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.

Benjamín Vega is 60 years old and has been in prison for the first time for 35 years. Since then, he has been in and out of prison. In 1991, a judge in Tarragona "punished him for a week" after he was caught stealing in Salou three times in a row in just a few days, and he admits he took it "like a game." "The worst thing about it all is that I didn't learn to be afraid in prison, because if I had been, I wouldn't have gone back," he says now, with twelve convictions that—if he doesn't get a sentence reduction, as he is currently trying—he will finish serving in 2039, when he will be 73 years old. While in prison, he has had two children: a son who is now 27 and a daughter who is 16, the daughter of a woman he met in the penitentiary. Mayo will be a grandfather for the first time, and it's been two years since he separated from his partner: "I could say I've been with a woman for thirty years, but what have we been through if I've only been on the streets for a year? We've only known each other from four visits, four times of an hour or an hour and a half." In prison, he explains that he met Vaquilla, "a great guy," with whom he says he shared his first experience in solitary confinement. He also ran into Dani Alves at the Brians 2 sports center, who, after much persistence, signed a pair of Real Madrid boots for his son.

The continued increase in the number of inmates in Catalonia has led the Catalan government to decide to expand prison spaces to prevent overcrowding. Specifically, it will build two new modules within the current perimeter of the Mas de Enric prison in El Catllar (Tarragonès), which will accommodate a total of 256 more prisoners. The new buildings will be for men and will be built on the site of a disused soccer field, as inmates already use the sports facilities in each module.

Of the 7,302 prisoners who were involved in a violent incident between 2017 and 2022 in Catalan prisons, 5,785 did not have a valid risk assessment at that time, either because it had not yet been carried out or because its validity, which is six months, had expired. This represents 79.22% of prisoners, according to the study. Institutional violence in Catalonia's prisons, The algorithm is based on all the incidents recorded by prison workers in Catalonia in the computerised penitentiary system and includes, among others, assaults, self-harm and disturbances of order. According to ARA, the Justice Department is working on an update to the RisCanvi prediction algorithm – a test to assess the risk of each inmate reoffending – to make it more accurate and with the intention of having it active this year.

The United States announced on Tuesday the release of Marc Fogel, a professor who had been detained in Russia for more than three years. The handover of the American citizen was part of an "exchange" with Moscow, according to the White House, which said Fogel, convicted of drug trafficking, had been imprisoned "unjustly." It was Donald Trump himself who welcomed the professor on his return home.

Should politicians be prosecuted for statements they have made in the exercise of their mandate? This is the title of the report published this Monday by the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe by 70 votes in favor, 28 against and 12 abstentions. It includes in the same 28 pages the case of the persecution of politicians of the Kurdish minority in Turkey and "the prosecution of several Catalan politicians finally sentenced to long prison sentences for sedition and other crimes, among other things for statements made in the exercise of their political mandates in support of an unconstitutional referendum on the independence of Catalonia". The simple fact that the Catalan process is framed within this report is already a victory for the narrative of independence abroad, but the text goes even further and demands that the prisoners be pardoned or released, Euro-orders cancelled, charges against low-ranking officials over the referendum withdrawn and prisoners not to be required to disavow their political convictions to obtain more favourable prison regimes.