The Parliament of Catalonia has just decided to create a working group on the Catalan prison system that will have a human rights perspective. This is a very necessary and timely initiative. Catalonia has prisons and has prisoners, and the government of the Generalitat configures the public services system that this requires every day. It is already known: the health of a democracy can be measured by the level of respect it has for the rights of its prisoners. Nelson Mandela said a similar phrase.The panorama we face corresponds to a situation of complexity often ignored socially. We continue to have a rate of more than one hundred prisoners per hundred thousand inhabitants (more than 9,000 people); we have a very high length of stay in prison, of 19.3 months (at the forefront of Europe); we have a prison population with an alarming prevalence of mental health issues (close to 5% with serious mental disorders; more than 60% with personality disorders), and data on inmate suicides in constant increase for years.Taking this reality into account, we must look at prisons and ask ourselves if we are doing it right.Ten years ago, Parliament already created a study commission on the initiative of the Committee for the Prevention of Torture of the Council of Europe. According to an agreement of this committee, signed by Spain, the State is obliged to train prison staff in human rights matters, among many other actions. At that time, the initiative was understood in the face of a figure: in 2016, isolation measures were applied on more than two thousand occasions in Catalan prisons. It was necessary to know the causes of such a high use of a measure that, according to international standards, must be used restrictively.I then participated in a training activity for all prison staff. International regulations on human rights in prisons were explained, from the UN and the Council of Europe to the European Union. We have a good handful of norms and duties regarding necessary public actions. When I finished my session, I had to listen to a public employee – what’s more, head of services – who said that the training was a waste of time and a way to squander public money. A public employee belittling basic knowledge, knowledge without which it is not possible to do their job well. I became worried. Perhaps it was an attitude that allowed us to understand the abusive use of such a serious disciplinary measure.Years later, in the terrible spring of 2024, the trade union movement of prison public employees caused a situation of extreme gravity that put very basic public services of the prison system at risk. I still wonder (many of us wonder) how it is possible that the Public Prosecutor's Office did not act to investigate facts that could be constitutive of crimes against public order, by causing, for example, suspensions of trials. It was a shameful and unacceptable episode in the history of the Generalitat administration.