A lifetime in and out of prison: "I wasn't used to living with people who have killed"

San Esteban SesroviresBenjamín 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.

After that first week in prison in 1991, he didn't stay out for long. During his first furlough, he fled to Granada, where some of his family lived. He recalls that he was on the run for exactly 1,165 days, in a town where everyone had known him since he was a child, but no one knew he had been in prison. That is, until the Civil Guard caught him committing a crime at a fair in Almería. "I gave my brother's name, and they arrested me. I served two years in prison under my brother's name, and then they released me." He admits that this caused problems for his brother, because the criminal record was in his name.

12 causes

Once released, he still had an outstanding sentence in Barcelona, ​​this one in his name. He couldn't go back home—"if you're smart, you know they'll come looking for you"—and he had no job or money. "Back to a life of crime. A friend and I committed a robbery and we were arrested. From then on, when I was granted furloughs, I tried to do things right." Unlike the "game" that was his first week in prison in Tarragona, in Barcelona he encountered "all kinds of people." "It really shocked me; I wasn't used to living with rapists, with people who had killed."

It was also while in prison that he met the mother of his daughter. He remembers how, at that time, school and theater activities were co-ed. When Carnival approached, there could be thirty or forty people preparing the decorations. "One or two teachers couldn't keep an eye on everyone. That year, I think there were nineteen pregnancies; it got out of hand," he admits.

During the pandemic, he was free and found himself living on the streets. Eventually, all his fines for violating the lockdown were canceled. It was around that time that he accumulated the 12 charges that keep him incarcerated today. Now he works cleaning the prison, lives in the drug unit, and the job gives him the "privilege" of not sharing a cell like most inmates. He says he has never fought, confronted the guards, or been involved in riots. In the courtyards, he says he has seen all kinds of drugs, but that "thankfully, the demon of heroin is gone."