Prisons detail that 264 attacks were classified as minor and another 234 were recorded without injuries to the worker.
MADRID, 29 Ene. (EUROPA PRESS) –
Prison officials have reported that 2023 closed with a record number of 508 attacks in the prisons of the General State Administration, ten of them serious. This is an increase of 12% compared to the previous year and marks an average of “one attack every 17 hours”, according to the professional association Tu Abandono Me Podemos Matar (TAMPM).
The data is part of a response from the Secretary General of Penitentiary Institutions, Ángel Luis Ortiz, to this group of prison officials in which it is detailed that only 1.9% of the attacks were serious. In addition, 264 attacks were classified as minor and 234 were recorded without injuries to the worker, with none as very serious.
In the response under the Transparency Law, consulted by Europa Press, it is detailed that the serious injuries were recorded in 2023 in the prisons of Albacete, Castellón II, Las Palmas II, Lugo Bonxe, Lugo Monterroso, Madrid V Soto del Real, Madrid VI Aranjuez, Ocaña I, Zaragoza and Penitentiary Psychiatry of Seville, with an attack in each of these establishments.
TAMPM has criticized that at the end of 2017 the General Secretariat of Penitentiary Institutions, dependent on the Ministry of the Interior, approved a protocol to “whitewash” the total figures of attacks, since, according to them, “death threats, pushing, touching or spitting.”
The association recalls that attacks exceeded the figure of 300 cases in the three-year period 2015-2017, although with the new way of accounting they dropped in 2018 and 2019 to 250. Then the Covid-19 pandemic forced the closure of prison facilities, which which had a favorable impact on attacks due to the “reduction in the entry of prohibited objects or narcotic substances.” However, the return to normality caused the number of attacks to skyrocket starting in 2022, up to 453 and 508 in the last year.
TAMPM has reiterated the demand for prison officers to be recognized as agents of authority in the performance of their duties, an aspiration that remains unrealized despite the Government registering a bill in July 2020 that remains “kept in the drawer”.
