis-
tributed directly by the researchers in the concerned prisons. Instead, after the neces-
sary approval by the General Secretariat for Penitentiary Institutions (Secretaría
General de Instituciones Penitenciarias [SGIP]) was granted, the questionnaire was
sent to the inmates via mail post and distributed by the prisons’ management. As a
result of this survey, a sort of X-ray of prison life was obtained, a specific and firsthand
view based on the story of the prisoners themselves (Cabrera Cabrera & Ríos, 1998).
This work became the empirical basis of subsequent research that will be mentioned
later. The premise of the study by Cabrera Cabrera and Ríos Martín is that, to actually
know the reality of Spanish prisons, it is essential to collect information directly from
the inmates (Cabrera Cabrera & Rios, 1998). From the results obtained in their
research, these authors conclude that the enforcement of prison sentences by the peni-
tentiary administration in Spain in the 1990s was inconsistent with the principles of
individual treatment that, formally, should inspire every decision in this field. They
criticized the fact that the ultimate decision on the reincorporation into society of the
inmate was not taken by the treatment teams, which only had a role as proposers, but
by the central administration, which, as such, was typically far from the penitentiary
centers. According to the authors, the administration decided “according to abstract
and generic criteria based exclusively on alleged needs of public safety and political
security” (Cabrera Cabrera & Ríos, 1998, p. 221). Their main conclusion is that, on the
dates when the investigation was carried out, the Spanish prison system was designed
and configured from the exclusive point of view of security in almost every regard:
budget allocation, regime, treatment, and even architecture.
From an essentially quantitative perspective, the analysis carried out by Benítez
Jiménez in 2006 on the evolution of the prison population in Spain between 1998 and
2006 deserves to be highlighted. The aim of the study was to identify, through the
exploitation of the statistical data published by official instances, the demographic
characteristics of the prison population in Spain. The conclusion reached by Benítez
Jiménez is that, at the time of the study, Spain stood out both for its high rate of incar-
ceration—when compared with other European countries—and for the density of
occupation of its prisons. She predicted a steady increase in the prison population in
future years (Benítez Jiménez, 2007). This did occur, albeit only for some time,
because after 2010, when a maximum of 76,951 inmates was reached, the prison popu-
lation in Spain has been shrinking every year.
Perhaps one of the most important empirical studies carried out in Spain about
prison life is the one conducted by Gallego Díaz, Cabrera Cabrera, Ríos Martín, and
Segovia Bernabé in 2010, which elaborated on research published in 1998 by two of
its coauthors (Cabrera Cabrera & Ríos, 1998). The methodology of this study com-
bined the statistical exploitation of a questionnaire that was answered by a sample of
1,668 inmates serving sentences in 46 prisons, together with the analysis of the texts
collected in the open questions formulated to the prisoners themselves, as well as with

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