MADRID, 5 Nov. (EUROPA PRESS) –
Attacks on prison officials have risen 39% since the first year of the Government of Pedro Sánchez and Fernando Grande-Marlaska in the Ministry of the Interior, going from 223 cases in 2018 to 310 recorded until September 30, 2022 .
Taking as a reference the total number of attacks on prison officials since 2015, the 310 incidents so far in 2022 are in line with what was recorded in previous years, except for 2020 and 2021, both years marked by the restrictions of the Covid pandemic. -19.
In this way, 2015 recorded 341 attacks on officials, compared to 359 in 2016 and 305 in 2017. In 2018 – the government changed in the middle of the year with the arrival of Sánchez – the incidents dropped to 223 cases, which is the same figure who scored 2019.
The information is contained in a response, consulted by Europa Press, from the General Secretariat of Penitentiary Institutions through the Council for Transparency and Good Governance signed by the head of the body dependent on the Ministry of the Interior, Ángel Luis Ortiz.
The increase is even greater, 76%, if the 310 attacks on officials so far in 2022 are compared with the 176 registered in 2020, a year marked by the restrictions of the Covid-19 pandemic that also affected regulations in Spanish prisons. The data was even better in 2021, with 159 incidents, the lowest figure since 2015.
Soto del Real, in Madrid, is the most dangerous Spanish prison to work in according to the number of attacks, since it has accumulated a total of 104 attacks since 2015, 18 of them in the first nine months of this year, according to official data provided by the General Secretariat of Penitentiary Institutions.
Thus, in Madrid V, 8 more attacks have been computed in these years than in the second penitentiary center with the most attacks, Puerto III, in Cádiz, with 96 attacks in the same period. It is followed by another Madrid prison, Madrid VII-Estremera, with 86 attacks on officials, 10 of them this year.
The professional association of prison officials ‘Your Abandonment can kill me’ (TAMPM) has warned that, if the trend of the first nine months continues, 2022 could end up exceeding the figure of 400 aggressions, becoming the year with the most conflict in the prisons.
According to this association, at the end of 2017 the General Secretariat approved a specific protocol to account for attacks on Spanish prison officials with a different criterion than the rest of the General State Administration. “With this, it was possible to whiten the totals and that insults, death threats, shoves, spitting or touching, if they do not leave a physical mark that can be reflected in a medical report, would not be counted,” they criticize.
Thus, after exceeding 300 annual aggressions in the 2015-2017 triennium, the new way of counting the daily aggressions suffered by prison workers meant that in 2018 and 2019 they did not reach 250.
Subsequently, in 2020 and 2021 these attacks have been reduced due to the closure suffered by prison facilities in terms of the entry of people outside the institution and the restriction of communications with family members due to the pandemic.
“This caused the entry of narcotic substances, which are the origin of many of the dangerous situations suffered in the country’s prisons, to be limited almost entirely for prolonged periods,” says the TAMPM association.
In the 93 months from January 2015 to September 30, 2022, prison officers have suffered more than 2,096 assaults. The statistic does not collect data from Catalan prisons, although it does collect data from the Basque Country –both communities with transferred prison management–. Assaults in social integration centers (CIS) and psychiatric centers are also included.
“A figure that leads us to the conclusion that in the last 8 years every 32 hours a prison worker suffers an attack in our country. This time interval has been reduced so far this year, producing an attack every 21 hours”, calculated from TAPM.
With this situation, TAMPM denounces that despite the fact that many professionals have recognized the status of law enforcement officers in the performance of their duties, prison officers are one of those groups “that no one would imagine that they do not have such status recognized” .
The bill that would provide prison officers with the status of law enforcement officers was presented on July 24, 2020, more than two years ago. And qualified on September 2 of that same year.
From then until March 29, 2022, the date on which the consideration was voted in the Lower House, there have been many attacks on prison officials. “This year and a half of having the bill ‘saved in the drawer’ gives an idea of ??how much priority Penitentiary Institution officials are for this Government,” the union criticized in a press release.
