Madrid V Penitentiary in the city of Soto del Real. Luis Sevillano (EL PAIS)
The expression of two practical assumptions by the recent opposition called by the Home Office to fill 1,850 posts in the prison assistants’ body has caused strong unease among prison officials’ unions as it undermines their image of reflecting fictitious cases in which they commit crimes commit. In one case, the applicants were presented with a situation where the worker was dealing drugs inside the prison. The second describes an episode of mistreatment of a prisoner, according to the texts of the evidence to which EL PAÍS had access. Prison sources remind that the selection process is still open and decline to comment on these criticisms.
The test, administered on December 18, presented would-be prison officers with 10 practical assumptions, from which they had to answer a series of related technical questions. Those who caused trouble between the unions were the second and seventh place finishers in the written test. In the first, the text describes officers searching a detainee and confiscating a mobile phone. After this, the exercise shows that the prisoner “shoves one of the workers and refuses to enter the cell by adopting a defensive posture with her fists raised”, for which she must be bound and cuffed with her hands behind her back.
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“When she was being picked up to be taken to the isolation ward, one of the officers hit the inmate with a knee at chest level when she stopped resisting,” the text added. The question immediately afterwards put to the opponents, who indicate “how many means of coercion, used in accordance with the legislation in force, have been used”, giving them four possible answers: one, two, three or four.
The second deals with the case of an inmate’s mother, who denounces that an officer at Madrid V Penitentiary in Soto del Real introduced narcotics into the prison “intended for inmate consumption”. The text describes that the woman “given her concerns and on the advice of the inmate’s attorney, filed a complaint against the officer to seek punishment,” and subsequently in court, for which the worker is being detained and sent to jail. In the exercise, the opponents were asked whether the mother was capable of making a complaint and what the official’s administrative situation was after his arrest.
It is not the first time that the allegations made in the prison opposition have raised fictitious cases of crimes committed by officials, as this newspaper has been able to verify after analyzing the drills of the previous three years. The 2019 tests included accepting an officer offering certain prison benefits to inmates if they agree to have sex when they go on vacation. The following year, one of the drills alluded to a prison employee’s sexual blackmailing of an inmate, whom he pressured by threatening to change her destination in prison. And the 2021 opposition has included the alleged case of an officer bringing banned items, including a cellphone, into prison to hand over to an inmate.
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However, it was the opposition questions last December that drew the most furious criticism from the unions, which have maintained a hardened confrontation with the Home Office for years. The organizations accuse the ministry of not responding to their job demands, including treating them as agents of the agency, a long-standing effort by the group that sees penalties for those violating their integrity tightened and their testimony presumptuous will bestow correctness. Union elections are being held this year to renew prison officials’ representatives.
“distorted vision”
For Francisco Llamazares, president of the Professional Association of Prison Officials (APFP), the opposition’s controversial questions convey “a distorted picture and out of reality” about prison officials. Llamazares accuses “those responsible for preparing these questions” of ignoring internal regulations and laws. Along the same lines, Jorge Vilas, CSIF’s national head of prisons, calls the texts a “new lack of respect” by the Ministry of the Interior towards officials. “There are thousands of ways to formulate practical assumptions about the disciplinary regime that do not imply a new attempt to tarnish the group’s image,” says Vilas, who believes that the General Secretariat of Penitentiaries “is failing in its duty for good ensure the public image of its employees.
ACAIP-UGT, the majority union among civil servants, filed a complaint with Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska two days after the audit, demanding “that such an undesirable situation not happen again” and to take action to stop it “Member officials of the opposition courts to the organs of the penitentiary institutions are suitably formed for the elaboration of each exercise.”