The prisoner who committed suicide this weekend in a cell at Quatre Camins had been living in the intake module for months, separated from the rest. According to what ARA has learned, he was living in isolation as a measure to protect him from other inmates from whom he had received death threats. He had been in this situation since June, and although this measure allowed him to leave his cell for two hours a day, he had not left for about a month.

With prisons reaching their capacity limit, one of the ways the administration is trying to gain space is by promoting semi-liberty. As ARA already explained, the general directive to prison workers is to trend toward openness, which the Government had already defended in the previous legislature to improve reintegration and which now also takes on a logistical meaning. While professionals and academics agree that semi-liberties improve the prospects of a prisoner not reoffending, the acceleration of third-degree statuses in recent months leaves some concerns among workers, who warn that in some cases they do not have enough time to treat the inmates. "Excarcerations are being done a bit ahead of time and we don't have time to treat them," summarizes a prison psychologist in conversation with ARA.

An inmate at Quatre Camins killed his cellmate tonight in the disciplinary module. At around 11:30 p.m., an inmate in the neighboring cell used the intercom in the room to warn the officers that he heard the noise of a fight, as ARA has learned. The workers knocked on the cell door and the aggressor told them to enter. When they entered, they found him sitting with the other inmate on the floor covered in blood. The victim reportedly died of asphyxiation after being beaten.

Prisons are resorting to all options available to accommodate more than 9,500 inmates, a figure that accounts for 95% of the system's total capacity. Saturation in many modules affects the day-to-day life of prisoners and staff, and the prison sources consulted by ARA agree that having more people in the same space encourages more tensions and conflicts. "There end up being more tense situations over things you wouldn't even think about outside of a prison. For having to queue for breakfast, because someone else finished the milk... When there are many, small tensions are harder to see and can trigger incidents," a prison educator explains to ARA. "There is more movement, more cunning, and the ratio of professionals remains the same," she adds.

Oh, holy Virgin of the Push. L'ARA breaks a story saying that Catalan prisons are at the limit. Meaning we have more prisoners than cells in the prisons, well. In the Figueres one “there are inmates sleeping in the infirmary instead of the usual modules because they don't fit there” and, in Lledoners, there are some who “were serving isolation sanctions in the intake module, where they normally only place those who have just arrived at the prison”. The Department of Justice publishes that prisons are at 95%. On August 31st there were 9,597 prisoners and the total capacity of the system is 10,016.

At the Figueres prison, there are inmates sleeping in the infirmary instead of the usual modules because there is no room for them there, and in the last week, a dozen inmates at Lledoners were serving isolation sanctions in the admissions module, where they normally only place those who have just arrived at the prison. These are two of the situations that different prison system workers have explained to ARA, all with the same reason: there are more and more prisoners, and the space in the prisons is the same. Five years ago, there were 1,800 fewer prisoners than now, which means that the prison population has grown by 23% and the prison system is approaching its limit. According to public data from the Department of Justice, right now the prisons are at 95%: on August 31, there were 9,597 prisoners and the total capacity of the system is 10,016.

Catalan prisons are one step away from reaching their maximum capacity. According to data from the Department of Justice, as of August 31st there were 9,597 prisoners for a total of 10,016 places, meaning prisons are at 95% of their capacity. This is the case because in the last five years there has been a notable increase in inmates: 1,800 more. Beware, however, of making simplistic interpretations and relating this increase to immigration, because the peak of inmates in Catalan prisons was reached in 2009, with 10,525, and until 2013 it remained above 10,000.

Assaults within Catalan prisons have skyrocketed in the last ten years, in parallel with the increase in the prison population and a staff that is not growing at the same rate. According to data from the Department of Justice accessed by ARA, 265 workers have been assaulted since the beginning of the year, while in 2025, 677 assaults were recorded – 699, according to unions – five times more than a decade ago. In the same period, incidents among inmates have also doubled to 1,983 last year (see graphs).

The Movistar+ platform has premiered a magnificent BBC series. It could be considered a more adult and mature version of what Merlí intended. Waiting for the Out (The Life in the Shadow) is based on the memoirs of Andy West. The protagonist is Dan Stewer, a young philosophy professor who leaves university to teach in prison. The decision, which is incomprehensible to his brother, connects with some of his most intimate fears. The son of an abuser and a delinquent, he is one of the few men in the family who has not ended up behind bars. His father, his uncle, and his brother all spent time incarcerated. Dan is the only one who seems to have escaped a cursed inheritance. And despite everything, he resolves to enter prison in a different way. In The Life in the Shadow, the prison drama takes a back seat. The protagonist is, apparently, free. But as the episodes progress, we will question this premise. Dan will converse with the inmates about Descartes or Locke and pose existential questions to them, aiming to stimulate their thinking and reflect on their circumstances. And through his interventions, he will try to understand who his father was and why he behaved the way he did. He will confront his fears, traumas, childhood memories, and unexpressed past conflicts that make him a victim of another type of condemnation, from which he doesn't know how to escape. In this sense, the series is part of the abundant body of fiction where protagonists carry wounds due to their parents.The characters are not at all stereotyped and the dialogues with the inmates are splendid. It is not a basic philosophy Wikipedia of a wise man illustrating illiterates. The more theoretical reflections overlap with the most logical miseries of a prison: the sense of justice, consciousness, guilt, the possibility of changing or becoming a better person. “What makes you be you?”, “Is your self from ten years ago the same as who you are now?” are the first questions he shares with his students and that the viewer can also pose to themselves.Life in the shadow consists of only six chapters and, despite this, you see the characters evolve in a very natural way. In the background, it reflects on masculinity, on how family can determine our destiny or the possibilities we have of breaking with the inertias we have inherited from our parents. It is a series that, once you reach the end, you can start again, because it allows you to read the subtlest details that we had overlooked.Don't miss it, because it's one of the best options this summer, even though it's not, precisely, a very cheerful or bright story. From time to time, however, it gives you a slight smile. The series poses a reflection on freedom, which goes beyond being behind bars or not, and asks us what vital circumstances imprison and limit us, even without us realizing it.

The man imprisoned for killing a flatmate, dismembering the body and hiding the torso in a suitcase has escaped and his whereabouts are unknown. According to El Caso and confirmed to ARA by prison sources, the man has not returned to Quatre Camins prison, where he is serving his sentence, after a planned outing he made in Barcelona this Tuesday. According to prison sources consulted by ARA, the man had completed three years of his sentence, which he would have finished serving in October 2033. Tuesday's was his first planned outing, a regulated activity that is part of prison treatment and in which inmates are accompanied by prison staff.

The classroom is filled twice every morning and twice every afternoon. They are "more or less" constant groups. The teacher explains that being in a prison, and even more so in the one for Young Offenders, leads to "a lot of mobility". "It's not easy to sustain a group, but when it happens, truly beautiful things emerge," he says. As he speaks, about a dozen boys are progressing on their projects. Some are drawing, some are painting with brushes, and others are making sculptures from cardboard sheets. Like the rest of the inmates at the Young Offenders prison, they are all adults, but under 25 years old.

The Pope has reserved the two small-format, more intimate events for the second and last day of his visit to Barcelona to meet with vulnerable groups. In the morning, he met with about eighty inmates at the Brians 1 prison, in Sant Esteve Sesrovires, before heading to the monastery of Montserrat. In the afternoon, he chose the modest church of Sant Agustí, in the heart of Barcelona's Raval, on his way to the central event of the blessing of the Sagrada Família's tower of Jesus. It was, therefore, a day marked, on the one hand, by two great symbols of Catalan spirituality and, on the other, by two points where current social problems are felt.

One of the Pope's stops in Catalonia will be at Brians 1 prison, in Sant Esteve Sesrovires. With a little more than a week to go before the visit, a group of 14 human rights defense entities has written a letter to Leo XIV warning him of the state of the Catalan prison system, which they say "shows signs of clear regression". Regarding Brians 1 specifically, they add that in recent years it is the prison "that has received the most complaints for alleged mistreatment, isolation practices, mechanical restraints, and also suicides, which are often a consequence of them".

Prison reintegration workers' unions have called off Union sources have stated in declarations to ARA that this commission formalizes for the first time this joint task to review the safety of CIRE staff, the public company that employs inmates within prisons and also hires the trainers who teach trades to inmates and who work with them in cafeteries and canteens.

Workers involved in reintegration in Catalan prisons have announced a strike for Thursday, June 11, as prison sources have explained to ARA. It is the third professional group to have called for stoppages this year, after teachers and healthcare workers. "We are the only group whose working and safety conditions are still pending review," denounced the inter-center committee of the Centre d'Iniciatives per a la Reinserció (CIRE), the public company that employs and trains prisoners.

The director of the Puig de les Basses prison, Jordi Oliveras, has resigned from his post following the suicide of three inmates at the penitentiary center since the beginning of the year. The last one was this Monday, when a prisoner who was in isolation took his own life. The Department of Justice and Democratic Quality reported this Friday that in the coming days there will be "a change" at the head of the Figueres prison and a new director will be appointed. According to the department, the director until now has placed his position at the disposal of the Secretariat of Penal Measures and Reintegration and its head, Elena Pérez, has accepted the resignation.

The prison system's response to the murder of a cook at Mas d'Enric has not satisfied all workers. In fact, it has fueled protests from some prison professionals. Two years after the crime, some workers denounce a "sustained discrimination" compared to their colleagues, security officers. Those protesting are staff from the same public company where Núria López worked when an inmate killed her and then committed suicide. Now, the inter-center committee – which represents the workers of this company throughout Catalonia – threatens a strike if the Generalitat does not agree before next Tuesday to give them the same improvements that Interior officials and other professionals in the sector have received.

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.

Every day, people who have already served their sentences are released from prison, and this is usually not news, unlike the release this Thursday of an inmate from the Ponent penitentiary center. He was already known in the 80s for his robberies and has spent half his life behind bars. He served a sentence for killing two people, including an agent while fleeing a robbery, and also for shooting an ex-policeman who died months later. After five months of freedom, he returned to prison for a robbery, and this week he regains his freedom. Now, the workers who have treated him in prison have warned that they see a risk of him reoffending, among other reasons because he has not wanted to follow any treatment program.

Carlota Elias was clear that she needed a topic that would motivate her for her final degree project in criminology. And she came across the word hyrbridophilia: people who are attracted to criminals. She has finally turned it into the book Hibristofília, a tale of (enclosed) fairies.