You might think that the reason more corrupt politicians haven’t been sent to prison is because there is no room… but there are brand-new prisons standing empty!
Take the case of Málaga II (Archidona) with its 16 different blocks containing over a thousand cells between them… all empty. Yes, Málaga II is the largest empty prison in the world, and that’s not hyperbole.
The original budget was for 90m euros but it crept up to 117m before it was finished. The locals in Archidona were ecstatic because such a building project would need a lot of labour… but all of the construction workers came from elsewhere.
The prison was finished in March 2013 and as late as November that year the Government promised that it would be up and running before the end of 2014, but here we are one year later and not a sausage! In fact, the 2015 budget sets aside 800,000 euros, which won’t make much a dent in the costs of furnishing it even.
But Málaga II is not the only new prison standing unused; there is one in Tarragona (Mas d’Enric) with space for 1,000 inmates.
The Regional Catalán Government pays one million euros a month in rent to a private company hired to run it, whether it is in use or not.
Going back to Málaga II, it costs a lot of money to maintain it, even if it is empty – 3.2m euros a year in security and maintenance. All told there are five such prisons around Spain.
So what went wrong? Firstly, these prisons were built in happier, economic times but now there isn’t the money to staff and run them. Secondly, the Rajoy Government has a different attitude towards the prison system than the preceding Zapatero socialist government, which built them; i.e., the conservatives don’t go for the system of open prisons.
And there is one last reason, the crisis has even affected the amount of crime in the country, which has dropped: the total inmate population was 76,079 in 2009 whereas at the end of last year it was 67,404.
Add to that the policy of sending foreign inmates to their own countries to serve there sentences and a plethora of pardons handed out by the Minister of Justice.
Finally, prison staff are under pressure. A total of 2,000 personnel are off sick and no temporary substitutes have been hired to fill their posts, meaning that the existing staff has to cover the vacancy workload, quite apart from the 3,000 new jobs needed to run the new prisons.
Only 90 jobs have been offered to job hopefuls even though by 2020 a third of the existing prison wardens will be 58 or over, which leads many to suspect that the Government intends to privatize prisons along American lines.
(News: Spain)