Repeat offenders in law

We all agree that it is unacceptable for people to be arrested hundreds of times for petty theft and robbery, only to then continue acting with impunity on our streets. Understandably, this reality generates frustration, distrust, and a perception of failure in both the police and judicial systems, which is always exploited by those who do not hesitate to manipulate it for political gain.

Given this situation, it is clear that decisive action is needed, without excuses or delays. However, the problem arises when decisiveness is confused with noise and effectiveness with sensational headlines. When an issue emerges that generates public alarm, the most common approach is to propose harsher penalties in the Penal Code as a magic bullet, believing that this will automatically change the behavior of those who intend to commit crimes.

We have countless examples of legislation passed hastily in the hope that increasing penalties will have an immediate deterrent effect. But if this were true, to take an extreme example, we would have to accept that countries that apply the death penalty for the most serious crimes would have much lower crime rates than those where sentences are less severe. Criminological data and studies have long since refuted this simplistic correlation: there is no automatic relationship between the severity of punishments and the number of crimes committed.

These days, as a result of various political urgencies from those who need parliamentary support and those who need to raise the banner of a hardline approach, we find ourselves immersed in the processing of a new amendment to the Penal Code, agreed between PSOE, PP and Junts, which wants to toughen penalties of prison for repeat offenders. With the new regulations, for example, stealing a mobile phone can carry a sentence of between one and three years in prison. Thus, to respond to a public outcry that, in my opinion, is entirely justified, the legislator is repeating a questionable political practice, namely, relying solely on the severity of penalties.

Let's proceed with caution, however. As numerous experts, judges, and prosecutors have already warned, this measure could end up having the opposite effect to that intended. Increasing penalties is not procedurally neutral: it requires more complex and rigorous legal procedures that slow down the resolution of cases. Therefore, the foreseeable result is that someone who steals a mobile phone could easily spend two or three years awaiting trial and, as one can easily imagine, might not miss the opportunity to continue committing crimes during this time. Thus, the effectiveness of the Penal Code will likely be undermined by the enormous delays in the administration of justice.

As I have written before in these pages, the factor that most decisively influences recidivism is not so much the letter of the Penal Code as the chronic collapse of the courts.

The police, generally speaking, do their job, as demonstrated by their ability to arrest a person dozens of times. But everything gets bogged down when the case reaches the courts, not because the judges aren't working hard, but because there aren't enough judges. Catalonia has approximately 11 judges per 100,000 inhabitants, while the European Union average is 20, almost double. This explains, for example, why so-called fast-track trials, which should be resolved in fifteen days, end up taking fifteen months. The Penal Code already offers sufficient mechanisms to impose harsher sentences and remove repeat offenders from the streets, if final judgments could be obtained in a few weeks for minor offenses committed a month ago.

The diagnosis has been made for years: the main problem with the justice system in our country is the lack of judges and resources to provide swift and effective responses. And this is essentially an organizational and budgetary issue that, for whatever reason, has never been prioritized.

As long as legislators continue to resort to noisy but ineffective measures, designed more to appease outrage than to solve the problem, this pattern of repeated offenses will persist. Too often, effective solutions generate fewer headlines than grandiose pronouncements, but political urgency provides fertile ground for sensationalist gestures that yield no practical results.